Another poem from the extraordinary Sarah Doughty.

Hi, I’m Sherron, from the South, and I am a bookaholic.

I currently have my dream job, which is freelance editing. —More to read! 

My mother is also an avid reader like me so we’ve always shared books back and forth. Now with the digital age we share a nook account. Works out great. She buys some, I buy some, and we both get to read without mailing the books to each other.

Recently, I was trying to get into the B&N account to add a couple of books to our library. My password didn’t work. Repeatedly. I can’t change it because they wanted to email something to my mother’s email. 

I remember she’d recently had a complete computer apocalypse, and had been forced to change some passwords that only the old computer had known. I thought maybe B&N was one of them. 

I email; she sends the password. Funny, it’s the old one, the one I thought I’d tried. Nonetheless I look up the book again, and try to log in to buy it. Password denied. S L O W L Y, typing each letter one at a time, I re-enter and I’m again denied. I call my mother to make sure she hadn’t changed it. She’s sure. She reads it off to me one letter at a time so I can type it in while she’s on the phone with me. She says a letter and I say it as I type it. A–A, B–B, C–C…and so on to the end. I press enter and get my old familiar response. Either the email or the password is wrong, and we know the email is correct, I can see it. 

Sighing with the burden of having to make sacrifices for your children, Mom says, “Well I’m logged in. I’ll go and reset the password but I’m resetting it to the same one. 

“Great!” I say. 

She mutters each step as she does it: getting into her account, proving again that she’s the owner, deleting the “old” password and entering a new one (the same one). She ends with, “Okay, I’m done. Try it now.”

“It’s a miracle!” I say. “I’m in.” 

The rest of the story:

I’m finally in because while she had been busily resetting things for me, I had finally looked up to the top of the screen. All this time I had been determinedly typing the Barnes & Noble password into Amazon’s ID box. I quickly changed over to the correct bookstore, and voila! Piece of cake. I just let my mother believe that the resetting had done it and we hung up. Sorry Mom. At least it’s a funny story? 

My blog (http://www.SoSimplySO.com) has posts about writing and editing, and poetry, interspersed with stories from my life, which are often funny and occasionally maudlin. 

I know I’m supposed to write my own stuff occasionally, but there are so many really good bloggers that I’d rather share with you. So today, another poet.