I could rant about the mall
all day, and you know what?
It sucks!

The stores are fine;
it’s the damn people who
populate them. I don’t know
how many times I’ve seen
some jackass or another go
around and be a jackass; we get it, you have no etiquette.

How many times have we dealt with that group of
twenty people who stop right in front of a fucking store
and then they just stand there! That’s right. They don’t buy
anything. They just look! I mean, isn’t that what online
shopping is for?

I used to think it would be okay if they just went inside,

Matthew
Steinbach

Opinions Editor

   
 
    

but the other day I was in a record shop, and these valley
girls came along.

“Oh my god, there’s like two Le Chateaus in the mall,
isn’t that, like, totally ridiculous?” they bantered.

And then, guess what? Every time I tried to look at a
CD, they got in the way and made it impossible to look at
anything. If I moved along they would follow and get in the
way.

I didn’t tell them off, but I should have. And you want
to know why? It’s because I have worked in the service
industry too long. I’m trained not too. We all are. No one
who works in a store or restaurant can. We'd get fired. But
these valley girls are akin to the people who go into a store
when it’s busy and ask 50 questions and all of them are the
same.

“Is this a good iPod?” they’ll ask.

 

“Why of course it is. It’s got the same specs as every
other one here,” I’ll reply.

“So, is it comparable to every other one?”

A time waster is all they are, and it’s time we tell the
Mall People off. Only the customer can push for what they
want because the salesman can’t. Sure time wasters deserve
time too. But come on! There are other people there too
who want time and space; why can’t they wait and give the
people who just want to buy something that chance, so they
don’t have to wait for them to take 30 minutes to decide
when everyone else already knows what they want?

So, I may be an asshole for wanting to tell them off,
but you know what, these people are jerks, so how can they
change if no one puts them in their place?

 

Password protected .....:.....

Wie: the deal with the crazy requirements put on
passwords these days? C’mon, do we really need a password
that’s eight-plus letters with a capital letter and a number?
Some even go so far as to include your username in the
farce, requiring letters, numbers, and even punctuation
marks. At what point is this just someone being anal?

Long passwords are hard to remember, especially when
they’re mixed alphanumeric. Now I’m not saying that we
should be using four letter/number passwords or something,
but I do think that requiring us to create elaborate passwords
is making our passwords less secure. Many sites require you
to answer questions you really don’t remember the answers
to before they’ll resend you your password. Inevitably, this
leads to us writing down these monstrosities in the vain
hopes of being able to use the sites that we created them
for. This begs the question: are these epic passwords even
useful? If you can’t remember the damn thing, it’s kind of
pointless, because it can’t perform its sole function.

Now if you’re like me, you write it down on the first
random piece of paper that you can find; this inevitably gets
lost. If you don’t lose it, you probably post it next to your
computer. The end result is the same: the password is not
secure. Instead of this, why not just require a username, a
simple 6-letter password and then ask one or two easy-to-
remember security questions? It works for the banks and you
have to believe they’re secure... at least outside of the stock
market. If it works for them, why won’t it work for other

things that need to be secure?

Let me give you an example. The other day while
reorganizing my finances, my fiancé Matt and I had to
look up my student loan debt. I knew it was a ton, but
I was a little hazy on the exact amount. We tried my
usual username with my usual password, but it didn’t
work. Then we tried every combination of password
and username that I had ever used (or so I thought),
but still nothing. Getting tired of this after 30 minutes,
we decided to try the “forgot your password” option.

I had to have my username. Again, we entered every
username we could think of. Just at the point where

we were ready to give up, Matt decided to try the one
name that I would never ever use. Sure enough, that
was it. Due to all of the stringent requirements, I hadn’t
been able to use anything else that 1 might possibly
remember. After answering the three security non-
questions that only gave hints, we got to the “create a
new password” screen.

It was then that we discovered the original
problem: the password required a capital letter, a
number, and it had to be so many letters. So now I have ©
a new impossible to remember password. I guess some
you win, and some you lose...