My wife and I are complete opposites in many regards of our lives. I’m a science guy; she is art. She cooks and cleans; I eat and unclean. I’m tech-savvy(ish); she is not. As such, we have informally defined roles in our house. For example, anything to do with homely matters, she handles. Anything to do with technology… that is my domain.

Because of the just-mentioned, I am the one who created (creates) important online accounts for my wife, like her email. (She creates her own accounts when it comes to useless shit, like Facebook.) Part of the process of creating my wife’s accounts is that I’m responsible for her login details (including password). For example, I setup her email on her phone but she has no idea what her password is. And, as it turns out, this is a very good thing. Curious? Read on to learn more.

It was a Saturday afternoon. I’m on my computer when my wife hurriedly calls me over, telling me she won a free iPhone. Perplexed, I walk over and look at her phone. It took me roughly 0.4535609712345 seconds to recognize what she is looking at is one of those scam websites that tell you that you’ve won something but then force you to sign up for dozens of offers in order to get said item (if you ever get it at all). I explain this to her and tell her she won’t get squat. She insists that this is legitimate because “many people left positive comments”. I further tell her that the website she is on is not Facebook and the comments are not real — someone created the website to look like Facebook and put fake comments on there to fool people like you (yes, I said that).

She continues to insist that this is legitimate, so I tell her to go ahead and try it. She does and, surprise surprise, she gets nothing. When I ask her about it, she says she didn’t finish it because it was asking her to signup for xyz and abc and etc. (For the record, this is exactly what I explained to her earlier.)

Fast forward to today.

Today I need to log into my wife’s email account (for an unrelated reason). She happens to be standing besides me and asks me what her email password is (recall: I setup the account and never actually gave her the password). I was more than willing to give it to her, but I had a feeling she didn’t actually need it. So, I ask her why does she need it. She tells me so she can login. I tell her, you can already login on your phone (and she doesn’t use the computer to check her email). She tells me she needs the password so she can give it when asked.

…Wait a second. Give it to who when what?

After I interrogate her, it turns out she was talking about how during her attempt to get a free iPhone from the above-mentioned scam website, she was asked for her email password… but she didn’t give it because she didn’t know it, seemingly indicating she would have given it had I been foolish enough to give it to her.

Face, meet desk.