End of this year is upon us and as a result, I’m extremely busy. Not because I have to build or upgrade servers or migrate or do an OS or software install or upgrade or anything of that sort because there has been a freeze in such activities since the end of last month. The upper management puts this kind of freeze at the end of each year because they don’t want any kind of hiccups resulting from such activities so that the year end business closing goes as smooth as possible.

Then why am I extremely busy, you might ask? Well, because people procrastinate and put off work as long as possible. For some reason, people in this company seem to only work at the end of each month. And then more people only work at the end of each year. But even so, I wouldn’t be busy if people would REMEMBER their passwords, which they need to their work! I’m busy because people request their passwords to be reset. The requests come in droves at the end of each month, quarter and year.

What I don’t understand is this. We are not talking about some password for some internet social networking site or private email or googles or yahoos or game or gambling site or any other PERSONAL sites. What we are talking about are the passwords they have to use TO DO THEIR WORK! How can you keep forgetting this password? I’m telling you, out of several thousand users on this particular system, and some people forget their passwords so often, I even remember their names. And what does it say about how much work they do throughout the month or quarter or year?

Another thing that cooks my grits? They all want it as soon as possible. It’s very urgent. It’s high priority. It’s an emergency even. YOU forgetting the password that you need for you to do your work that you get paid to do is NEVER an emergency or high priority or urgent. WE (we as in IT people at work) don’t really care if one person –YOU– doesn’t get high performance marks  because the said person –again YOU– has forgotten the password to do the work. A request for the password reset is automatically assigned the lowest priority by the system. There is no use crying or keep sending emails or calling or yelling because you haven’t received the new password in shockingly long 15 minutes of you requesting it – I might not even see the request within a few hours because if it’s some real emergency or high priority or an urgent matter, the ticketing system would have automatically paged us, and believe me, a password reset request never gets that privilege.

I don’t care how many passwords you have to remember because most people don’t have to remember more passwords than a system administrator of about 100 servers, the root passwords of which need to be changed every few months. The password is needed to do you job. Remembering it is part of your job. Please make an effort.