Whilst my sister and her partner are away holidaying in warmer climes, I took the opportunity to take my rabble family up to Midlands and stay at their house.

Being upstanding and security conscious citizens their house is protected by an burglar alarm. Whilst I thought I knew the PIN, I wasn’t sure and besides they might have changed it. So how to get the PIN from them? Well obviously they wrote it down and left it with my other sister. OK no problems, all I know have to do is go to my other sisters house first and pick up a piece of paper with the PIN written on it. Stop me when you realise that PINs and passwords are useless.

So for the rest of the weekend I carry around the PIN for their burglar alarm written on a scrap of paper, transforming it from something they know to something I’m carrying around. In due course, Maria needs access to the house and I simply delegate my capabilty – in less fancy terms I gave her the scrap of paper.

After this things get a bit hazy and eventually the piece of paper is nowhere to be found. If I didn’t happen to have a pretty good memory we’d have had to suffer the ignominy of having the alarm blaring out and disturbing the neighbours. Is this seriously the best we can do it 2014. Forget the world of the Jetsons, we are still reliant on scraps of paper for the most basic task of security tasks.