Congratulate me. I have now achieved a higher level of impenetrable security so great that it is completely unassailable and cannot be breached.
I have locked myself out of my cellphone.
OK, let me qualify that "completely unassailable" part. It's completely unassailable ... to me. I'm sure some teenage hacker in Estonia could rip through it in seconds with the proper motivation and even the slightest amount of interest. Heck, my 8-year-old granddaughter could probably get through my phone's security, and I should probably ask her if I wanted to have about a million K-Pop songs downloaded.
Me? Yeah, I've managed to take a fairly expensive piece of communications equipment that connects me to the world and turn it into a paperweight. A reference that will be completely lost on my children, who have no idea what "paper" is, why we need to "weight" it and what we would do with it. And can also remember their own phone passwords.
And that, of course, is the key. Or passcode. Or password. Or User ID. Or whatever it is I'm supposed to have that I don't remember, which has resulted in me locking myself out of something I have paid and continue to pay good money to use.
No, I'm not frustrated. Or bitter. But if you're expecting a phone call from me, I'm strangely quiet. Because I don't remember my passcode.
Again, another correction. I do remember my passcode and my password and my User ID and my log-on key and all that stuff. I remember all of them. I just don't remember which one of them goes to which account. And since my devices run toward unfriendly petulance, they only grant you a certain number of attempts to remember whatever it is you forgot before they lock you out. (Let's pause and consider that, once again, I am paying good money for a device to "grant" me access to what I'm paying for it to do. Again, frustration and bitterness.)
But they do tell me how long it will be before I get to retry. Which is nice. And helpful. Not quite as helpful as just letting me use my own phone, but close.
The challenge here is that this particular situation is symptomatic of so many larger issues in our lives. We've reached the point where, to make sure that some possible but highly unlikely bad things don't happen, we've made it difficult (and in some cases, impossible) for good things to happen.
If by "good" I mean annoyance calls asking me if I want to buy an extended warranty on a car I don't own anymore or threatening me with vague legal action in some state I've never been in, then yeah, it's all relative. I get lots of pictures of the grandkids sent to me, so, there is some upside.
All of which leads me to consider if I really, really need my phone to work in the first place. I mean, there are currently several avenues for my co-workers to get hold of me that don't involve calling. Unless you count Zoom as a call.
But if the house caught fire and I needed to call for help, I could just run next door and borrow my neighbor's phone. Provided, of course, they remember their passcodes or user IDs or whatever.
And I wouldn't irritate my wife by looking up arcane facts about the television show we're watching. However, I wouldn't be able to answer her calls, so that could be pretty annoying, as well. Sort of a break even, and not in a good way there.
I could also figure out some way to restart my phone and go through the laborious process of resetting my password. Except, to do that I have to know my old password. And if I knew that, I wouldn't have to reset my password. Which I'll also have to do every six months, according to my phone.
Which is where the challenge comes in, because my phone (which, again, I am paying good money for. Again, frustrated. Bitter.) won't let me use any of the passwords I have used since the 1990s, won't let me use my name, won't let me use just numbers, requires that I have a "special" piece of punctuation and in short, guarantees I won't remember the passcode unless I write it down. Which sort of defies the "security" thing.
On the bright side, I have achieved security. From myself. And I may be the biggest threat I face every day anyway.