Please Protect Your ID and Password

Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I recently enrolled myself in some con ed courses at the local university. The reasons are many but first and foremost it is important to make sure you know exactly how much you've forgotten at any given point in your life and at my age the list is longer than the great wall of China. In any event one of the courses I signed up for is a basic web design class. Now we all know the importance of protecting our identity and in keeping with those practices the university has gone to great length to have you pick separate id's for your e-mail, accounting and student access info. 

I thought, wow these folks are serious about this stuff, then I attended my first class. I sat in the class waiting on the professor and about 10 minutes after the class was scheduled to start the door bolts open and a young man walks to the front of the class. He states that Bob (I imagine the professor) is ill and won't be attending the class but he has been instructed to provide the user id's and passwords for each of the students in order to log onto the systems in the lab and complete homework assignments. He reaches into his knapsack, picks out an envelope and hands the stack to the front row student. "Please find your user id and password and pass them on." he says and begins to show us where the course syllabus is located on the web. An anonymous student from the back row asks "Are the user id's and passwords all the same?" "No" came the reply as if that was the stupidest question on the face of the earth. "They're each unique to your own account so please make sure you change your password" he says matter-of-factly. 

HUH? SAY WHAT!! I was astonished and not alone in my state of shock. So you now have about 50 students all rifling through the stack of id's and passwords in order to select there own singular account information. Isn't that sort of like a banker throwing everyones bank book in the air (I think I just dated myself) and telling people to identify which one is theirs. Better yet, how about the social security office dispensing the SSN cards that way. 

It turned out my info  wasn't among the lot so I was protected by omission but I can't wait for this leader in waiting to be put in charge of the IRS. I'll see you in line for the refunds on our tax returns.