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 Oh, Herb. In yesterday’s Evening Bulletin, Herb Denenberg — knower of all, apparently — fields a question and answer about, well, you read (you can see a scan of it here):
Question: One of the standard recommendations for preventing fraud and identity theft is not to write your PIN down, certainly not on a check card, credit card, or related document. So you’re supposed to memorize it. Are there safe alternatives as I don’t seem to be able to memorize all my numbers?
Answer: Here’s one suggestion. Develop your own code so instead of writing down the PIN you write down a series of coded letters. There are endless ways to construct a code. One is to use letters of an easily remembered name to substitute for numbers. For example, use “Henry Smith.” Each letter has to be different. The first letter, h, is one; the next letter is two, etc. The last one is zero. So if the number is 7142, it would be written in code as m-h-r-e. There are all kinds of other easy methods of encoding PINs.
I can only imagine what those other ways are. They probably involve looking up a passage from each Gospel, copying down the chapter and verse (for example, “Luke 2:14″) and then tossing them all into big fire so that your pin number comes out (briefly) in the smoke. Then again, that’d probably be simpler than the “Henry Smith” method.
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