PIN Please

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have been experiencing PIN burn out. That personal identification number thing. It seems everything these days requires either a password (another story), or PIN.

My very first experience that required a PIN was when I recieved my first bank card, when the ATM machines were in their infancy. Along with it came the PIN number. The instructions said, don't write it down anywhere, memorize it, eat the paper. Okay, it didn't say eat the paper, but it implied that it was going to be a top secret operation with the disposal of that letter. A friend said she wrote her PIN on the top of a page in her checkbook, making it look like an amount that was to be recorded. I thought that was a good idea, so that's what I did.

I carried the card faithfully in my wallet for that just-in-case moment, but never used it. Years went by, and I never had the desire to use a bank machine ever. I had always told myself that for all of the fees banks charge, the very least they could do for me, was to have a real person say hello, please, and thank you.

One day, I was at the mall, and there was a place that only would accept cash, so I found a bank machine. I pulled the card out of my wallet, inserted it into the machine, pulled my trusty checkbook out, as I knew the PIN number was handily written down. I'll just look at the top of my check register to find a four digit dollars and cents number. The number I had on top of the first page didn't work, so flipped to the next. Then I noticed, on EVERY page of my check book register, there was a four digit number written down. Which one was the PIN??? I sure didn't remember writing all of those numbers down. I had to pull my card out of the machine, because if the next number I tried didn't work, it was going to keep my card. That was the last time I tried to use one of those cards.

I am sure that there will be a day when I have no choice but to use those darn things, and have to have a PIN, and I'll have to figure out some way to remember it, because checks will be a thing of the past. I'm going to hang on to that checkbook for as long as I can, and try to get out of the habit of writing bunches of numbers all over the thing.