Everybody craves security but security can be a fickle mistress, sometimes abruptly changing loyalty.
It is supposed to keep criminals from entering your castle, but it occasionally seems to change its mind and prevents you (the owner) from having access to your goods.
It feels like Jeeves refusing you entry to your own estate.
You naturally want to protect your belongings, so you put everything valuable under locked key.
But what if you lose the key to your vault? How are you going to retrieve your valuables? Who is going to help you?
This is the $64,000 question.
Yesterday I installed Windows 10 on a desktop computer running Windows 7.
It was a rather lengthy process and It took me about two hours to complete the operation. Let me point out that it was not a “clean install” but an upgrade.
Everything went tediously well, and after repeated messages like “This won’t take long”, “Taking care of a few things”, “Just a few more tweaks”, the Window 10 interface finally appeared on the screen.
Kookaburra! Good golly, miss Molly!
I experimented with the interface for a little while, especially with Cortana (Microsoft’s answer to Siri) and I then turned the machine off and rebooted it it to make sure that everything worked properly.
The computer burped and sneezed and finally asked for an “ausweis” (password), and that’s when everything came to an abrupt halt.
The cyber doorman rejected every password that I offered. And the following message appeared tauntingly each time:
“You can’t sign in you account right now. Go to account.live.com to fix the problem or try the last password you used on this PC.”
No matter what was entered, the Cerberus would not accept anything.
It is comforting and at the same time extremely annoying.
Comforting because it shows that the system is very picky about who can have access to you data, and annoying because it is basically protecting you from yourself.
Prove to me that you are who you pretend to be, it says.
I suspect that the mix-up occurred while I initially entered the required password.
The problem could have had something to do with the computer’s keyboard.
Any decent keyboard should have a visual indicator signaling that the “caps lock” key is activated or not, and this keyboard didn’t have this feature.
When you enter a password into a system, the machine often doesn’t show the actual letters being entered, but black dots. So you are never sure that what you entered is correct.
Since a decent password is supposed to have a mix of lowercase and uppercase characters, it could be a problem.
And it turned out to be a problem. A real pain in the wazoo.
Taking care of a computer that refuses access to its operating system can be a daunting task.
It is a never ending Catch 22.
In desperation I finally called Microsoft support. The last thing that I wanted to do!
After being transferred from department to department, I was finally put in touch with an Eastern gentleman.
Let me say right away that I love Bollywood movies and that I harbor no ill will towards Indian gentleman; but when it comes to technical support I would definitely prefer talking to somebody who speaks the King’s English.
After a few minutes of a difficult to decipher conversation, I regretfully had to end our technical powwow.
Strangely enough, as a foreign-born person I find it always difficult to understand foreign accents.
Then trying to retrieve the password online also proved very frustrating.
After different unsuccessful attempts I was told to cool my jets and not to bother Microsoft for at least 24 hours.
The computer is now mockingly inoperative. It knows that I know that everything is working properly, but it refuses to do anything until given proper identification.
It is aware that I am not a hacker, but it still declines to let me inside the club.
But I have not said my last word… I have lost a battle but I have not lost the war… yet.
Alain
To be continued…
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