Based on a true story.

I got up that morning, but only after a near-unprecedented four presses of the snooze button. It was the first day back after the New Year break and it meant getting up 40 minutes later than normal. That was because the idea of getting out of bed was too depressing. Especially because it was still dark. I’d been sleeping in every day for nearly two weeks, only getting up when it was light. I’d forgotten how late the sun rose in winter. However, I eventually managed the feat. After a shower and a kind of breakfast, I stepped out into the street to note that while it didn’t feel particularly cold there was actually a dusting of snow on the ground from where it had fallen overnight. Better still, after I’d reached London and had my morning coffee and started walking to the office, it actually snowed a bit in London too! Not nearly heavily or sustained enough to settle but still… very cool and I was kind of grinning like a kid.

Then I got into the office, and I turned on my computer and my old password didn’t work.

Crap, I must have forgotten that it was due to expire before I returned from the break, and stupidly left it for the Me of the New Year to worry about. Thanks, buddy. But fine, I called IT to have it reset. Guess what? I was informed that they no longer reset passwords over the phone. The new process requires the requestor to log an online application for a new password.

Wait – what? I needed to log a password reset request on a computer, even though I’d called in to say I couldn’t log in because I didn’t have a password? The person on the phone said without any sense of irony that this was true. I’d need to find somebody else’s machine, and then once they’d logged in, log in as myself on the online IT system and then make the request. Being my first day back, I didn’t have the bullshit filters in place yet to say that with the five or six different system passwords I was forever having to change between, I only ever remembered my login and kept the others in a file on my desktop. Instead, my brain held my consciousness in check and made me stumble out an ‘uh… okay’.

I regret that now.

While I was still vulnerable, the person on the phone added that once I’d filled in the form, the request would then go to my manager to approve before it would be dealt with within a TWO HOUR service level agreement.

I hung up, and two weeks worth of relaxation evaporated.

First, I had to wait for somebody in my area to get in, then once they did I waited for them to catch up on some emails before they went for a coffee and gave me control of their machine. Incidentally, this was a person at two or three levels of seniority above me and they had GIVEN me their computer to use without any restriction or reservation. I wonder if this was what IT had in mind by locking me, a lowly analyst, out of my machine.

After trying several likely passwords, I was lucky enough to hit the IT Request area where I had to choose what kind of password reset I wanted (there’s more than one?), and I realised that there were about three things psychopathically dumb about this password reset method. I decided to make explicit reference to them in the ‘comments’ section of the password request. You know, just to let IT know the depths to which I despised them. I may have used swearwords.

So, I was done, but my boss wasn’t in yet so the clock hadn’t even begun to tick on my request. What if he didn’t come in, I wondered? What would I do then? Further, I wondered, how would they even let me know they’d reset my password? I didn’t have access to an email address!

I bided my time for an hour doing more or less nothing, after my boss had come late and then approved the request, unsurprised at the ridiculous process to be gone through. He’s been here a year longer than I have and isn’t as angry.

After an hour I called the IT Department to ask about the status of my request. I’m optimistic, what can I say? I was on hold for twenty minutes. When I got through, the first thing I learned was that yes, they do indeed email you to tell you that you can now log in and, as it were, get access to emails they’ve sent you with your new password instructions….. that you would need to have logged in to read. Because they are F*&ing A&$holes, I didn’t say. That said, they also send the email to the person who authorised the password reset which is brilliant especially if they approve the request and then go for a four hour meeting, for example, I also didn’t say.

And then the guy told me (after I’d given them my ID number and spoken aloud to them my password security phrase – which is excellent security in itself, I might add) that I’d applied for the wrong kind of password reset. What… really? You threw random acronyms into a password reset system, and I chose the wrong one? How silly of…me.

And then the guy took pity on me and said he’d reset the password over the phone for me after all just this once, in apparent contravention of their policy, making a mockery of an abomination of what was already a searingly bad joke to begin with.

Problem solved.

And then I logged in and checked my emails and there was one from an IT guy I’d been speaking to before Christmas telling me (on the 29th December when I was on leave) that he’d resynced my passwords and that I should try logging into the system now to see if it worked, and I began to remember that my password probably didn’t expire over the period, it had most likely been played around with by somebody while I was gone. Of course, my out-of-office reply to the guy might have clued him in to the havoc his actions would cause later, but being IT he probably worked on a level both airily unconcerned with and yet much, much, much lower than that of normal human beings, and he didn’t worry himself with such base issues.

The IT Department in this company are utter f&^king morons.