I have been working from home for something like eighteen months now. It's long past a novelty at this point; it's just how I get stuff done for work. Sure, I get to have my own snacks and do push ups without any funny looks, but at the end of the day, I'm trying to get work done.
Now, as it so happens, I have a work laptop that requires company-issued credentials in order to log in. This isn't super uncommon, so I don't really think much about it most of the time. However, if you have to renew those credentials, things start to get a little bit more interesting. I remember a long time ago, I used to have to get a new badge that was encoded with new credentials. It was very much a process where I had to rely on others in order to complete.
These days, there is a self-service portal that lets me go through the motions on my own. That's much better than the bad old days, but since I'm not working from the office lately, that means having to do this remotely. That's not bad in it of itself, but it does add a degree of risk to the whole process. If, for whatever reason, the remote process goes awry, then I will be at home without valid credentials to log in to my work laptop. Essentially, it has to work perfectly or else I will be locked out.
Want to guess what happened to me the other day?
Yup, I was unlucky enough to have something go awry. I'm still not entirely sure what happened, but I worked through the process one afternoon. It looked like it had completed, and I finished out my afternoon without problem. When I tried to log in to work the next morning, however, the laptop just would not accept my credentials. I tried a few different things, including just plain restarting the laptop, but nothing worked.
Well, we have a helpdesk that I can call, so I tried calling them. Nothing they suggested seemed to work, so their last resort was to try plugging directly into the router instead of using the WiFi. I'm not entirely sure I understand how that would solve this problem, but they mentioned that they'd seen it work in the past.
However, that meant that I had to dig up a cable to hard-wire into the router. I'm not sure I've needed one of those in a long time, so I actually had to rummage around to see if I could find one. Sadly, I came up empty. Either I was flustered and I didn't do a good job, or my memory had failed me and we didn't actually have an ethernet cable handy. In either case, I didn't have an ethernet cable handy, so that really only left me with one option: drive in to the office.
I can't remember the last time I actually did that, so it felt very much like a field trip. I mean, I was going to be there anyway and I was probably going to have to be there long enough to last until lunch, so the Mild Wife packed me a lunch. I can't remember the last time that happened. Usually we just sit down and have a meal. All in all, it was annoying, but I tried to make the most of it.
With the benefit of hindsight, the whole thing was amusing. I mean, what are the odds? Not only did I have to renew my credentials, but that process had to go bad, the usual troubleshooting had to fail, AND we had to be missing a cable. It was like the perfect storm of shenanigans.
Next time, we'll talk about my adventures on said excursion.
Comments
Post a Comment