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My work password was scheduled to run out Saturday.

All week when I logged into the company VPN it came up with a window asking “Don’t you want to change it now?” Enter a new one here: with boxes for old, new and confirmed new passwords.

After ignoring it for a week, today I went ahead and changed it. I wrote down the new one to be sure as I entered it.

Then, almost everything stopped working.

If I didn’t have it running when I changed the password, I couldn’t start it. And, about half of what I did have running stopped.

I started about 5:45 this morning. IT doesn’t start until 8…

And, apparently when I called at 8, the receptionist had a good laugh that I thought they’d actually be there by then.

When I finally did get through, it turns out that if you use that dialog box that comes up on the company VPN with the company logo and all the appropriate information, it changes your password, but doesn’t actually inform the network about it.

So, the prompt the company network sends you doesn’t work on the company network.

“Yeah, it’s pretty misleading,” the IT person told me. “Everyone makes that mistake and gets locked out.”
“Why don’t you fix it?”
“I told people they should, but they won’t.”

So, a trap. I guess the IT department is looking for more folks. Maybe they’ll be less inclined to trap users into getting their passwords messed up.

What amazes me is that they have time to send people fake phishing emails to see if anyone will wrongly click on them, but don’t have the time to fix a company program pop up that if you follow will lock you out of your computer.