Tuesday, November 15, 2005

I just got voted off the island...

...or Freaky Things That Happen Courtesy Of IT Systems.

I work as a computer programmer for a large finance company. So as you can imagine, our PC’s, and the various systems we use, have many many layers of security.

Today I was happily working away, doing a little sneaky surfing on the side (as you do), when suddenly, during a surfing moment, up pops a message in my IE screen to the effect that my account has been locked out. 'Oh hell' thinks I, the IT snoopy police have finally caught me.

So I gave up on hopes of any more surfing today and settled into an afternoon of nothing but work. I mean I ask you, who does that these days, sheesh. I thought I’d give it until tomorrow, see how things were in the morning and if I was still locked out, then I’d give the help*coff*desk a call and get it sorted out. You see I do actually need net access to do my job some of the time.

Anyway, about 10 minutes later I was trying to access some documentation on one of our many LANs when up pops another message about me not having access to that LAN and a possible security breach having occurred. Now this fired off a warning in my office befuddled brain. I have to have access to that particular LAN, all the departmental documentation resides therein, and I know I had access to it not an hour ago. Hmmm.

So in the traditional manner of the very jaded PC user I went for the 'kick it a couple of times and see if that fixes it' option of rebooting, before attempting to get any help from the help*coff*desk.

Well, next I get a message saying that my machine is unable to save my roaming profile, and then another security breach popup, before the machine finally reboots.

Of course when I went to log back in, I was told that my account was locked out. Yeesh, can’t a girl even pretend to work these days.

Finally I got my account unlocked and logged back in to discover…. everything working perfectly, even my internet access.

But I still haven’t got a clue what happened, so SNAFU *grin*