People I Have Met
All Posts,  Miscellaneous

People I have Met

Just changed all my passwords and boy does that suck!

The diary site I have mentioned has a little thing on their site that allows you to type in passwords and check them for hackability. I typed two of the main passwords I use into it and part of an online banking password but now I am nervous.

If they will steal my rights to my writing why would they hesitate to steal anything else? Like passwords to online banking accounts.

I decided not to risk it so I changed all my passwords. I was using two passwords for almost everything except banking but now I have invented new ones for everything.

I needed one for my ISP account, one for my hotmail email, one for this blog, one for eBay, one for each bank account. It took longer to invent good passwords than it did to go to all the sites and change my passwords.

Maybe I am being paranoid. Maybe the site owners can’t know what is typed into that programme. Maybe stealing passwords and money and identities is not on their agenda but, in my experience, people who will do the dirty on you in one way have very few qualms about doing the dirty on you in other ways too.

It can be an unhappy life at times. Life as a psychologist introduces you to just how ugly human nature can be. You learn that there are people out there who will do the most atrocious things just because they can.

You see the other side of humanity too though. You meet people who don’t give up even though they are carrying burdens that would crush the life out of most of us. You stand in awe of them as they push away their own troubles to be there for others who have far more than they do.

He was an old man of around 70 when he came to see me. He’d loved, and lost, two wives to long illnesses that he had nursed them through. He was ill himself. He had cancer and chronic pain from a bone disease.

His third woman had refused to marry him because her children objected so they had lived together for many years. He cared for her when she developed Alzheimer’s but her grown children stepped in and put her in a home. He visited her every day. When her children changed the locks and threw him out of their house while he was visiting her he rented a place near the nursing home and continued to visit her. Her children told the nursing home not to let him see her. They were afraid he would inherit some of her assets. He wasn’t interested in her assets — he wanted to be there for her. She liked him to play cards with her and he worried nobody else was doing that for her.

His daughter insisted he let go of his love and move interstate to live with her and he had done so. Now he was depressed. He felt like he had abandoned his love and left her in the hands of people who would not love her the way he did. He worried about her every day. The pain in his body couldn’t take his spirit down but the pain in his heart was overwhelming him.

We couldn’t find much in the way of a solution to his problems. All I could do was let him talk about her. Nobody else would listen. His children wanted him to forget her. They were furious with her children.

So he talked. He talked about all three of the women he had loved. As he talked about them his eyes lit up and his spirit rallied.

“I’m a lucky man”, he said, “I have been blessed with three soul mates in one lifetime and not too many people get that lucky.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. I wiped the tears from my eyes. I bit back my protests that life had been terribly, grossly unfair to take all three from him like that. I agreed with him that he had been a very fortunate man to find three true loves and, for just a moment or two, I wondered if I could be his number four.

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