Mastodawn

A story that’s a parable for…something:

For months, I’d had trouble typing my laptop password. I’d have to retry 1 or 2 times, then 2 or 3. I wondering if my fingers or my brain were degrading with age or overwork or something. Then I realized that one of the keys on the keyboard — one in the password! — had started not registering unless it was pushed firmly, and was getting progressively worse. That whole time, the password entry had only worked when I got annoyed enough to hit the ailing key a little harder. Fixed the key, and suddenly I was typing my password on the first try again.

What’s the moral of this story? I don’t know. Choose your own.

Paul Cantrell 1d ago

I love the morals for the story that people are inventing in the replies.

MrAlanCooper 1d ago

@inthehands I think the moral of this story is obvious: password fields should not obscure what you are typing.

Nathan Lowell (he/him)1d ago

Failed solutions are merely steps toward correctly identifying the problem.

@inthehands my moral: intermittent, unobtrusive failures are worse than spectacular failures. If you are going to fail, fail safe but loud.

Mathaetaes 1d ago

@inthehands I had a similar thing happen. It was either the first or the last character in my password that started going bad, for my home network.

My takeaway: My password is the the thing I type most frequently, and the first (or last... whichever it was) key gets whacked a bit harder than the rest. Thus, I get password burn-in on my keyboards over time.

The moral: I need to change my home passwords more frequently.

Jesse Morris 1d ago

@inthehands I find it interesting but not super surprising that this was probably happening for non-password stuff too but you didn't notice because you just automatically corrected stuff that you were typing that you can see.

Paul Cantrell 1d ago

@aubilenon
I’ve wondered about that! I had two theories, which may both be correct:

(1) Exactly what you said

(2) The key was extra sticky after a period of non-use, and the password entry loosened it up enough to make it work reliably for a while after logging in.

Jesse Morris 1d ago

@inthehands Oh! That didn't occur to me that it would be a little self-healing. It feels weird that it wouldn't happen at all the rest of the time, but I guess possible. Do you usually use TouchID to unlock it so it's only relatively infrequent and especially after being locked for a while that you have to type the password?

Paul Cantrell 1d ago

@aubilenon
I believe this was a pre-Touch-ID machine.

FeloniousPunk 1d ago

@inthehands the moral: don’t use computers

David Nash 1d ago

@inthehands 1) If, at first, you don't succeed, hit it with a bigger hammer.
2). No, not like that.

Janeishly 1d ago

@inthehands The moral of the story is "Do not eat things that can make crumbs over your keyboard". I regularly have to switch mine off and spank it firmly to dislodge all the food debris.

@inthehands passwords should only contain one character that's known to work fine on the keyboard. The password is still secure bc attackers won't know which characters work on your keyboard or how many times the character is repeated.

@mattg @inthehands
The more I think about this the more I like it.

Shaula Evans 1d ago

@inthehands I don't know what the moral to the story is but I'd love to know how you fixed the key because I'm going through the exact same thing with a key in a high-use password and none of my fixes have worked yet!

Paul Cantrell 1d ago

@ShaulaEvans
I don’t fully remember (long time ago), but I believe it involved prying the key off and cleaning underneath.

@inthehands sometimes, the problem you can see is not the problem you need to fix.

Almost A Fern 1d ago

@inthehands the final straw that got me to replace my first laptop was when the semicolon key kept sticking (so, press it once, it would hold itself down until I hit it again hard enough to dislodge it); losing that particular key made coding difficult

RolandOfGilead 1d ago

@inthehands been there, done that!