Overnight problems

Last night's principal dream concerned the setting of the passwords which gave me access to the corporate computer system, with the dream being agnostic as regards which corporation we were talking about.

The first setting was a rather messy open plan office, the sort of office where people have to scramble to get a bit of clear desk space amid piles of papers, files, paper clips, sandwiches, dirty plates and (paper) cups of coffee (or tea). But it did run to IT support, there to help you with things like passwords.

The second setting was a similarly messy small car, but not so small that it did not have four doors. Parked in a multi-storey car park.

The only other people in this dream that are now available to me are various rather shadowy beings from IT support.

The problem revolved about a confusion about the purpose of passwords. Some of the time it was the ordinary sort of password which one plucks out of the void and passes onto to the computer for future use. But some of the time the password was a function of oneself. So the first letter gave one's place of residence, the second letter gave one's height, the third letter gave one's size in boots and so on and so forth. But one still had to agree with the computer what that password was. And, somehow the computer was able to check all this stuff out and complain if, for example, you put in the wrong size in boots. Worse still, there were options: one password for the days when I wore a regular shirt and another password for the days when I wore a dress shirt. At least they were both white.

Between us, IT support and I managed to fill up several messy pages of a school exercise book with pencil notes about all this. Without resolving the matter to the point where I could log in.

At some point the problem moved to the car and at some point after that I woke up.

PS: I associate now to some EU guidance which I came across once about the use of identifiers in computers which says that it is bad practise for object identifiers to carry any other information, to serve any other purpose than identification. So to all intents and purposes one's tax reference number should be random and one should not attempt to include age, sex or anything else in it. Guidance which is, no doubt, about to be struck down.

Reference 1: http://blog.thinkingschoolsethiopia.com/. With thanks for the use of their picture, rather tidier than that in my dream, turned up by Bing. 'The vision of Thinking Schools Ethiopia is for all Ethiopian children to have an opportunity for access to high quality education led by trained and certified Ethiopian educators that becomes a multi-directional model of education nationally and internationally'. An interesting website, if a little slow.