Life is full of exercises in bad timing. My company decided to institute a new timekeeping software program now. There is no time like the present, the old saying goes, and there is never a good time to get people used to new software, but it’s the end of the year and we have two holidays coming up. Just when everybody is on the same page with a routine, the rules change.
The timekeeping gods are dancing a jig now.
Also, the decision was made to start using the new software at the start of a new pay period, which for us starts on a Saturday. This means that, for the majority of us who do not work Saturday or Sunday, we will start right in with a new way to account for our daily hours first thing Monday morning. I’m anticipating lots of spilled coffee and four-letter words shouted at the height of desperation.
Either that, or a manager will come around and tell us that the software crashed the system over the weekend.
In addition, we can’t sign in until we receive our logins and passwords. Usually new logins are complex URLs which take up two lines of type on your computer screen. Passwords are born as a string of unintelligible garble which you must change into something you won’t forget the minute after you devise it. Having gone through family names and birth dates and names of pets from 1965 who were alive ten household moves ago, most password reminders now ask us for ten characters for a new password. Even a birthdate only contains eight. And what if you gave your kids and pets names of only five letters?
You might try stringing together four-letter word patterns with an exclamation point at the end for your “special character.”
I often have to dig deep for passwords, because my life is dull and missing exciting things I could use for passwords. That must be why the most common passwords are 1234 and such. Who has the time to figure out a new password before you’re one minute late clocking into the new time clock system?
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