A taste of familiar medicine
As a system administrator, I deal with the little problems that all of our users face at one time or another. No, not power failure. Worse. The disease of the forgotten password. I try to be as helpful as possible, reassuring one and all that we can work through this little bump on the road of life. There is usually a terminal window close at hand where I can restore world order and make all and sundry back into productive individuals; a magic hand, if I say so myself.
But sometimes I get caught by my own trap; a taste of familiar medicine. My inventiveness is sometimes too diligent, and the password so carefully chosen to be unique and difficult to guess becomes unique and impossible to guess. There are a couple of free email accounts that are now the digital equivalent of an oxbow lake, cut off from the river and doomed to be a haven for the salamander and my errant messages. Even worse, I have (on the odd occasion) managed to lock myself out of machines where I really do need access.
On a machine where I am the sole user and where I have physical access, there are workarounds. Reformatting and reinstalling is a good one. But when it happens on another’s domain, I am reduced to begging for forgiveness. As I said, a taste of familiar medicine.
There are the usual “dog ate my homework” reasons, or the “hard drive went to Paradise without me” or the one I used this evening… “as I was exiting your shoddy interface, my cursor slipped and erased the password, partially, just before I hit OK. Now, I am like a tourist with a lost passport. A man without a country. Please, Mr. Postman, send me a letter with my replacement credentials so I can return home”.
It’s been ten minutes and I’m still waiting. In the digital age, some things don’t happen as quickly as they should.
