Your Password Will Expire...

Monday morning isn't exactly the pinnacle of greatness in my week.

In fact, it's about the opposite.

(Except that would make it the pit of despair, or something.. And that makes it sound super melodramatic. Melodrama is something we seek to avoid, and thus... I guess we'll just call it Monday morning.)

This morning wasn't all downhill. I did wake up on time. And looked at the clock, and said "Hmm... that should have gone off two minutes ago." Then I set the clock for eight minutes later (because even a sleep-deprived Sunny can be anal-retentive about her round numbers) and went back to sleep. And promptly snoozed for 56 minutes (that's 8 hits of the snooze button), at which point bed needed to be rocketed out of in order for the morning's schedule to commence accordingly. 

Which has pretty much set the standard for the rest of my morning.

Over the weekend, I partied too hard. I went to a restaurant that sets my tummy into fits of Rawr, so I've spent most of the weekend feeling (and looking) like a pregnant beluga. I watched a football game late into the evening, so I'm sporting some very healthy bags under my eyes. I haven't done laundry in the better part of a fortnight**, so I'm down to the bottom-of-the-barrel clothes-wise. I haven't gone grocery shopping in a week, either, so I'm scraping the bottom of the unhealthiest choices in my pantry for nutrition. And I've been napping like a crazy person, so I can't even argue that it's a busy schedule keeping me from living a healthy lifestyle.

Anyway, all of these choices have led me to feel less-than-stellar today. My shirt is too small and my jeans have a hole between the thighs. I'm not wearing makeup and I forgot my rings. My skin isn't fitting properly, and every time I move something smells funny in my cube, and even though I showered this morning, I suspect it might be me.

This is the type of morning totally befitting a Monday. And thus, when I got to the office this morning... I had to change my password.

Hurray.

The tiny little message is so unassuming:

Your password will expire in 0 days. Would you like to change it now?

OK | Cancel

It's a setup. You can't really cancel. You HAVE to change your password. If you hit cancel, you can go about your business for exactly 45 minutes, until you forget that you didn't change your password and you step away to go pee and accidentally lock yourself out of your computer and your password expires, so you have to go beg the IT guy to please let you in to your computer... All while he sighs and asks why you didn't just change it before.

"Well, ninny, why didn't you change it before now?" you must be asking, just like IT guy. "Don't they give you a warning?"

Well of course they do. They give me 14 days. Which isn't nearly long enough to be clever and witty in devising a new password.

Here's the basic scoop:

One must come up with a new password every 40 days. (I would say something witty about Organized Religion here, if I weren't worried about offending the masses. Or at least the masses who read this blog. Hi, masses! Look at me, trying not to offend you!)

That's just enough time to get settled in to a pattern where you remember your password without looking at the little sticky you hid underneath your frog-soap-dish-that-functions-as-a-business-card-holder to remind you of your last bout of password creativity. After all, the safety of your workstation and the company depends on the strength of your password! Without a strong password, any schmuck could wander into the company and start firing off messages about impending doom and free barbeques at lunchtime. I just can't have that responsibility hanging on my shoulders.

So, every 26 days (when the error message first pops up), I try to get clever. I think about what passwords I've used in the past, and how I can modify them ever so slightly so I don't go completely bonkers when I try to remember just what, exactly, I changed it to on day 41.

But it can't be as easy as a-b-c or 1-2-3. You must use at least one capital letter. You must use at least one lowercase letter. And you must use a number or a symbol.

Which means I usually end up with something terribly clever like aBc1@3 .

Yeah, good fun. Totally rememberable... Except unacceptable.

Corporate doesn't accept patterns, either.

So I try to go with the season. Snowflake... Pumpkin... Patriot... they've all been victims in the past.

Or I try to go with a current hobby. Knitting... Medieval... yup, they've worked it too.

But eventually, one runs out of creativity.

And eventually, one runs out of days to push off their finding-of-creativity, and one must just make a decision and go with it.

So one looks around ones office, and comes up with something that their eyes will settle on every morning just to get them past the little blinking error message of doom...

So for the next 40 days, one ends up peeking under the frog-soap-dish-that-functions-as-a-business-card-holder to remind oneself to type in ScotchTape! every time a password is requested.

And then your pattern gets shaken up with a swirly-whirly swizzle stick of corporate doom, and you start all over again.

** Two weeks. You should read some Shakespeare.