Rants in the Pants

Episode 10- Frustration

Sometimes I get so angry, I could chew nails. Today, I would chew nails but my hair is on fire. Add an unhealthy dose of confusion to that and you have my current status. What could upset me so much? MFA, also known as 2FA. I didn’t know what this meant either= Two Factor Authentication and Multi Factor Authentication. I have other names for these processes but I won’t print them here. Use the letters provided and your imagination and you will come close.

When they first announced that this was going to be used, it seemed soft and cuddly yet protective of my privacy. My arms opened wide to this innovation in online protection. What turned me against it? Here’s the story:

I wanted to get into my bank account so I went to the site, entered the proper username and password and a window came up announcing that I would have to use 2FA. Yes! I was being protected. The code was sent to my email, so I opened the email up and by golly, it was requiring 2FA as well. In order to get into my bank account, I was going to have to get the code to enter my email so I could get the other code to enter my bank account. Luckily, I had a second email and that was where I had chosen to have my code sent for my other email. When I got to my second email, however, it also chose to require a 2FA. The code was sent to my other email which I could not enter because I couldn’t get the code out of the second email account because of 2FA. I went back to each page hoping that one of them had a little box you could check that would text the code for that site to my phone. One of them did.

I checked the box to have the code sent to my phone that would allow me to get into that email so I could get the code to open the other email to get the code to get into my bank account. I breathed a sigh of relief and waited. My phone did not beep to tell me I had a message.

I waited some more. No beep.

 I checked the phone and the battery was dead.

They call all these things we can’t wait to buy into “modern conveniences.” Could someone please explain how this is convenient?