PIN

The other day I went to use my debit card and just whiffed through my PIN; I entered the wrong number three times in a row. Though I’ve had the same number since I got my first ATM card in Boston in 1985, it’s of course hardly out of character that I’d forget it: once or twice a semester I would freeze up and be utterly unable to remember my high school locker combination, and those two-letter combinations for the St. John’s mailboxes refused to stay fixed in my memory for more than twenty minutes at a time. Since I’d entered my PIN incorrectly one time too many, I had to call B of A to clear the block on my account.

I told all this to Juliana, which brought up the somewhat intimate question of PINs. Fifteen years, and the subject’s never come up before. I told her the number, which I’ve used because it was part of a friend’s phone number in Cincinnati, and seems like a very strong number. Oh she said. That’s the same number I use. Because she knows it’s mine, I had told her at some point and had forgotten? No, she just likes the number. It’s a nice number. She’s been using it not quite so long as me, perhaps for ten years, each of us using the same secret number without knowing it.