It seems that every day at work has a different overriding theme. Yesterday it was printers. Today it's passwords. On password days, it's like a cloud of st00pid descends upon this office and everyone simultaneously forgets the same passwords they've been using for the last three months.
First thing this morning I had an email from user #2 telling me user #1 had been locked out of her account because it wasn't accepting her password. I reset the password to our standard default, checked off User must change password at next logon in Active Directory, and emailed the new, temporary password to #2 to pass on to #1 since #1 wasn't answering her phone. Quelle surprise.
User #2 acknowledged the email and told me she'd passed on the information. Two minutes later I get an urgent email from user #1's supervisor telling me that #1 still couldn't get in. I wrote him back, including the new password again in case she there had been some miscommunication.
Five minutes later, I get another email from the supervisor telling me that it didn't work and she had now been here for 90 minutes and unable to do any work, blah blah blah.
At this point, I got up, walked over to user #1 and noticed that she had the temporary password written down on a slip of paper—minus one character.
I looked at her after seeing this. "That's what they both told me it was."
TWO SEPARATE PEOPLE had passed on the password incorrectly, even though in both emails, I had put that password in 16 point, bold type. I pointed this out to her (loud enough that her supervisor could hear it) saying, "It helps if people pass along the correct information."
Naturally, once she typed in the correct password it let her in and prompted her to select a new one. I hung around long enough to make sure she got it changed, and then went back to my desk. I checked the emails I'd sent to verify that I hadn't left out that one character. Nope, it was there.
Five minutes later I received an email from a different user. "I'm locked out. It's not taking my password."
I work with IDIOTS.
Remember when people actually had the knowledge to properly use the tools they needed to do their daily job?
"Thinking is HARD!"
Working in IT gives a special insight into the problem child of the human race. You rarely hear from the ones who can figure it out for themselves, or have reformatted their computer with Linux instead of Windows (e.g. the developers, usually). Instead you're only exposed to the idiots, often unappreciative because they think the world revolves around them.
Any time I needed IT, despite my best efforts, I always thanked them for their time and insight into the stupidity that is Windows (the one most memorable to me is when corporate said everyone had to migrate their profiles from one network group to another, and their automated scripts failed miserably for about 2/3 of people. The IT people were scattered all over the place rushing around trying to helping people in person, and one particular manager was belittling one for not getting back to her first (even though her job was the least important to keeping things running smoothly, compared to all the developers and everyone under her). Someone who appreciated IT like I did even came to her defense when that happened).
I never want to do IT. I have my own world of problems to handle in programming that dealing solely with the human factor would be too much for me.