Will Harris finds it’s all Greek on the internet

I’m running between back-to-back meetings when Helen calls me in a flap. “Help!” she says. “I’ve forgotten the password to my Facebook account and they won’t let me back in without it.” She doesn’t specify who ‘they’ are. She doesn’t have to. I know my friend well enough to know she is picturing a shadowy consortium whose plan for total global domination somehow centres around photos of her lying on the beach in Malia (Summer 2008). Those bastards.

“Look, don’t panic,” I say. “There should be some sort of button you can click to be sent a reminder. Do you see it?”

The line goes quiet. I can practically hear the sigh of relief. “Okay, but it says I have to type the security word as it appears in the box. God, they don’t want much, do they?”
“I’m glad that’s all sorted then. Listen, I really have to–” “Frurgle,” comes the reply. I push the handset harder to my ear. “Say again?” “That’s not a word, is it? Frurgle? Or is it frungle?”

“My friend, unfamiliar with camera phones, has sent me a partial photo of her own face”

My heart sinks. The trouble with internet security codes – that once noble attempt to foil hackers by encouraging human users to recognise and type words like ‘milk’ and ‘beef’ – is they’ve now grown so complex they are next to impossible to read.

Letters swim in and out of focus as if viewed through a fun-house mirror. Joilambo? Sttean? These words are not words, they are the names of Power Rangers. As if we don’t have enough to contend with remembering our pins and passes, apparently these days the internet Gestapo won’t be convinced of our humanity until we’re all hanging upside-down from our swivel chairs and squinting. And how much harder must it be for my bespectacled friend, who only missed out on the lead in the film adaptation of Mr Magoo because she couldn’t find her way to the audition?

I realise Helen is still talking. “It does have a sort of Jabberwock air to it,” she is musing. “Twas brillig and the frurgle furks.” Already late for my meeting and biting back the urge to tell my friend to frurgle furk off, I advise her to take a photo of the word in question and send it to me via text. Then I hang up.

An hour later, I look at what she’s sent me. At first I take it to be little more than a pale blur, but slowly – like a Magic Eye picture painted by a maniac – the lines and contours resolve themselves into more familiar shapes: an ear, a cheek, the corner of a pair of specs. My friend, I realise, as unfamiliar with camera phones as she is with internet security protocols, has sent me a partial photo of her own face.