This Should Not Be This hard

There are some days where I look at myself and am appalled by my own laziness. Granted, there aren't many of these days but every once in a great while I just hit a wall and I feel like if I have to exert one more iota of effort I'm going to just wither up and die.

I had a moment like this yesterday.

I was trying to login to one of the Accounting programs we use here at work so that I could run a report for my boss. When I typed in my password I got a pop-up box informing me that my current password will expire in 15 days and would I like to change it now? Sure. Why not? So I clicked on the Change Password link which lead me to a screen where I had to type in my old password, a new password, and then a confirmation of the new password. Standard stuff. This should not be hard.

(As an aside, I have a real problem with password setup boxes that don't explicitly list the restrictions on the password; don't make my try to guess the exact number/letter/symbol combination you want. Good grief! Just tell me what it needs to be)! This was one of those boxes. I swear I tried no fewer than half a dozen new passwords and every single time I got a different error message. My password must be longer than 7 characters. It must contain at least one capital letter. It cannot exceed 9 characters. It must contain at least one number. It must contain at least one non-numeric symbol. It cannot be a real word. Blah, blah, blah. See, if I had known these were all the restrictions I could have easily enough started out with a password that matched. But no. Whatever genius decided to write this program apparently didn't have the foresight to include any actual instructions so instead, I just got to blindly type in combinations of stuff and hope to get a match.

So here's where I got lazy. After trying all these different password combinations with no success I just gave up. I sat fuming, looking at my computer screen and I just couldn't muster the mental energy to to to come up with another password right then. Couldn't do it. So I just stopped. I told myself its all cool cause I still have 14 more days to think of something.

Yes, today my computer won.