I was coming to the conclusion people didn’t read things.
We’ve changed things on the PCs at work recently. These are student PCs, and as such they tend to be geared up for people who want to just work. Being a Netware kinda place, logins can get a little cryptic, what with contexts and all. So we enabled contextless logins, so you can just bung in your userID and password and off you go.
I found a neat little hack for Windows so you can put a wallpaper on the windows login screen – inspiration hit me, that I could add some text to the wallpaper giving instructions on how to login. I even included a little example username and password. Unfortunately, I’d gotten the example, and the instructions wrong. Student passwords are based on their DOB – pretty standard practice. I’d gotten the form of the DOB wrong on the wallpaper. Not a problem you’d think – no sod reads these things anyway, so hardly anybody will notice.
Nope. Not this time.
It seemed EVERY student who walked in to use the computers at that point tried putting their passwords in as per the incorrect instructions. On the one hand it made me pleased people were actually reading it, and doing what it said (because as we know, NOBODY ever RTFMs), but on the other hand, it was causing a nightmare as nobody could log in. I wouldn’t mind so much, but this isn’t the first time I’d done it and gotten the login wallpaper wrong.
I think I need a holiday.