please empty your brain below
How's the minutes/hours/days/years to retirement clock looking today?

Waterhouse | 03.01.14 - 8:32 a.m. | #

They should have been telling you to wait 15 minutes before trying email - I suspect Active Directory sychronisation between the DC you are connected to and the DC your email is using for authentication.

Steve | 03.01.14 - 8:44 a.m. | #

None of this malarkey does much for productivity, especially when the whole pantomime is repeated in offices up and down the country. It provides a justification for gossip about Christmas/football/hangovers/family fallouts/weather/power cuts/floods/ etc, involving colleagues who are already logged in thank you very much.

Still, in DG's case, it gives him something to blog about. And, at least a cup of tea is a solitary interruption to productivity.

And perhaps, heaven forfend, you are even reading this, while you should be working !

Petras409 | 03.01.14 - 9:55 a.m. | #

"There were also three separate administrative emails from the helpdesk, recently arrived, each with a separate job number and a different employee's name at the end."

And no doubt each job number would have generated a separate charge from the helpdesk provider to your company.

Alan Burkitt-Gray | 03.01.14 - 10:16 a.m. | #

Whenever I worked at bigger companies, IT was always in-house, with a real person to solve these problems.
But when I worked at a London hotel, and the power supply unit of a PC blew up by a sudden power cut, we had to call someone in Mumbai to have it replaced...

Greg | 03.01.14 - 12:05 p.m. | #

ah...the classic "turn it off and on again" & the "wait 5-10-15 minutes". I get the feeling maybe computers 'realise' we humans need a break now and again to work more productively and as such have a in-built ramdom "t-break protocol".

E | 03.01.14 - 12:53 p.m. | #

A while ago, I was at a meeting with someone whose password, not chosen by her, was so complicated that she had to have it written down. She still made a mistake and was locked out. But she'd saved the (confidential) info on a memory stick because that happens so often, so was able to access it on another computer - otherwise her 70 mile round trip would have been wasted. Frankly, her pet's name or 123abc would have been no less secure.

Z | Homepage | 03.01.14 - 1:52 p.m. | #

I note another person who does the "shove some extra digits on the end" approach. Alas my current employer's system recognises that this is too simple and instead I have to do something more than that. So I have a number that iterates, and two chunks of characters that I have to swap around, and a third character that I have to change.

Hurts my brains.


Thankfully we have on-site IT, but when I was at the BBC, front line support was, oddly, done from Durham. Unless they were busy in which case we'd get routed through (even more oddly) to a call centre in the American mid-west!

Andrew Bowden | Homepage | 03.01.14 - 1:56 p.m. | #

Just read this out to the spousal unit who's in IT and up to his eyeballs in passwords all the time.

He feels your pain!

CornishCockney | 03.01.14 - 2:38 p.m. | #

"An increasing number of passwords is required to chart our way through everything..."

A couple yrs. ago I wanted to make reservations at a local restaurant. They would only take reservations via their website, with me first needing to make an account and then of course a password.

I'm sorry but going out to lunch should not be that complicated.

thrown olives | 03.01.14 - 3:52 p.m. | #

Which reminds me... A while ago I decided to change my website passwords. Up until that point I'd been using the same password almost everywhere. Not very secure at all.

So I came up with a new system that would mean I could create a memorable password for every site, but which would be different. You basically have a fixed term, and a variable one for each site using a standard rule (e.g. the first four characters of the website's domain name.)

As part of it I took notes of every website/place I had a password. When I created a new one, I also took a note.

That process was kicked off 18 months ago. Since then I have found that I had SEVENTY different passwords. And I am still stumbling across places using my old one.

And that's just my personal stuff.

Andrew Bowden | Homepage | 03.01.14 - 3:59 p.m. | #

You could always use something like 1Password amongst other useful password apps.

Chris | 03.01.14 - 7:09 p.m. | #

A 2-day week last week and a 2-day week this - perfect.
I'm dreading next week.

Karl, Dover | 03.01.14 - 8:51 p.m. | #

Of course, you realise that it was the demonic 666 that was the problem...

Antipodean | 04.01.14 - 8:30 a.m. | #

Co-incidentally I just had a similar set of events. In my case I'd been blocked from the email system.

Not a password glitch. Just inexplicably blocked.

I was still on xmas hols so just emailed in from another account so that it could be sorted out in my absence.

It was, but then within a day I was also told to change my password with the 'password reset tool'.

I did this (still from holiday), but unlike your speedy system, it took 3-4 hours before it all worked properly again. Something about the servers needing to synchronise.

Probably good to have done all of this over the quiet period.

rashbre | Homepage | 06.01.14 - 9:06 p.m. | #











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