You know the old joke about getting someone to pack up their computer and take it back to the shop?

 I am in the unfortunate position of having tom deal directly with our staff, it's something I have written about here before.  This is last weeks most outstanding call.  Sometimes it is difficult to maintain politeness when dealing with these people.

So a a call landed on my to do list where a guy said he could not log on. He was being asked for a pin number that he had never set up.   I checked his Windows account, and he hadn't yet messed up his password enough times to lock himself out, nor had his password expired, so I called him and then connected remotely to his computer.

From the very wordy and irate tirade he cam off with it was very difficult to understand, or even get him to demonstrate the problem, but since he was logged onto Windows properly it obviously wasn't what I had first thought of from his emailed description.  He had the error showing on screen and kept referring to it, even after I asked him to close the screen and start logging onto whatever system it was from scratch.  Eventually the message got through

Now, the system is a pretty big one, so is hosted on its own server, so what he was actually doing was trying to open a remote connection onto that server.  This would require his windows credentials, which he obviously knew because he was already logged onto Windows.

After he eventually closed the failed remote connection to the server, I got him to try to log on again.  The pin was not the first choice of logon criteria, he was actually asked to enter a password, which he rattled in very quickly.  Only when this password failed was he asked to enter a pin.  He hadn't mentioned this small fact.  The password seemed too short to me but because he had entered it so quickly, I could not be certain that I had seen it correctly, so after telling him that it was his Windows password that he needed to use, I got him to try the logon process again, and asked him to type slowly and not to hit enter when he finished typing.  Of course, he typed quickly, and hit enter, but it was obvious that the password he was using was too short.

Asking him how many characters were in his password confirmed this, so I tried to describe to him the minimum criteria that our organisation uses.  He consistently denied that this was the case for him, and also insisted that this short password always worked up to this point, and that it was the password he used to log onto Windows.  He would not believe that he did not have some sort of special privilege to be exempt from our organisations security criteria.  This guy was not endearing himself to me!

I asked him if he also had a longer password for Windows, and he agreed that he did, but swore that he never had to use it.  Since I could not get him to believe that only one password was possible, and that it would have to be the longer one, there seemed to be only one thing that would convince him of his error, and by this time the call was getting to be a long and very annoying interaction, especially for such an obvious fault.  So I got him to log out of  Windows.

Funnily enough when he tried to log back in, the short password did not work here either, yet he swore that he had used it to log on that morning.  It took some persuasion to get him to try his longer password, and surprise, surprise; it worked first time.  So we did the same thing with the server connection.  Again the short password did not work, yet the long one did.  Personally, I thought this was pretty convincing evidence that he should always be using the long password.  He still disagreed!!!

Eventually I left him to it, but told him always to use the long password.  There was no point in wasting more time on this.  We log these calls on a CRM system, and the customer gets a copy, so all that was on this call was a note that the customer was using the wrong password.

Guess what?  I received an email from him shortly after logging the call, still insisting that his short password was the correct one!!!!!

There are some people out there that are beyond help.