The Glade 4.0

Passwords must be a minimum of 12 characters and contain mixed case, numbers, and symbols. Logging into the account requires a password, and each seperate application (four of them) has its own password. Each password must be substantially different from every other password. Passwords must be changed every 60-90 days depending on the application. New passwords cannot be substantially similar to old passwords. Sometimes, in addition to your current password, an application may ask you for your previous password to help in verifying your identity. Passwords must be remembered, they should never be written down.

If you incorrectly enter a password more than three times, cannot remember an old password, do not login for a week, or the system detects a change in your access pattern, your account will be locked. "Change in access pattern" will have a ridiculous hair trigger and will go off for every employee at least once per quarter, for no apparent reason.

When this happens, you must call our IT department which will then proceed to repeatedly insult your intelligence and waste your time by making you reboot the computer and check the cable connections, despite the fact that you just read off the damn error code and it takes them about 30 seconds to look up your account and see that the account is really locked. The IT department does not believe that your computer monitor is correctly plugged in, you must check it. After this, the IT department will require you to provide the answers to your security questions before they will help you, even if you know the representative personally or even if you visit the IT department in person with ID.

Look, I know we can look at patient medical records from these accounts, but that's no excuse for you to come up with impossible-to-follow procedures (Do you actually believe that the employees are memorizing ten different random alphanumeric strings without writing them down every three months? Really?) that seem to be designed to be just sadistic enough that the other employees don't physically murder you. The amount of time and money we waste dealing with this **** is phenomenal.

Thats an incredible system. Our IT people and password systems are way easier tban that..

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

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I really wish more systems allowed for longer passwords, without the imposed requirements for numbers, mixed case, and non-alpha numeric characters.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Your ire is misplaced. The IT people don't care what passwords you use. It's the CIS people who come up with this stuff. The IT people are just challenged to implement, enforce and support it.

I'm an IT guy, and I *hate* those sorts of ridiculous passwords.

Hell, I hate the iTunes crap where you enter the PW wrong once, and you're locked out, and have to reset your ****. Its obnoxious.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I use a lot of really weak passwords. Mostly, I have a bunch of stuff that I don't really care if people hack into, nor would anyone really care about hacking into.

And then I have a few accounts that I use very secure passwords for, and rotate on at least an annual basis.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Sounds like conundrum. IT doesn't like to have to reset your passwords, and this is probably a big part of low level support. I would think if it were at all possible to condense down to one password, it would behoove them to do so. We had three (AD, e-mail, and 4js) when I was at the school, but were in the process of condensing that down when I left.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

This is likely because you're being an *******. IT generally goes more "by the book" the more of an ******* the person is being. If you're super cool about things, they'll tend to go much faster.

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Holy shitsnacks!

No, the IT Department doesn't 'insult your intelligence' by making you reboot and check cable connections. Long years of experience have taught us that this is actually a frequent fix and a frequent problem. Error codes are sometimes misleading. And despite your supposed 'expertise' anyone can dislodge a cable it it isn't always the first thing people think of simply because its so basic.

The first rule of troubleshooting: Check your connections. More generally the first rule should be: Try the Quick & non-invasive things before you actually go mucking around with settings that could potentially cause other problems. Checking the cables is a 10 second process. rebooting maybe 2 minutes. Resetting passwords is irrevocable.


Your IT People are not insulting your intelligence by asking you to do these things. They are not making any assessment of your intelligence. They're simply playing the odds. Its a cheap bet with a high potential payoff. And they've seen it pay off enough (because like it or not, 'is it plugged in' really does need to be asked sometimes) that they do ask the question. Stop getting your panties in a wad about that.

Now, password restrictions: I agree. There are demonstrably better ways of securing access to various programs.

This.

People in IT hate the password complexity rules even more than the end users, because we have more passwords that are affected by them. Information Security is not IT.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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I haven't ever had an IT person ask me to check cable connections, but I can say that if I'm reading something off the screen and they want me to check the monitor power connections.....

Well, it'd be a lot like the cable company:

me: My modem isn't working; I have no internet and only half the lights are lit.

them: Is it plugged in?

me: That would be why half the lights are still lit, yes

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

And worse, we likely have passwords across more platforms with vastly different password rules. Some of us straddle multiple domains, multiple networks, multiple operating systems, etc. Beyond that we're the first targets for the Security folks so we're targeted for enforcement, audits, etc.

No, this is why everyone hates IT.

You're servicing the problem, possibly in the most effective way, but you're not servicing the customer.

If a particular method is fast and effective, then, actually, yes, they are servicing the customer. The customer is not the caller. The customer is the line of business that has negotiated the SLAs with IT and helped set budget, headcount, and performance targets, requiring IT to do "more with less." Meeting those negotiated SLAs is more important than not pissing off a few oversensitive people with effective methods that may insult your prideful intelligence.

With that said, anybody who asks you to check the cables when you've called in to get a password reset is NOT servicing the caller in the most effective way. I posit that if that really happened, it actually went down quite differently when you listen to the call.

Caller: I can't get on to my computer! I put my password in, now nothing is working!
Helpdesk: Nothing is working? What error message did you get?
Caller: I didn't get ANY error message! It's just not working!
Helpdesk: What's on the screen?
Caller: Nothing!
Helpdesk: There's absolutely nothing on the screen?
Caller: I already told you that! Just fix my **** password!
Helpdesk: Can you check the cables on your monitor? Is it unplugged from something?
Caller: I just need my password fixed!
Helpdesk: But you said there's nothing on your screen.


No, that's not an exaggeration. I'm relatively sure I've heard that exact call before.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Taly, I don't really care who the customer is. We're discussing "why everyone hates IT people", so it's safe to assume we're talking about the callers. If you don't want to call them the customer, ok. Further, as this has been an ongoing discussion on this board over the years, and these discussions include a general acknowledgement throughout of such ire, I think it's safe to assume the problem is not limited to "a few oversensitive people with prideful intelligence".

In fact, this sort of obvious disdain for the customer/caller may be part of the problem.

Hey, it's the business side that's decided "We're only willing to pay for 12 people, but we need you to be able to answer 80% of 600 calls in a day within 20 seconds." (Part of the Service Level Agreement contract with the Helpdesk.) You get what you pay for.

As for disdain for customers/callers, anyone with at least half a brain and regular contact with people has disdain for most of the human species.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Paying for more people in a cost-center department is never high on any business leader's list of things to do. If you disagree with the SLA metrics, you need to demonstrate why your department should be special compared to all the other industry benchmarks.

It's possible you're right, I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying that every overhead department thinks they're special. If they want to ACTUALLY be special, they have to generate value beyond industry-comparable overhead departments.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

No, this is just adolescent "I'm smarter than other people" nonsense, and in any case, no matter how justified you think your disdain is, its still a reason people don't want to talk to IT people.

Pretty much no one on earth is in any position to have any sort of disdain for the species in general. No snowflake is that special.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Your acceptance of the status quo/normative and authority disqualifies you from having any valid opinions on the subject. It's not adolescence. It's misanthropy. Misanthropy is, itself, a virtue. :p

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The fact that you, for no justifiable reason, think yourself superior to people around you disqualifies you from having any valid opinion on the subject. Your mention of authority is particularly silly, this has nothing at all to do with authority, and everything to do with you needing to get your digs in at it because you associate "authority" with "people who tried to get me not to **** when I was a teenager". :p

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

As individuals, I have very little against most people in particular, but as groups, we are worthy of nothing but contempt. As a group, human beings sheep that never gives thought to things in the abstract, they accept every axiom with which they are presented, and participate without self-reflection or introspection in the routines with which society expects them. Thinking is no virtue to human society. People live like the animals we are, most never deigning to rise above and assign meaning to their pointless lives. These are the people who have made "reality TV" profitable, "Pop music" popular, and logic something that people view with suspicion.

Any one individual who stops to speak about such things can often do so respectably, and I don't hate the presence of individuals so much, but as a group, I hold humans in utter contempt.


Or, to put it in the popular vernacular:
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." ~ Agent K

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

All you are really doing here is explaining why people hate IT. They are underfunded so don't have adequate time to properly service the caller, IT folks are cave-trolls who hate people, etc.

You just presented several basic axioms that you do not or weakly defend, whilst complaining that people blindly accept every axiom presented.

Aside from Arathain pointing out that you are simply spouting axioms with nothing to support it beyond your personal cynicism while complaining that people "accept axioms" the simple fact is that people are not, in the main, sheep, and do think about things abstractly (even if with error much of the time.) You're basing this on a very cursory assessment of the people around you.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."