in which our heroine is a bit of an idiot

Dear friends, I have been meaning, as you do, as you mean to do your taxes, and see about registering with a dentist, and rescrewing your bike-light mounts, as you do, as you mean to do, to change my passwords. For a while. I'd get around to it, thought I.

On December 6th someone who wasn't me took £496.13 out of my account.

The bank, and PayPal, have been very nice about it, and they tell me I should have the money back pretty soon. (PayPal's customer service impressed me rather a lot: I rang them up in a panic and a nice man from Ireland said, before anything else, "We do this every day. Now you just sit down and don't worry about a thing, we'll fix it all for you.") They also said I didn't need to cancel my card, but I did anyway, for peace of mind. Having done that, I have just spent half an hour of my life changing my passwords for Gmail, LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Land Registry and HMRC. Some of them I had changed, at some time maybe. Facebook informed me I hadn't changed my password since October 2005. I changed it. I changed them all.

Can I please entreat y'all to do the same. I now return you to regularly scheduled programming.