Passwords - what would we do without them?

A couple weeks ago I had what can only be called a “bad day at work” due to total brain freeze on my part.

I had just purchased a new flash drive the night before and had given it an access password that was very similar to my NT login password at work. When I came into work that morning I immediately jumped in an early conference call and simultaneously booted my laptop and attempted to login. I was pretty distracted by the call, so I inadvertently entered the password I had given my flash drive instead of my NT login password – and unfortunately I did it three times in a row. I was now locked out of my NT account. I was dead in the water – no email, no nothing. So, I called desktop support. The support person was quite helpful and reset my password. But….to guard against social engineering they will never give you a password over the phone. Instead this person called my voice mail and left the password there.

OK, so that should be the end of story, right? Well, unfortunately I had recently changed my voice mail password and couldn’t remember the new voice mail password either. Not to worry….I recorded a copy of it in my password tracking file that was…oh boy…on my NT laptop. So, the next thing I did was call desktop support again and ask them to reset my voice mail password. As usual the person was very helpful, but I was thinking “gee, I hope she isn’t seeing a record of my previous call made a few minutes earlier asking for an NT password reset”. Again, to avoid those “social engineering attacks” she couldn’t just give me the password, she had to send it to my email. Oh boy…..so now think about this situation. My voice mail password will soon be in my email, which I cannot get to because I cannot login to my laptop because I forgot my NT password, and my NT password will soon be in my voice mail, but I can’t get to voice mail because I forgot that password too. Ok, so I suggested to the support person that she “copy my manager on the email with the voice mail password because I am having laptop problems this morning”. I didn’t want to say that I had forgotten that password too, for fear she’d either think I was a hacker attempting social engineering, or worse yet, a total moron (which was closer to the truth). She said OK, and now all that was left was to tell my boss that I screwed up and wait for him to give me my voice mail password so I could then get my NT password and actually start working. I asked her how long it would take for the email to my boss to go out and then she told me that she isn’t the one who actually resets the password, and that she has to pass it on the voice mail team and their response time for such requests is about 4 hours. Ackkkk…So, I told my boss the stupid story and he told me he would let me know as soon as he got the password.

Ok, so now I’m just sitting there waiting for my boss to call, when my brain actually starts to function again. I remembered that the way NT domains are administered in my company that anyone can log into anyone else’s computer, only with limited “user” privileges instead of “administrative” privileges that the primary user has. So, I asked one of my coworkers to log into my laptop and he readily did so. I then found my password file and retried the “old” voice mail password I had forgotten. I hoped that they hadn’t gotten around to changing that password yet (it had only been about an hour, much less than the typical 4 hours expected). I called my voice mail and luckily the old password still worked. I retrieved my new NT password and was then able to log in properly to my laptop. A few hours later the new voice mail password arrived. Life at work was now back to normal!

So, there you have it. This was pure stupidity on my part. I now keep all my passwords in a password vault I carry on my flash drive. The flash drive is of course protected by a password so that if I lose it the finder won’t have ready access to all my passwords. Now, as for the flashdrive password, I think I’ll have that one tattoed on my wrist….