The woman on the other end of the line was matter-of-fact. "Who is your favorite actor?" she asked.
I froze. Tom Hanks came immediately to mind — versatile, accomplished, serious — but is he my favorite? In truth, all other things being equal, I'd rather see Alec Baldwin on the screen than Tom Hanks, though given that he's mostly a sitcom star these days he might not qualify as the capital-A actor the woman was looking for.
"It varies," I said after a pause. "I can't answer that."
"What about your favorite singer?"
What am I, a teenager? Who has one favorite singer? "No."
"Restaurant you'd most like to visit?"
She was assisting me with the registration for a new account with my home Internet service provider and running me through the options for security questions — personal posers to which I will have to provide the answer in the very likely event that I forget the account password.
The multiple password problem will go away in a few years. Ultimately, retinal scans or other biometric technology will give us access to all our online accounts and services without the need to ransack our memories.
Until then, though, we'll have to live with the growing problem that the old standby security questions — "What is your mother's maiden name?" "What's the name of the street you grew up on?" "What's your pet's name?" and so on — are too easy for other people to answer in the era of bulging online databases and oversharing on social media.
One of my online readers produced my mother's maiden name — Barnhart — less than 15 minutes after I posted the challenge online.
In 2008 then vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's private email account was hacked because her security question asked where she met her spouse, and by then the answer (Wasilla High) was well known.
"Who was your childhood hero?" the woman persisted, continuing down her list.
That's not going to be in any database or tucked into the biographical information I have carelessly uploaded to Facebook. But it's such a quirky question that my answer today is unlikely to be the answer I summon under pressure several months from now when I urgently need access to this account.
I did idolize Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain, but that's embarrassing in light of the dissolution that followed the end of his career — Two prison terms! Say it ain't so! — and a rotating cast of NASA astronauts. The answer I gave was a comic book superhero, which I worried would make me seem shallow to the woman on the other end of the line.
So it became something of an insecurity question.
Several other questions she rattled off were similarly whimsical — What was your best vacation? What country would you most like to visit? Who is your favorite writer?
These aren't questions so much as they are conversational gambits and invitations to philosophize. What do we mean by "best"? Is an ideal vacation destination relaxing or challenging? Is a favorite writer the same thing as a favorite author?
I asked readers to come up with even worse security questions. Among their suggestions: "How would you characterize your first driver's license photo?" "What's the last American-made appliance you bought?" "What the heck is that thing behind you? Is it supposed to be art?" "What's your least favorite prime number?" "Which of your previous passwords did you find hardest to remember?"