(no subject)

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

I liked the joke in today's xkcd very much, but I confess I was hoping it would be about someone who throws a fit about having to follow the script because he's such a big tech badass, and it turns out he really did just need to power-cycle something. Or he kicked out a cable.

Complete this sentence: if I had a dollar for every time someone assured me of his/her tech credentials, only to do or say something remarkably stupid, I could buy _________.

Where is the "Shoot Me Now" button?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_caecus_/]

I work in IS in a hospital. My job is sort of a "Jack of All Trades," type position. At night I do backups, server maintenance, monitor interfaces, troubleshoot problem systems, and handle telecom issues. Unfortunately, we also do help desk calls. They decided that it would be more cost effective to consolidate them to our group. Yippee....

I had a lady call for a password reset on our main Intranet site. She has never logged into this site, but she's sitting at the login screen. She called me to ask what her password was. It says on that page If you are logging on for the first time, use the last 4 digits of your social security number for your password. We're off to a good start, right? The box above it says, Employee ID Number, and she had to ask what she put in that box, too. I thought being literate would be a prerequisite for working here, but alas, I was incorrect.

It asks her to change her password, as it always does when you log in for the first time. Keep in mind, it says on that page:

• All passwords are confidential and should NEVER be shared.
  
• Minimum of 6 characters.
  
• An alphanumeric password with special characters is preferred (i.e. H6r*&hg)
  
• All password require at least: 1 capital/uppercase letter, 1 lowercase letter, and 1 number
  
• Do not use passwords such as your name, birth date or common phrases such as : “love”, “password”
  

Now begins the pain. We go round and round with me telling her that she has to change her password and type it twice to confirm it. I tell her it has to have at least 6 characters, at least one has to be a number, and at least one has to be a capital letter. I even used examples like Hername1, and she still couldn't get it to work. She kept either getting a message stating that her passwords don't match or that they didn't meet the requirements. FIFTEEN MINUTES into this call, she says, "Oh, so I have to make a capital letter on the keyboard?" It says it on the page, and I've been telling you that over and over. At seventeen and a half minutes into the call, I give up. I tell her that since it's not working, she should call the administrator for that system. The funny part was, she kept telling me what she was trying to change her password to. It says all passwords should never be shared. The users change them, so we don't know them. I'm not very fond of him, so I rather enjoyed sending this issue to him. The kicker is, when an end user is too stupid to follow instructions, it is always somehow our fault.

To make matters worse, my stress level is through the roof. I am working full time on graveyard shift, and I am going to school full time studying Software Engineering, on top of my CIST degree. I just learned that they are considering outsourcing the entire IS Department, which would mean that those of us they retained out of necessity or convenience would lose our benefits. I'm a cancer survivor and an amputee, and the benefits are the whole reason I work for this hospital. To make matters worse, the hospital pays half of my tuition. I've done so well working at getting ahead, and it looks like most of that may get blown away in one fell swoop for the sake of the bottom line. All of this comes right as I'm prepping for two brutal mid-terms. I'm having a great week.