So I got into work today and was presented with the dreaded “You password will expire in 10 days. Do you want to change it now?”. So I said yes to get on with it, but surely this is a ridiculous security measure. How does this make my login more secure if you get me to change it all the time. I’m not going to take the time and effort to come up with a secure password and commit it to memory if every 6 weeks I’ve got to come up with a new one. All joking aside one of the team came back after Christmas and because they’d changed their password literally the day they left for holidays they couldn’t remember it. After nearly a day we got an administrator over from IT who reset the password for them. Nearly an entire contractor’s day wasted.

I’ve got a number of passwords stored in my head. I’ve got really really secure passwords with numbers, underscores and punctuation that I use for logging into my bank for example. They don’t ask me to change it every 6 weeks and if they did do you know what I’d probably do? I’d write it down. I need to get into my bank accounts and if I forgot the password and had to wait for them to reset the password, or got through the pain of a call to telephone banking it could be a serious problem (especially if I wanted to pay myself out of my business account). This is why banks DON’T make  you change your password all the time.

So dear IT bods at Auntie. Please stop making me change my password. I can’t be bothered coming up with a decent one anymore. D’ya know what I’ve done now? I’ve stuck with one password and each time you tell me to change it I add 1,2,3…etc. Probably not what you had in mind.