DAYTON, Ohio — A local man’s password reset link expired eleven seconds before he located his reading glasses, which were on his head, he confirmed Tuesday, setting in motion a three-hour recovery process that ended with a security question about a childhood pet he has never had.

Gary Pelletier, 58, said he clicked “Forgot Password” at 2:14 p.m. and was informed that a link had been sent to his email and would remain valid for 15 minutes. He then spent 14 minutes and 49 seconds looking for the glasses he needed to read the email.

“I had them,” said Pelletier, holding up the glasses. “I was holding them. I could feel them. But the link was already dead, and I couldn’t see well enough to know that, so I clicked it anyway, and I did that four more times.”

The site responded to the fifth attempt by locking his account for 30 minutes “for his protection,” a phrase Pelletier said he read aloud twice in the tone of a man being told he was being let go for his own good.

After the lockout, Pelletier requested a new link, which arrived promptly and was immediately sent to a secondary email address he abandoned in 2011. He then selected the option to verify his identity by phone, which called a landline he does not have, in a house in Toledo he sold during the Obama administration.

The final obstacle was a security question Pelletier set up in what he believes was 2009: “What was the name of your first pet?”

“I never had a pet,” said Pelletier. “We had a neighbor’s dog that came around. We called him ‘Dog.’ I typed ‘Dog.’ I typed ‘Dog’ with a capital D. I typed ‘dog.’ I tried ‘Rusty,’ because I figure that’s what it would have been.”

Dr. Lorraine Achterberg-Voss, senior fellow in Credential Fatigue at the Midwestern Institute for Remembering Things You Were Told to Remember, said the case is typical of a growing class of lockouts in which the account holder’s past self has been replaced by a more imaginative one.

“The man who answered that question in 2009 was a different person, one who owned a beagle named Biscuit and had a clear vision for his future. We are all locked out of that man.”

Achterberg-Voss said the security question industry relies on the assumption that people remember what they said about themselves, an assumption she called “bold.”

Pelletier eventually regained access at 5:21 p.m. by calling customer support, where a representative named Todd asked him to verify his identity by reading back the last four digits of a card he had cancelled. He read them off the card, which he found in his wallet, which was where the second pair of glasses had been.

The account he fought to recover is for a streaming service he said he does not use. He had been trying to cancel it.

At press time, Pelletier had been informed that cancellation requires a separate link, valid for ten minutes.