Every so often — and I assure you, it’s not in regular intervals — I get an email saying my corporate password needs to change. This is a problem because a.) I have like 73 different work log-ins that require passwords and I don’t know which one this email refers to...

Nor do I know how to go about changing it. I click the button on the email that says “change your password now” but then it asks for my old password, which I also don’t know because this happened before and I don’t remember how I fixed it…

Anyway, I’ll ignore it for a few days, maybe 2 weeks, maybe a year… I honestly don’t think time matters here. But 1 day, inevitably, my email will stop working. A message will pop up on my phone saying “cannot retrieve the endless emails from PR people you delete immediately…"

This is a problem because I need to delete all that email from PR people. So I’ll try once more to change my email password only this time the problem is worsened because that “cannot retrieve PR emails” message KEEPS POPPING BACK UP while I try to fix it...

This will go on for an hour or a month or a decade — again, there’s some infinite time loop involved here that may or may not have been the inspiration for "Tenet.” Eventually I’ll get frustrated & call tech support, where very nice people work answering very stupid questions...

The answer tech support is required to provide is a “temporary password” so I can log back in and change my password to something that is ostensibly not temporary, but as the initial email I received suggests, no password is permanent. Life is full of existential paradoxes.

Anyway, they’ll change my password to something like D1sNey2020! and I’ll say, “Oh that’s a fine password. Can I keep that? No, no I cannot. So why can’t they just set the password to something I can keep? Because then THEY would know it. And they cannot be trusted...

Now, here’s where you might ask, if they have the power to change your password at any time when you can’t remember it, why can’t they be trusted with setting your new password? I think it has something to do with time bending back in upon itself. Again, Tenet.

So now I’ll log in using D1$neY2020 and look for a way to change my password to something else and that will take like an hour or a month or an epoch and somewhere on a web page there will be a secret link that I finally click on by accident that has a solution…

So finally I’ll figure it out and change that temporary password to something semi-permanent and tjhen get a message that says “this was your last password that you couldn’t remember you moron pick something new.”

And I will not be able to think of anything new because time doesn’t exist and therefore nothing is new and everything is new. Then I think, maybe "matthew mcconaughey” is a good password. Time is a flat circle. But I can never remember how to spell mcconaughey

Then I’ll end up just using my old password but changing one number & then I will immediately forget what number I changed, and then I will pick up my phone and see a message that says “hey moron you need to update that password here too” and then I will call tech support again.

Anyway, long story short, if you are a PR person with an urgent story pitch about a new medical technology that makes college athletes have X-ray vision or something like that, be aware that I may not get to your email today.