https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21862160

There's a much more evil prank than that:

A user was having a really bizarre problem: They could log in when they were sitting down in a seat in front of the keyboard, but when they were standing in front of the keyboard, their password didn't work! The problem happened every time, so they called for support, who finally figured it out after watching them demonstrate the problem many times:

It turned out that some joker had rearranged the numbers keys on the keyboard, so they were ordered "0123456789" instead of "1234567890". And the user's password had a digit in it. When the user was sitting down comfortably in front of the keyboard, they looked at the screen while they touch-typed their password, and were able to log in. But when they were standing in front of the computer, they looked at the keyboard and pressed the numbers they saw, which were wrong!

If you have an iPhone, this app is pretty damn hilarious: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/action-movie-fx/id489321253

It’s done by Bad Robot (JJ Abrams’ company). Shows how easy it is to do really good special effects, these days.

I had to make a new card because I couldn't remember the password to unblock it at the bank.

I had that card and password for 3-4 years at that point, wasn't under any stress at all, and nothing like this had ever happened, nor happened again.

That's saved me a few times when I blanked out. This note, in theory, will look completely innocuous in case anyone gets access to my notes.

No matter what I tried, I hit the 3-try limit for the day, and opted to have the same preassigned PIN sent by mail to my home address.

When walking back home from the bank branch I realized the mistake I had made: I had entered the correct PIN, but had typed it in calculator/numeric keypad order, and not in phone/PIN pad order.

While I've never used that PIN on a numeric keypad for a PC, somehow my brain associated the numbers with their order on a PC keypad, since I had used my PC keypad to unlock my PC with a PIN numerous times more than I had used any card terminal with a PIN.

So, the next day, I returned to the bank branch office to try the same operation again, and indeed - I had correctly entered the PIN and the online banking transfer limit ended up adjusted just fine.

Completely out of the blue I forgot my PIN, the PIN I had used every day for years. I was at an ATM trying to withdraw cash, got it wrong twice. It was just gone.

Luckily I cancelled it before the machine ate it, but I had to borrow money from someone to get a taxi home.

I had to request a new PIN and I still can't remember what it was. I now keep my pin in my phone under a contact.

That was almost 30 years ago, and thankfully it hasn’t happened again.

The other thing you can do is make a mnemonic story to help you remember it.

I try to use my local language and some obscure local slang to avoid being guessed by an international dictionary.

Yeah, for my master password, I use a slightly misheard line from an episode of a 90's TV show. Googling my misheard version in quotes only gets 6 hits, and it's 30 characters long, so very unlikely to get cracked even without replacing letters with symbols or adding a suffix.

I can confirm this. Many years ago I had to type for the first time a password on a classmate's iPhone (smartphones were just beginning to become common). The problem was that I didn't really know that password: what I remembered was a shape I was "drawing" onto the keyboard, which involved the numeric keypad... You see were this is going. That event was the one that led me to finally properly memorize that password.

I just totally blanked. Like you said, the more I thought about it the less I could remember what it was like. It was really scary.

They do this all the time.

They don't come back.

The information associated with them is just gone. Often the information can be reconstructed from other neurons that still work, but not always.

A small annoyance is when I need to change my iPhone passcode because of it being work managed. The keyboard used during that reset is slightly different to the regular iPhone keyboard.

Throws my muscle memory off.