[mid-kid]

Can't agree more with the last paragraph. Not too long ago, due to my keyboard breaking, I was forced to type my password manager's master password on an unfamiliar keyboard with an unfamiliar layout, and I just blanked. I type it frequently enough on my phone, so I tried typing it there too, but probably due to a combination of mild distress and actively trying to think about what I was typing I couldn't do it there either. I eventually decided to try again later and later that day I managed to type it correctly.

Rest assured, this situation probably sounds as bizarre as it felt. Randomly forgetting something I type every day isn't something I had considered a possibility until then. Maybe a password without as many non-alphanumeric characters would've aided in avoiding this situation, but I get the feeling it could've happened with any muscle-memoried password.

[DonHopkins]

I posted this earlier:

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!

[alistairSH]

Holy crap. That's amazingly evil. And not at all what I thought you were going to say

[ajxs]

My employer made me use an SOE Macbook that had the 'butterfly keyboard'. Many of its keys would only work haphazardly. Once I made the mistake of setting my password using the laptop's keyboard instead of the external one I normally used. It had me going for ages before I realised there was one letter in the password missing!

[gnicholas]

I find it incredibly annoying that my iPad wants to automatically capitalize the first letter of most text-entry fields. I heard somewhere that some sites have made the first char of their passwords case-insensitive because of this, but IDK if this is just lore.

[Merad]

I used to work at a company that had some LoB apps used on iPads in a manufacturing facility... if the user login failed and the first character of the password was upper case those apps would retry with it lower case.

[cschep]

easily disabled which is good!

[gnicholas]

Not on the client-side! Sometimes it happens when you're typing the first char, in which case you can hit shift (which is visibly activated) and then type the char. But sometimes it 'autocorrects' when you hit the return key, and the only workaround I've found is to type the password with the first char doubled, and then go back and delete the first of the doubled chars. Not fun, especially when you're navigating the cursor on a touchscreen!

[cschep]

huh - if you disable this in the keyboard settings it still persists? Is it a browser input issue? not fun :D

[gnicholas]

I don't think there's a granular way to do this, shy of turning off autocorrect in its entirety.

[jlg23]

Being fed up with people asking to use my laptop (some 20 years ago), I cleaned its keyboard and put the caps back on at random. "Yes, of course you can use it, here you are! Oh, sorry, I forgot the keyboard..." Peace and undisturbed working ensued...

[chmod775]

Many people with mechanical keyboards (as in non-disposable keyboards) can probably relate to this, having put some keys back the wrong way after cleaning.

[zdragnar]

It's why the das keyboard with blank key caps was my favorite I've ever owned. It forced me to actually touch-type, rather than touch type the common keys and look for the rest.

[chmod775]

Then one always have trouble typing from unfamiliar angles that invalidate ones muscle memory, instead of only when someone swapped some caps...

[chmod775]

*Then one always has

[lobocinza]

This happened to me ~2 times I think due to exhaustion and/or stress. Just had to sleep to remember.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Great prank (the car swap). Must’ve cost quite a bit, though.

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.

[thatjoeoverthr]

Once I got home and found my toddler had completely shuffled the letters on my keyboard.

[Arrath]

Oh my god that car prank you linked was incredible.

[sabellito]

Few years ago I went to a store and paid with my card and 4-digit password. Not 20 minutes later, at another store, I just couldn't remember the password anymore, missed it 3 times and got my card blocked.

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.

[wishfish]

I was worried this would happen to me. I made an entry in my notes app. "Doctor Harry Bottomsmith 801-421-8623 9 am Friday" where 4218 was my PIN.

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.

[SenHeng]

I've had a few of these. Until years later when I stumbled upon them again and totally forgot how they were meant to be decoded.

[account42]

You just validated every adventure game player typing in whatever numbers they can find to try and guess passwords.

[kibwen]

This is more generally known as steganography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

[ntauthority]

A year ago, I had to go to a bank office and engage in some verification process that also required me to use the physical bank card with its preassigned PIN.

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.

[SenHeng]

For the past decade and a half, possibly longer, Japanese ATMs have replaced their physical keypads with digital ones where the numbers are randomly placed. Imagine my surprised when the first times I tried to enter my PIN, it kept failing until I took a good close look at the numbers.

[thraxil]

Had the same experience. Went to an ATM one night and the PIN for my card that I'd used several times a week for probably a decade was just... gone. Never before, never since.

[urxvtcd]

I once forgot root password to my FreeBSD installation, I spent a lot of time trying to remember it but failed. So I did a reinstall, and obviously recalled it when prompted to come up with a new one.

[LandR]

This happened to me last year.

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.

[macintux]

I’ve had the same experience. Walked up to an ATM for the second time in two days and my 4-digit PIN was simply gone from my memory. I never figured out what it was.

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

[grogenaut]

I use my ATM so infrequently that it's happened to me a few times. I get cash reups selling stuff on Craigslist so I need the ATM like once a year. Luckily my ATM is right next to an in grocery store branch so resetting the pin is 3-5 minutes talking to someone irl

[Vinnl]

I've had this happen to me multiple times, and more often now that so much payment is contactless here (even though I still have the same code as when it wasn't). Additionally, something as simple as a different machine (the most recent instance was a touch screen) can throw me off as well.

[jay_kyburz]

I went for a week holiday and when I came back I couldn't remember the alarm code. Had to call the boss at 7am with the alarm blasting in the background.

[tarsinge]

It has already happened to me blank on the 4-digit PIN I have since more than 5 years. Never thought I could forget something so short I use so often.

[PontifexMinimus]

Some bank cards have allowed you to change the number to a more memorable one.

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

[grog454]

I had a similar problem once. I normally use the dvorak layout but was on a qwerty keyboard. I don't remember exactly why, but I had to muscle-memory type the password as if the keyboard was dvorak and manually remap the characters using an image of a dovrak layout on top of a qwerty keyboard.

[frostwarrior]

My approach to that is to follow xkcd advice with an emergency password which looks less like a random string but more like a real world phrase.

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

[Sohcahtoa82]

> My approach to that is to follow xkcd advice with an emergency password which looks less like a random string but more like a real world phrase.

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.

[isolli]

It reminds me of the time I tried to type my password on a keyboard with a French layout, but responding as if it had a US layout. It turns out, even if you think you know where all these special characters are, finding them under pressure (three tries before you're locked out) with misleading visual cues is hard!

[ncpa-cpl]

Some countries even use more than one keyboard layout, so I try to stick to special chacters that dont change from keyboard layouts. Like dot comma and space.

[empyrrhicist]

Had that happen with a four digit numeric bank pin once, and several times since then with pass phrases. I tend to get stuck on whatever wrong pattern I entered first and have to try again later.

[GTP]

>but I get the feeling it could've happened with any muscle-memoried password.

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.

[remram]

This happened to me, I forgot my Android "pattern", the swiped pin-like thing to unlock the phone. I didn't have a password set. I was able to factory-reset it with my Google account password but I lost recent files that hadn't yet been backed up (photos etc).

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.

[efreak]

My method of solving this is to only use familiar, well known information about myself as my master password. It's > 50 characters and contains addresses, old ID numbers, my public library card number, account numbers, old usernames from 5th grade (I've never seen another username even remotely close to either my first IRC name or my geocities username). I usually get the order wrong the first time I try it, but correct on the second or third.

[InCityDreams]

Mild distress? I don't think that is so rare. But, why are my phone numbers not in the same order as my keyboard numbers! At my bank i drew a blank and had to sit at the assistants desk/ keyboard to fire off the muscles to enter in my old pw, in order to enter in an otu pw they'd generated.

[concordDance]

It's a really scary fact that people try and ignore but: neurons die.

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.

[NoPicklez]

I've done this so many times.

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.

[grogenaut]

sometimes i just cant get the password but will get it a bit later when not anxious.

[mixmastamyk]

You just described tech interviews. ;-)