It’s been about three years since I was first flummoxed by a phone.

Having just returned to work from a two-week vacation, I had attempted to retrieve my phone messages at the office when my brain went blank. For the life of me, I could not remember the password that would let me into the voice-mail system. My finger hovered lamely over the keypad, uncertain how to proceed. I punched in one series of letters, which the robot voice told me was incorrect. I tried another, but that was wrong, too.

A colleague suggested I walk away from the phone and come back in a few minutes and try it again. I did, but no luck. The brain circuitry responsible for handling the storage and retrieval of all my many passwords, logins, account and PIN numbers had been fried. The simple password that had served me well enough before had evaporated into the ether, never to be heard from again.

The friendly people in personnel issued me a temporary password and assured me the old password would eventually come back to me. Three years later, it’s still floating out there somewhere, part of that alphabet soup of letters and numbers necessary to gain access to computers at home and at work, my bank accounts, phones, ATM, 401(k) account, debit card, and dozens of Web sites that I once registered with and have never been able to revisit.

When I first wrote about the frustrations of password overload, I heard from lots of people who also suffered from this insidious form of technology-induced senility. Some told me they had forgotten so many critical passwords that they were forced to start writing them down in a special notebook. Others simply festooned their bulletin boards at home and at work with a blizzard of cryptic code words.

For years I followed the advice of security experts and created a new password for everything. I chose passwords that were unique to me – passwords related to my musical tastes, my reading preferences, and to my favorite outdoor hobbies. I used the names of family members, too, including my dog.

I considered the dozens of passwords to be so unique and unforgettable, in fact, that I never bothered to write them down. Eventually, after I had forgotten or misplaced most of them, I decided to simplify my life with a single password as my entree to the online smorgasbord. I chose an old nickname, confident that no one else in the world had ever been saddled with such a moniker.

Yet as cyberspace becomes more congested every year, I’ve found that my password and even my user name are no longer mine alone. While trying to register with a research site recently, I was informed that not only had another Tom Weber gotten there before me, but so had another tweber, tweb, web, web1 and web2. After 10 minutes, I was forced to log on with a truly clever name that escapes me at the moment.

If you asked me to recite the first phone number I ever had in my life, I could rattle off those 45-year-old digits without a moment’s hesitation. Yet in just the last few years, I’ve managed to forget more valuable secret words and numbers than I have been able to remember.

I’ve heard there are now Internet services out there that will, for a fee, retrieve your lost logins and store all of your important passwords for you. I’d be tempted to use one, too, but for one fatal flaw in the system: you need a password to access your account.