The tech team at work is at it again.

In the past the majority of us used the same login ID and password to access the work system. Any preferences were saved at the individual computer, so if you switched seats you had to change everything to get it back how you wanted it, but that only happened about two times a year on average, so no big deal.

So the systems people decided to try something new. Now everyone has their own user ID and password. Sounds good, but they didn't bother to create any system to save preferences. The result? Every time you log back on, it's like someone used a restore disk on your computer. Any web locations you had visited? Gone. Any changes to the bookmarks (because there's about 200 of them, so I always put the ones I use at the top of the list)? Gone. Any passwords you saved? Gone. Every day when you log in every program's window size is back at the Microsoft default. Every day when you log in you get the same endless warnings about remembering passwords (which is useless because they'll be gone the next day anyway) and Autocomplete options. Naturally this slows down the work greatly, because you can't make anything convenient for yourself. I fail to see how this is supposed to aid the people actually use the computers to do work. Everyone is complaining about it, because it's utterly counterproductive and hurts efficiency.

One login for everyone, everyone could have personalized system settings. Everyone has personalized logins, one system setting for everyone. Am I the only one who thinks that's completely backward?

Because I'm always ranting about work, let me say something nice about it for once, in the interests of fairness. We've been granted the right to bring personal CD players to work and listen to music when we're not on the phones. We can listen to any crazy thing we want when we're Working email or paper mail, as long as it's not so loud as to disturb other people. It's something we've wanted for a while, and it's far preferable to the radio we used to have, which required everyone to listen to the same music and caused so much trouble they took that one away from us (but really, some people at work love god-awful stations; one of them is a car radio station, not intended to be listened to for any length of time, unless you're the sort of person who can stand listening to Jewel's "Intuition" and Eminem's version of "Dream On" and other such songs as many as six times each in a single eight hour shift). Back then I brought a headset to work and was told in just the second hour of use that it was unacceptable, because headphones are a distraction, isolating you from your surroundings and making it impossible to hear what's going on around you, especially the fire alarm, if it came to that. That was the official explanation, anyway, which conveniently overlooked the fact that the building is a call center and most people spend all day with headphones on. In any case, we're allowed to have them now, so kudos to those at work who finally worked this out and decided it was okay. And if we're quieter than normal, it's because we're not busy talking to each other anymore.