Thought for the day - technology and I are not friends

 The last few days I have wrestling with technology and have definitely gotten my butt kicked by it.  I admit that I am an old fashioned guy, so I get very frustrated when I don't understand how things work.  It has been very tempting for me to throw in the towel on some goals because of it.  But, I have to stay focused and use this as a learning opportunity because technology is ever changing and will not be going away any time soon.  

Going back to school, albeit online, I have seen how things have changed so much over the last 5 years.  UNCG uses Microsoft for many of their programs.  Now, they have to authenticate you to make sure that you are who you say you are.  I get that.  Cyber security.  And I guess it would be pointless if it was easy to prove I am who I am, otherwise what's the point in doing it?  UNCG gave me a temporary password that I had to update.  The new password had to be at least 14 characters, including upper and lower case, numbers and special characters.  I tried for 4 days to update this password.  99 percent of them were rejected as being too common.  I'm like how is that possible?  I just made it up.  Are there that many warped brains like mine out there to come up with these?  Finally, yesterday, one was accepted. Thank goodness I wrote it down somewhere.  

But, no, the fun doesn't end there.  Now I have this authentication app on my phone that I literally have no idea or use for, and it's making me prove who I am in two more different ways.  Email and text.  Then it locks me out.  When I try to open it, it asks for biometrics or a pin.  I never set up a pin or was given a pin and I sure as hell haven't done any biometrics on my phone.  Geez!  So, now I have this app that I'm supposed to use but I cannot get into.  I was able to log onto UNCG on the computer, but of course it wanted to prove who I was through the app.  That didn't happen, so I had to get texted a code to log in.  Is it going to be like this every single time I have to log in?  Studying online means that's going to be a lot.

All I can say right now is that UNCG's IT department is going to hate me over the next year.

That is all.