Roger received a notification that he needed to update his account password. After staring at the empty password field for a few minutes, he had it!


He typed his new password: potato.

The computer responded with an error message: ‘Sorry, your password must contain at least 8 letters.’

He typed again: boiled potato.

Again, he was met with an error. ‘Sorry, your password must contain at least 1 number.’

Roger thought he was being clever and typed ‘1 boiled potato’ into the password field.

‘Sorry, password cannot contain spaces.’

Frustrated, Roger typed ’50fingboiledpotatoes’.

Another error message. ‘Sorry, your password must contain capital letters.’

He tried again. ’50FINGboiledpotatoes.’

It was no good either. ‘Sorry, your password must not contain capital letters that are consecutive.’

Roger thought someone must be pulling his leg. He was getting furious.

‘IwillShove50FingBoiledPotatoesUpYourButt,IfYouDontGiveMeAccessImmediately’ he typed, thinking he’d outwitted the password requirements.

Another error message appeared. ‘Sorry, your password must not contain any punctuation.’

Roger, was about to lose his mind. He typed frantically, slamming his fingers into the keyboard with each keystroke.

‘NowIamSeriouslyGettingAnnoyedIwillShove50FingBoiledPotatoesUpYourButtIfYouDontGiveMeAccess.’

The computer started to process the request. Roger started to relax his shoulders.

‘Sorry, you cannot change your password to a password you have already used with this account. Choose a new password: …’