I am a former IT Desktop drone…er…support worker… I used to swap towers for my local municipality back when Windows XP was being replaced with 7. I saw passwords on post-its attached to the monitor, mouse pad, and even under the keyboard or keyboard drawer (I had to get under desks to do the swap). Our policy was to remove those whenever we saw them and trash them in a different can across the building or a different one. They have a standard 90 day password cycle and most people couldn’t handle that. I would answer the phone often to 'unlock" their account after 3 attempts. My all time favorite when I would help an end user with software was when I would encounter someone’s “God Mode” icon for some of the registry hacks that used to float around. Everyone had Admin privileges (ironically), so it wasn’t really needed anyway.

Their primary server admins and IT folks in the main office were Top notch though. Never any downtime and the main security guy was very strong in making sure everything was adhered to. We, as desktop support didn’t have the master password to decrypt a laptop which was GPG protected and had to bring it to him if we had a user which locked themselves out. With great consternation, only a few machines would be allowed to XP and those were VLAN’d and isolated from the outside world.

The rest of the server admins handled everything with ease seemingly. The fun part was when they had a third party come in and do a security audit. No problems on the server side, but it wasn’t a success. They did the 'ol drop a flash drive randomly in different locations test. Knowing human nature, they knew someone would pick it up, plug it in and be baited with an excel file which looked like it had financials. Unbeknownst to the user, it sent a ping to their reporting server and the drive ID. Which was later reported back. They also did physical security penetration tests - walk in behind you type of thing. I remember seeing a group of guys non company ID badges try to follow me into the main IT office. I stopped them and asked who they were and what they wanted (this was a Govt building), and the look of confusion mixed with satisfaction from them that I stopped them was priceless. I let the head IT guy know who was at the door and left it up to them to unlock it for them.

I now work in a help desk position for a software company and miss those days of desktop support. But, I know for a fact that I.T. Guys an Gals don’t get enough recognition. They are the understated backbone of a company’s well-being especially when holidays and weekends are prime time for systems to fail and they are practically on call no matter what.