So, on the bright side of things, the last round of password expirations is done. Those were some hellish three weeks, I’ll tell you what. My job decided that we needed to come into compliance with state regulations on password security. This is a good thing. They did this by force-expiring everyone’s passwords in batches, informing them one week in advance that this would happen, and they’d need to change their passwords before expiring to comply with new password standards. They would continue to expire every 90 days and would have to be updated. I nearly had a heart attack when we were told. Our Exchange users on our Active Directory domain would be fine, just hit CTRL + ALT + DEL and choose “change password” and bam, you’re done. If they were expired, it would prompt them when they logged in to change it. Our web and mac users, however, had to go through our web interface, and geniuses who wrote Exchange 2007 didn’t bother putting in a way for expired users to change their password.
So, for three weeks straight, we’ve been changing passwords and walking users through changing them and reminding them what the rules are, and listening to complaint after complaint about “why weren’t we notified?” or “Dude, I didn’t even read that e-mail. I totally ignored it.” Grrr. Not to mention the power went out several nights in a row. On one occasion, an electrician was working on an emergency power cut-off switch that wasn’t supposed to be attached to anything yet, and killed all the power to our data center. All of it. Mass hysteria.
Last week, our web server went down, REPEATEDLY, for a couple days straight. Parts of our web site are still broken.
Throw in on top of all that our usual cavalcade of comedy tech support calls about how to fix this or that, viruses & spyware, “How do I do this in Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook/Access?,” and transfer calls from vendors directly to unanswered voicemail boxes, and it’s been a pretty heavy couple of weeks. It has been nice though, people calling and going “I have a Mac question,” and I say “Okay, how can I help you?” and they go “I really need to speak to your Mac guy, is he around?” and I say “I’m Apple OS X Leopard certified, how may I help you today?” and then they shutup and ask their question.
My blackberry’s been really handy lately. For example, being connected to my work e-mail and not starting my work day until 11am means I can look and see if there are any global problems going on, and decide whether or not it’s bad enough to call in sick.