Treasury Fail--self sighting

[Sapphire Silk]

I made myself sound a lot like a sucky customer today, though I wasn't actually sucky to the folks on the other end of the phone, just terribly disorganized.

I have an account with Treasury Direct that I use to buy government bonds. I hadn't logged on in quite awhile, but needed to do so as I closed the checking account I was using to deposit money and get my interest payments sent to a different account.

There's lots of security layers to logging. For starters, you don't use a user name but your account number.

Fail Number One!

I couldn't remember my account number. I looked around for my documentation from the Treasury and found the security card I have to use as part of the login process (contains a grid, you're asked for random characters off the grid with each login, and there are different cards with different serial numbers). No account number.

So I call support. The customer service rep gets me to confirm all my personal information, including the serial number on my login card, then answer 3 security questions, one of which was What was the first car I owned.

Me: Car A.
CS: That's incorrect, ma'am.
Me: *puzzled . . . that was the first car I drove! * Oh, the first car I owned. That would be Car C. *as I get this image in my head of Gravekeeper doing the *

So I get the account number and hang up. Go to log back in.

Can't remember my password.

Fail Number 2!

I have to call back less than 2 minutes later and go through the whole spiel again to get support to reset my password.

Yeah, I'm an idiot

[Beki710]

I wouldn't worry, pretty much every time I've called up for my business account (which is only a total of about 3 times) I've had to go through the whole spiel of resetting various bits of it because I can never find where I've written it down.
I don't think you were sucky at all!

[Primer]

As a member of faculty, I have access to the school's computer database and can look up students' records. HOWEVER, the password has to be changed every 90 days, and can never be re-used. I have been there since 1984. Can anybody guess how many passwords I've used? Now, can anybody guess how many passwords I can remember while they are still current?? Every semester, I end up emailing the help desk and abjectly apologizing about needing my password reset yet AGAIN. I think they are beginning to lay odds on how long into the semester we can get before I do send them that email!

[Ironclad Alibi]

Can anybody guess how many passwords I've used?

Something in the neighborhood of 112 passwords, if each one had to be different for the entire time. Unless you had an ant farm, I'm guessing you didn't use your pets' names.

[Andara Bledin]

The processing firm we use to run our credit cards requires passwords to be reset every 30 days (normally - they somehow set one of the two to not require a reset at all... for 7 months and counting so far). It has to have mixed case, at least one numeral, and at least one special character.

Since it gets reset every single month, I use a password that combines a code with letters to represent the month, with both cases present, numbers to represent the year, and at least one special character thrown into the mix as well.

If I had to reset it every 3 months, I'd change the month code designation to represent which quarter or which season it was, instead.

^-.-^