The other day one of my many bosses walks into my office with his wife's new Costco laptop and a bag full of software. He says, "Dawn, can you load this up and make sure it all works". "Sure" I said, I mean, what else was I to say?
Normally any computer geek is happy as a clam to fiddle with something shiny and new. I fired up the Sony Vaio and went through the typical Windows 7 setup screen. I typed in the password that his wife wanted, very simple, Password123. I let Micro$shaft load its millions of megabytes of critical updates and then the computer was ready to reboot. Yes, please reboot yourself. Back at the log in screen I type Password123. Invalid password. What? Password123. Invalid password. I typed if very carefully - P a s s w o r d 1 2 3 ---- Invalid password. OH MY GOD! As I stared open mouthed at the laptop I felt my heart drop into my stomach and the bile rising into my mouth.
How did this happen? Wait, maybe because the keyboard is strangely skewed to the left on this model and I didn't have my fingers on the home row? I would have had to type the password in wrong twice though, as a confirmation. How could that be? One long sheet of paper and about 100 iterations of Password123 later, still no go. He's been in my office now about 10 times looking at his laptop and seeing how it is coming. I feign casual indifference but inside I'm freaking out.
Four hours later thanks to the hacker community, bit torrent and my helpdesk guy we've procured a hack to wipe the password from the laptop. I'm back in! Whew. Then I start with an older Adobe CS3 package which is not Windows 7 compatible. 8 hours later and with the help of the Experts Exchange (which I contribute to and have achieved Master status on ) I've finally beat that program into submission.
Total cost = 12 hours of labor,
25 new grey hairs,
1 sleepless night
and happy Senior VP
- Priceless.
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