Please Write Down Your Passwords — Your Kids Will Thank You
Yes, you will need them again. No, you won’t remember them.
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I recently got to spend the day with my 80 year-old mother, after a 5 month hiatus due to the coronavirus. I was anxious to see her, and I had a wonderful gift to take her that I was excited about giving her. My daughter and I went in together and purchased a new iPad, with a keyboard and a stylus. Her old iPad is tiny and does not have a keypad. It has gotten more difficult for her to send e-mails and other correspondence without a keypad.
The other reason I was anxious to be there with her was to see if I could figure out what she has done to get locked out of her iPhone. She got the phone for her birthday last year and it has been our saving grace during quarantine to be able to Facetime. I get to see her, which is reassuring. She has some health issues and she is good at painting a rosy picture of how she is doing when I know damn well she is lying. She has actually looked really good these last few months which has been a comfort to me.
But recently, her phone updated itself and when she tried to get into it, it wanted a passcode. She did not set up a passcode when she got the phone, so she set one up — a six digit code. That was fine and dandy until the next time the phone went to lock screen and asked her to put her passcode in. Of course, she had not written the code down. She didn’t think she would ever need it again. So now, she cannot get into her phone.
My daughter and I googled how to do a factory reset on the phone since there is nothing on there that she cares about losing. The instructions were to shut the phone down and hook it to a computer, then press the down volume button until a screen appeared and follow the prompts. Great! Sounds easy enough. But I had forgotten to take my laptop with me. So I asked mom about her laptop.
“It’s downstairs on my desk.”
“Does it work?”
“I guess so. I am not real sure why I stopped using it.”
So, I go downstairs and get the laptop. I fire it up. I am anxious to get her phone operational again and I need this thing to work just long enough to do it. The screen pops up. Yes!
“Hey, Mom, what’s your…
