Please Enter User Name and Password

Yesterday afternoon I had one of the most frightening MS moments (or rather, hours) in my illustrious MS career thus far.

At about 2:25 I sat down at my desk to start work, powered up the computer, waited for the login screen, took a couple sips of coffee while waiting. The user name and password came up, I lifted by hands, and then . . . nothing!

I could not remember my user name to save my life! I had no idea whatsoever. I have been doing this job for 17 years, I have been using this particular system, and user name, and password, for at least 4 years. And yet suddenly I had no idea in the world what to type into the field.

At first it was a Wow, that's weird sort of moment, but as the moments passed and nothing clicked, as the moments passed and became minutes and then a quarter hour and then a half hour, as the moments passed and every stab in the dark I took at typing in a likely user name failed, weird became frustrating, then maddening, then terrifying.

I suppose this is difficult to convey to anyone who has not experienced it. I suppose we have all had these moments where we just suddenly draw a blank--a name, a date, a memory--but of course such information temporarily misplaced soon pops back, and we chuckle and proceed.

Here there was no resumption, no revival, no retrieval, but only a quickening of the heart, a rising heat on the brow, a growing stuffiness in the brain, a dawning sense of panic.

The minutes marched on, ever away from revelation. The blank slate became if anything blanker. I began to search next for someone I could call, a coworker who might provide some sort of mnemonic, a phrase, a hint.

Now I had learned long ago that sharing ones troubles with MS among managers or supervisors in ones workplace is not the best idea. The sympathy that one somehow automatically anticipates does not in fact generally exist. There is, however, a friend and coworker who has been helpful in the past, who moreover will keep my terrible secret of incompetence, and so I sought now to locate her telephone number.

The idea that my current state of distraction could be further compounded had not occurred to me--until, that is, I found that I had not the slightest notion of where this person's phone number might be. Most certainly I had it. Somewhere. But where? I have, in fact, a printout of every phone number of every coworker in my department. Somewhere.

Knowledge, of course, is not presence. Two thorough searches of the desk drawers produced nothing--or rather, it produced everything conceivable other than that list of phone numbers.

By now a full hour had passed, and still I had not started work. My user name, my password, had fallen quite off the face of the earth, along with my brain.

Well, there is no amazing or edifying end to this. I wish there were. As it happens, the missing information simply popped back into my mind as abruptly as it had popped out. Sixty-five minutes later. I typed it in and began work. Later on I wrote the information on a strip of masking tape and stuck it on the side of the CPU.

What is left now is just a simmering sense of dread, a sense of just how bad things could become. And the knowledge that there's not a damn thing that I can do about it.