Sign-Up? ...... I'll Pass

Lately, if I want to buy something. The purchase is done in less than an hour. Half of the time to check if the product is a lemon, and the rest to find the best deal for the lemon out there. Online shopping is the norm these days. And most of them offer free shipping or charge a paltry amount.

Face it. You don't pay sales tax, no gas expenses and no waste of energy or time to go to the store. The stores here are so big, they have their own zip code. I have seen airports smaller than them. Besides, I think I need a navigation system to use inside these monstrous stores since, I get lost almost every single time. Well, everything seems perfect in the online world until you actually proceed to buy it. You see this annoying little button called "Sign up". And, There is no way around it.

Why can't I just buy the damn thing and leave? Filling the stupid sign up form seems easier than, choosing a sign in name and password. Any sign in name I choose seems to be taken by some lunatic. In most cases that lunatic would be me, since I don't remember about it at all. Finally, I form a sign-in name which is a combination of my name, birth date, ssn and my cars VIN which I am sure could not have created before. Nope. That one existed too. Then I got lucky, I used a swear word plus my boss's name and repeated it twice. I got through.

Now comes the bigger headache. The password. Each site has its own bloody way of forming passwords, it drives a person crazy. This is what the website wants. It should include a number, a weird sign found on your keyboard, upper case, lower case and a middle case alphabet. It cannot not have your mistress's name, swear word or your insanely long sign-in name. Why doesn't it just give me a password to use? I can't remember the one I will be creating anyway.

In a miracle situation if I do remember I had registered before. Retrieving is as painful. To identify you, it asks your girl friends name. Making you want to ask in turn, which one? Or it could ask you email address which a normal person has at least 10 of. I try it one by one and the third time, I am locked out saying it was a phishing attempt. Back to square zero.

Career website? They make rocket science seem like a piece of cake. Most of the companies want a profile to be created. No complaints. But what I don't understand is, why they want me to enter my work experience and education when I have already uploaded my resume there. What do they think, the resume has a recipe of Chicken Bryani? Most of the time I just give up applying for the job, looking at the details they want. They even want to know your grandfathers first job and why he left it.

Some career sites are friendly. They populate the fields from your resume to make it easier for you. Not exactly. Since my phone number is not my zip code and definitely the city is not named after me. You end up spending more time trying to fix it instead.

Even some news sites want you to register. All this for security and convenience. I am not going to talk about the latter part since we proved it is otherwise and for the former? I am least bothered if someone uses my credit card info since I am maxed out anyways!