Tales of Woe
Sep. 22nd, 2010 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This just in from someone who shall remain anonymous:
My cubemate Hal, just got off the phone to technical support asking them to reset his password (which involves emailing it to his line manager and checking credentials etc.)
I heard his side of the conversation…
“I need to reset my password….no, I didn’t forget it, it just stopped working…no I didn’t change it…here’s my line manager’s email…”
After a couple of minutes he arrives back with a new password written on a piece of paper and thrusts it into my face, saying “here it is, my new password!”
Followed by a bout of typing and…
“My enter key isn’t working….neither is my C key…oh yeah, I spilt water all over my keyboard yesterday………oh”
Yeah, I don’t think it’s his password that was broken.
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Date: 2010-09-22 11:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 02:51 pm (UTC)Of course, on a desktop machine you're much more vulnerable to shoulder-surfing this way. But then, if someone can see your screen, they don't have to do much more to see your keyboard.
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Date: 2010-09-22 02:58 pm (UTC)And I like the some of the system dialogs in Windows 7 have the option to show what you're typing, if you want to check you're typing it correctly.
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Date: 2010-09-22 03:07 pm (UTC)Win7 lets you see what you're typing if you want, and only requires the key once because duh.
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Date: 2010-09-23 11:52 am (UTC)Akin to the power cut chesnut (seriously paraphrased...), whcih always makes me chortle:
Customer: My PC is broken. It just wont turn on.
Call centre guy: Ok I'll take you through the checklist step by step. Can you please check that the mains power cable is connected to the computer?
Customer: No.
CCG: Why not?
Customer: I can't see behind the PC tower.
CCG: Can you pull a light over to check?
Customer: No
CCG: Why not?
Customer: The power's out.
CCG: ...
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Date: 2010-09-23 02:48 pm (UTC)Or, rather, I'd heard that story for years and years - and then, when I was doing tech support in the mid 1990s, I got pretty much that exact call.
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Date: 2010-09-23 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 03:30 pm (UTC)