Tighter Than Airport Security On 9/11/01

When my company was purchased by a publically traded company, we had to undergo a lot of changes, mostly for the sake of accounting purposes. There's a name for all this new crap, which occured because of the Enron clusterfuck, but I really can't be bothered to remember it. I just know it's why I have to put a tick mark down every time I use a company tissue to wipe my nose.

One of the things these new standards have changed is security - specifically, computer security. I have about four passwords I use in varying combinations on whatever it is I'm doing - I'll sub out numbers for letters, combine them in various ways, but four is about the upper limit of my memory when it comes to inane words I have to type over and over just to get into something I want to do.

Well, part of the new security policies are that our passwords can never be the same twice. So this has left me in a bit of a pinch: I cycled through all my old passwords, and now I can't use them. To make matters worse, our passwords must contain three of the four following things: a lower-case letter, an upper-case letter, a number, or a symbol. So even if I were to choose something easy to remember, it still wouldn't be in an easy-to-remember format.

Which leads me to the only workable solution for these high-security requirements.

I have to write the damn password on a post-it note on my monitor just so I remember what it is.

Sometimes, I really wonder if the people in charge of this train know what the fuck they're doing.