75ZT Community

I work for the MoD. I'm a Head of Department in an engineering college. I am NOT a secret agent.

This morning I was asked to generate a username and password for yet another page on the infernal MoD intranet.

As a matter of interest, I counted up how many different passwords I need to use when at work... 18.

Is it just me or does that seem faintly ridiculous?

Not really. I have at least 31 highly complex ones in my Keychain and several more for sites where I use a simple password.

But this is all for just the Mod intranet Mick.

That is overkill, I agree. One 31 character PW and a Secret Squirrel username should be all that is required for overall access.

Now I have a grand total of 19... but... it gets better.

I have been trying to login to the latest one for almost 2 hours because the task required is said to be quite urgent.

However, it keeps refusing to accept my password and of course, gives no indication as to what the problem is. I've spoken to their helpdesk and they are as much use as a fart in a colander.

I have just spoken to a colleague who has no hair left so is immune to the urge to pull it out and he has given me the secret information.

Now, most people tend to use the TAB key to go from field to field... except that this password checker is setup to accept TAB as a valid password character and of course you can't see what you type, only a row of asterisks so everytime I've tried to login, it has added a TAB character to my password, making it invalid.

That is nearly 2 hours of my time which could be far more usefully employed.

I detect the hand of Sir Humphrey Appleby in this

Oh, and when I eventually got logged in, the "urgent" requirement has been cancelled.

Congratulations Paul, you have passed that initiative test.

PaulT wrote:Congratulations Paul, you have passed that initiative test.

Unfortunately, I imagine a lot of people in the MoD have had the same issues today I wonder how much public money, in terms of salary, has been wasted by this crass stupidity?