Random Developments

This is a true story. It happened yesterday, to yours truly.

11:00am. Coffee time, the worst possible time to ask for support. A girl comes into Technical Services saying that she changed her password and forgot what she changed it to. Since the help desk is closed, we’re the only ones who can help… When?, ask I. “Just now”. Well, that’s not much of a memory… but, well, I’ve seen weirder things. “Do you remember your previous password?” Yes, she says. Ok, I revert it to the previous one, tell her to wait 15 minutes for it to propagate, and send her on her way.

Not half an hour later, she’s back. The previous password does not work either, she claims. Odd. I check it, it should work. So I set her password to something else, write it on a piece of paper, tell her “this is your new password, all lowercase; change it today or it will expire”, and off she goes.

Mid afternoon, and who comes in? She says that she logged in with the password I gave her, then she changed it and now she can’t log in anymore. I suspect her keyboard might have a problem, so I ask her to try on mine; it fails. So I change it back to the password I gave her earlier, and ask her to change it again.

A few minutes later, she comes back saying that the password I gave her does not work either. Well, now I know she has to be doing something wrong. So I log in to her account with that password, and it works. I ask her to do it on my keyboard, just to check. And I watch in horror as she pointedly presses the shift key while typing a password containing only digits and lowercase letters! Well, that explains it. I tell her about upper- and lower-case letters, the shift key and things not to do; a colleague helps a little with that. And she seems to understand. And off she goes.

And back she comes. Not working, she says. Ok… I need to see this. So I go with her to the lab, five floors down, to watch as she logs in. And there I see, in all its glory, a bright green Caps Lock light on her keyboard. I touch the Caps Lock key and tell her “try now”. She does it and, surprise of surprises, it works. So I have her change the password again, and watch as she does. And then I tell her to check for that light and, if in doubt, to type the password in the username field to see if it looks like what she expects.

And she’s a Postgrad student in Computer Science. What’s the world coming to?