Our hit-and-miss, slapdash approach to creating and keeping passwords – even when we know we ought to do better – is what you get when you demand a human solution to a tech problem.

Here’s the column that finally gets me written out of the family for oversharing. A few months ago, I was attempting to help my grandmother log into an account. Now, credit where it’s due, my gran is a force to be reckoned with. She is well into her 90s, still lives largely independently, and drives herself and friends around the village where she retired three decades ago. If that isn’t #goals, then I don’t know what is.

For someone who came of age before the ballpoint pen, she’s also pretty adroit with technology, using her smartphone, laptop, and various software and services to communicate with her progeny around the world. Remembering her passwords, however, has become a frustrating barrier to using said tools.