Changing My Password

Wednesday I was back at the continuation high school. And... Meh. The teacher was chaperoning a field trip whale watching. I had one student per class period. Yeah. Seriously. 

Alas, at the end of the day they had not seen any whales. They did see lots of dolphins, though. 

But I had one major thing I had to do on this day, and it had nothing to do with the students. 

Last summer, the district implemented a bunch of new security protocols. There were some breaches. Nothing bad has happened as of yet, but the IT people are concerned. So, two factor authorization became mandatory, and passwords now have to be at least 15 characters long and include a capital letter, one of the other special characters, a number, an incantation to summon the rain god, and the name of our first grade teacher. 

Well, maybe not quite all of those. 

And, of course, now passwords must be changed every three months. 

To change the password, one must use a district-issued device. Of course, as a sub, I do not have a district-issued device checked out to me. (I do get one when I'm on a long-term assignment.) And most teachers nowadays have laptops checked out to them that they don't leave in their classrooms for their subs to use. 

Some classrooms still have very old desktops. And some classrooms have newer desktops. So, knowing that it's been about three months since I changed my password, I was delighted to see a district-issued device that I could access in Mr. P's classroom. Which meant that this was the day that I could update my password so I don't have to worry about this again until May. 

I had a new password picked out and everything. 

Second period was my prep. As soon as my first period student left, I went about logging in and getting that password changed. 

And for the next hour... 

Because, yeah. I spent an hour on this ridiculousness. 

I mean, the actual changing of the password was pretty quick and painless. It was just in updating everything that uses that password that took for-ev-er. 

So, there's the login to the district computers. And my emails. (I have two with the district.) Then there was the login I'd used to login to the computer I was using, so every tab I had open suddenly didn't work. I have the district email on my phone, so that had to be updated. As well, I had to update my Wi-Fi access, as I can access the district Wi-Fi, but only via my username and password. 

And then the big problem. I had to re-login to Google on my phone, as that's what I'm using for my 2FA (because texting a code led to other issues), and that required 2FA, and... 

Like I said, an hour. 

And so, now I don't have to worry about this again. Until May. Sigh. 

All done. All clear. Until the next day when my computer wouldn't log in so I could take attendance, and I took way too long to find where to update the Wi-Fi password on that computer. Because of course there would be one more thing I hadn't quite updated. 

Whew. 

*My first grade teacher's name was Mr. Elm.