This is one of those typical lessons learned when you get too dependend on technology blindly and then you fall flat on your face. Well in my case I have been using Yodlee for about 4+ years now when I was working on a project for etrade.com. If you don’t know what yodlee is, then check out www.yodlee.com - they are actually pretty cool. Yodlee, provides an account aggregration service. So I logon to one place and that gets my financial information in one snapshot from all over - my account details from my banks, credit cards, 401K, utilities, etc. I know my bank (Wellsfargo) also uses this.
So the problem is, that since I have used this service for 4+ years I just remember my yodlee login and all the others login I go thru Yodlee and I don’t really recall my login and passwords for the other sites such as all the credit card companies, phones (cell and landline). etc. Why one would ask? Well primarily because I had this service available so I did not bother to save my credentials somewhere and like best practices, my passwords are different on each.
Now, yodlee has been down since last weekend (I tried it on Sunday - May 30th) and everyday they have been updating their site to say it would be available the next day and finally today saying that they are working on it and it would be back whenever its fixed. So the lesson here is for both myself - not to be so dependent on technology and use my poor brain (for a change) - imagine if someone like me who is a little more on the savvy end of technology can mess up, what of the poor non-geeky souls out there? The lesson also learned for Yodlee is to set expectations correctly and not publicly screw-up - again and again and again. Hopefully some young hotshot has learned his/her lesson from this - and if you are reading this - don’t worry everyone learns the hardway - I was in your shoes at one time. :)