Adventures in Technology

I finally caved in and got a new phone last week.

It’s been a while. My old phone had reached the “We’ll give you fourteen dollars and a Happy Meal for it” stage of trade-in value, there were things that were getting harder to update, and I really wanted a better camera than the one I had. It had lasted a good long while. It was time.

So I went to the Apple Store with Lauren, and we found a new one that did what I wanted it to do. I mostly deferred to her judgment on specs and such, since she is much better at technology than I am, but I got the camera I wanted and I was assured that it would mostly look and work like the previous phone only faster and with fewer random seizures. They even managed to port over my phone number into the new phone so I didn’t have to spend half a day trying to do that with the cell phone carrier.

Win.

But if you know anything at all about how this process works, you know that this was only the beginning of my odyssey. Because everything on the new phone had to be logged into again, even if I had no idea what the passwords were anymore.

Fortunately I have this all written down in a Secure Place, one that it turns out was nowhere near the Apple Store so I had to wait until I got home to do this. It was a very Secure Place indeed, but eventually I found it and got most of the things restarted.

And then I tried to do work and failed.

Because it is a sad fact of modern academia that we can’t do our jobs without our personal cell phones that the university is not actually paying for – a fact that sticks in my head for some reason. This, of course, refers to the various MFA apps that we are required to put on these personal cell phones that the university is not paying actually paying for, apps we need to get into any of the various programs that we need to use on a daily basis.

MFA, for those of you who are fortunate enough not to have to do this kabuki dance, does not stand for Motherfucking Apps, as you would think. No, it stands for Multi-Factor Authorization, a cumbersome process by which corporations, universities, and organizations of all types hope to achieve perfect digital security by making it sufficiently difficult to log in to anything that eventually nobody will bother to try and then they can just turn the computers off entirely and encase them in green-tinted glass for future generations to marvel at.

I have three of these MFA apps, because nobody can agree on which one of these things to use.

For one campus, I have DUO, which does have the benefit of working most of the time. I go to log in, it pings my phone, there is a short pause while my phone decides whether to tell me that it has been pinged or not (sometimes requiring me to close and then restart the DUO app just to remind it that it needs to be looking for something, and sometimes requiring me to start over from scratch), and then once the Yes or No buttons appear I tell my phone yes, it is I – taDAAAH! – trying to do my job, and then it lets me in. Sometimes I will get a survey later asking how much I enjoyed this experience and it will be all I can do not to respond. I am not making that up.

For another campus, I have something called Okta, which as near as I can tell is mostly just DUO in a trench coat, though for some reason it has the “Yes it’s me” button and the “No, that’s someone else” button on the opposite sides of the screen as the ones in DUO and this has on occasion caused low comedy. Every time I log in to something that the app regards as new, such as a new phone, a new browser, a browser that has been closed and reopened, a computer that has been restarted, or a computer that just has a certain je ne sais quoi about it, I get an email announcing this fact. Okta is now the third largest sender of email in the United States, behind car warranty spammers and Ancestry DNA updates.

For yet another campus I have Microsoft Authenticator, which requires no fewer than three log ins to function under the best of circumstances (again, I am not making that up) and which has a success rate only slightly higher than throwing liverwurst at the computer while uttering prayers to forgotten Mesopotamian gods. No idea which gods. Can’t remember.

Only one of these apps actually managed to migrate over to my new phone without further attention while at the Apple Store. This meant that I only had to spend the better part of the next morning on the phone with two different IT departments rather than three, trying to convince them that I needed to get restarted on these MFA things (in the Samuel L. Jackson sense of the term) and that indeed I had the authorization to do so, which is hard to prove since you need the apps to do that. Eventually they sent me QR codes for my phone to scan, mostly I suspect to get me to go away, and then I was back in business.

There are still a few things I need to resolve with the phone and I'm trying to figure out the camera, but for the most part I’ve managed to get myself back almost to where I was before I upgraded, and that pretty much sums up my entire relationship with technology really.