Log-ons, Passwords & PINs, Oh My!

An updated version of the Wizard of Oz would have Dorothy, the Lion, Tinman and the Scarecrow waltzing down the yellowbricked superinformation highway in search of different things. Such as the Tinman, with insufficient drive space needing a bigger hard drive; The cowardly Lion, sure if he had the latest Pentium chip he could brave the biggest number crunching equasion – without fear- ; And that brainless Scarecrow would be hoping for a memory upgrade. His sparse 16 k’s, all his maker told him he’d ever need, was insufficient in today’s world of flying windows and ME based software. Dorothy of course, would just want to recover her lost system that had crashed in her home office.So off they go, skipping with little To-To, watching out for broom riding viruses and evil hackers disguised as flying monkeys. The enchanted forest would be networked together and Dorothy and crew’s only hope of surviving would be to reboot themselves past the scary laser scanners while they are in the sleep mode. Sure enough the broom-riding virus would stop them just as they are about to enter into Upgrade Nirvana. Quick-witted Dorothy would overload the witchy virus with an ever-expanding equation that would cause the poor villains system to completely melt. Giving off that electronic smoke stench. And the hackers would sing, “Dingdong, the witch is inoperable!”With renewed vigor our heroic quintet arrives in Upgrade Nirvana only to find that smoke-breathing dragon, being remotely operated by some nerdy support tekkie. He disguises his voice with a frequency modulator and screams at Dorothy, “I need a loggon code before you can access my system!”The plucky Dorothy pulls off a loggon, but now that more nervous support tekkie takes a different track. “Now you must key in your password!” The Tinman at this point, pulls out his power source and interconnects with the Tekkie’s system. The voltage mismatch causes the system to malfunction. Tekkie now says, “Before you can advance, you must now enter your PIN in the portable keyboard.The nervous Lion inadvertently hits all ‘9’s as he paws the portable keyboard. While he snivelly snarls, Dorothy unveils the cowering Tekkie. “Aha!” She shouts.”Wait, wait!” Shouts the Tekkie, “I’m just doing what my parent IPO insists. Please don’t blame me.”Well, you know how it ends. Instead of a larger hard drive, the Tinman is suddenly satisfied with an old cassette recording called Memories. The Scarecrow ends up happy with discarded but interlinking Gameboys. And our cowardly Lion defies logic by settling for the Tekkie’s Walkman and self-help CD where he’s encouraged to not think of himself as an inadequate desktop, but more of a quaint palmtop.Dorothy and Toto are excited to find out the Tekkie has a free long distant wireless phone. Now all she has to do is, well, you know, phone home, where she awakes to find her system debugged and waiting.Log-gons, passwords and PIN’s, oh my! Indeed!