One monday morning an employee called and said she forgot her password. I told her that I need her username to reset it. She told me that she had also forgotten her username. I guess she must have had a fun weekend :)
Btdt. Forgetting a username is often more annoying than a password. Many login and reset forms let you use an email address or phone number or something instead for probably just that reason. Some places will need a support contact.
That’s why most companies with fewer than say like a thousand people choose a username that’s almost always first letter of first name, last name and then a couple of numbers.
If you can’t remember your own name then there are bigger issues than whether you can sign into the computer.
Once upon a time before there were smartphones…
The internet existed already, e-mail as well.
We got a letter on real paper.
The guy was asking about some weird stuff going on in our software on his PC screen. He had included some screen shots, and referred to them in his questions. Smart guy, so far 😉
It turned out the screen shots were Polaroids. Smallest possible size! And they did not just show that window on the screen where the software was doing things. It was also showing his whole desktop. And his real desk. And the wall shelves around…
I have kept one of the photos to this day 😂
I got called in to handle a situation where an employee was spying on his boss’s emails. He got caught when a read notification went out from his account.
He got called into a meeting and when they explained what it was about he didn’t say a word, but left the meeting, went back to his office, removed the hard drive from his computer and left with it.
I just had to figure out what he’d done, make sure he didn’t have any further access, and fill in until they hired someone permanent. No idea what happened after that.
Holy shit, that’s some sketch there. When you decide the least incriminating thing is to say nothing and abscond with a drive… damn.
I got a call from this woman in Boston, out was just a product activation call so I had to read her a 20-character activation string. We use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet for those, to reduce confusion over the phone.
The last character was Y-Yankee. I followed that up with “but I guess that’s a politically incorrect word around Boston, huh?” And she goes on an absolute tirade about how people are way to sensitive, throwing out a few racist dogwhistles along the way.
I just said “Ma’am, I was making a joke about the rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.”
She went silent for a few seconds and hung up on me.
Was working the counter at a repair shop. This really old guy had come in for a data backup and a wipe/restore. We performed said service, and reloaded the data from the backup back on, and his outlook data was encrypted with a password he couldn’t remember.
This infuriated him, he specifically asked me if I wanted HIM to “Shove the desktop tower up his ass, stick his head in after it, and give it a sniff.”
People are wild.
