There seems to be a new trend creeping into Irish law.

A while back they were talking about introducing a new law [or maybe they even passed it] making it legal for an employee to ask to work from home. This amused me somewhat. A legal right to ask for something? In my day everyone was free to ask anything of everyone else. Ask and you shall receive and all that shit. There was nothing in that law which defined whether the boss was required to give any specific response or even no response at all.

“Please sir, may I work from home?”

“Get back to your desk and shut the fuck up.”

“But I have a legal right to ask!”

“Well, you have asked. Now piss off.”

Now they are talking about a new law – the right of a Garda to demand all your passwords. So they have upgraded “ask” to “demand”.

I have no problem with this new one. They can ask, demand or even insist that I give them my passwords but what happens if I have forgotten them? I have a lot of passwords, and I mean a shed load. I have passwords to computers, websites, email accounts, shops, and God only knows what else. I actually have well over two hundred passwords. There is no way I could possibly remember them all, especially as most of ’em are those nasty ones like “T6so3zK!VUFQDmMXZ” [for example]. I couldn’t remember one, let alone a hundred, so I use a central repository to store all my usernames and passwords. All I have to remember is the one password to that repository.

Naturally that central repository has to have a secure password and one that I can remember. And I change it regularly.

I have just changed it to “Mind Your Own Fucking Business”.

Now they can ask, and they shall receive.