Thursday, I made a bold move. I wrote my first personal e-mail at work, where computer policies are on the fairly strict side. But this was for an old college roommate who I had told about the blog earlier in the week so I wanted to send her the address so she could take a looksie.
As I clicked the send button in Gmail, a window popped up telling me there were problems connecting me to my local server. I entered my login and password a few times to no. I exited out of all my programs, logged off my computer and tried logging in again. I was informed that my login had been locked out and that I needed to call an administrator. Well, everyone's out east and the offices there have been closed an hour, so I call and leave a message.
Then I start to worry.
Did I get busted for a violation of computer policy? So I start to think of everything and anything they may have hated. There was the time I went to weather.com to see how ungodly hot it was going to get. The handful of times I checked my e-mail on Gmail. It didn't help that a co-worker had told me how at a previous employer, they revoked computer logins to notify employees that they were laid off. I was not a happy camper.
It didn't help that people kept asking me to do things and I had to explain that I was locked out and couldn't do it. What must they be thinking? On the upside, with a co-worker out on vacation, this was the first calm I had experienced all week. I coasted to the end of the day.
Thursday night, I consulted friends and family for reassurance. Everyone agreed that I shouldn't lose a wink of sleep over it and find out in the morning what happened. Oddly enough, that's what I did.
Friday morning, I started my computer and went to log in, hoping the problem had been resolved. It hadn't. I mustered my courage and dialed the computer help desk again. They had no record of me calling the day before, but they did fix the problem. Apparently when that window popped up during my Gmail session and I was trying to log in, well, the system recorded it as 3 failed attempts on my login and automatically locked the login as a precaution.
I am a happy camper again.
Except that I had to catch up on computer work.
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