My 2FA activation codes are being emailed to another dimension… and texted to a monk
This week’s column remains valid for the next 10 minutes only
What do you mean, you don’t know me? Don’t say it’s true!
Zoom’s login is acting the pendejo again. Even though we hitch up every day, and often spend half the night together too, Zoom rolls out of bed the following morning and has already forgotten my name. To think that I believed we had a sharing relationship – at least when it comes to screens. But now it’s as if...
…
(Hang on, I’m on mute, I’ll try again)
I said: “It’s as if it doesn’t listen to me.”
It’s Zoom’s latest wheeze to annoy me, personally, for reasons known only to its own code. Previously it used to get its kicks by insisting on installing an update every at every launch, always right before a meeting, denying me the choice to skip. The download would, of course, fail to complete, instead freezing and refusing to budge any further, requiring a force-quit and relaunch, in the hope that it might try harder the second time round. Or third. Or fourth.
Perhaps the programmers of this little Fodmu-Fal routine (Fall Over During Mandatory Update – For A Laugh) got bored with the joke and invented a new one to take its place. This is the one that prompts me to enter my sign-in credentials – an ultra-secure one my predecessor set up with a ‘burner’ email address and a 24-character password – then retorts “Pff, not good enough”.
What I get is a message on-screen that tells me:
It appears you have not connected from this computer in a while.
Screaming “Yes I have, you screaming tit! I was on Zoom just an hour ago” does not seem to solve the problem, as it turns out. But worse is to come. The next thing it says is:
We have sent an activation code to your registered email address.
Great, I’m supposed to be hosting a meeting on behalf of my client’s organisation in about [demonstratively looks at watch instead of the much more convenient corner of the computer display in front of me] … aargh, 10 minutes! Now I have to wait for a stupid email containing six stupid numbers to be sent to a stupid email address that had been set up exclusively for this stupid Zoom login.
¡Qué pendejo!
Oh well, there’s nothing else for it. I open Yahoo (don’t laugh) in a browser tab. I click on the ‘Mail’ icon at the top right and am prompted to sign in with my client’s details. I enter my Yahoo username and password.
It appears you have not connected from this computer in a while.
Now, that is true. This is because (1) the Yahoo account in question was only set up for a Zoom login, and (2) nobody connects to Yahoo very often, do they?
We have sent an activation code to your registered email address.
Er, OK, I guess that makes sense. The organisation had advised me there were two email addresses I could use for their Zoom account. Maybe the activation code got sent to the other. All I have to do is find the original email they sent me with the usernames and passwords. Hmm… found it! Righty, let’s sign in to the alternative Yahoo account.
It appears you have not connected from this computer in a while.
No, indeed I haven’t but…
We have sent an activation code to your registered email address.
How likely do you think it is that the organisation used both email addresses to activate each other? Yup, very likely. And now I appear to be locked out of both. A closed loop. This is not going to work.
I notice a link that indicates I can send the activation code via SMS. Brilliant! I click on it.
We have sent an activation code to your mobile phone.
Have you? You didn’t ask me what my number was. Oh, right, it’s been sent to a pre-registered phone. The full number is not revealed but I can read the last four digits. It’s not a sequence that I recognise. [Looks at watch] Six minutes.
I buzz a WhatsApp to my contact at the organisation in question. It’s nearly 7.30pm in their time zone but what choice do I have? I ask if she knows who might have a mobile number ending with those four numbers. She replies almost immediately in the affirmative.
This is fantastic: I love it when people remain online and close to their handsets 24 hours a day. It really helps keep things moving. Not like those selfish types who switch to ‘monk mode’ when their working day is over while the rest of us slave on.
‘Monk mode’, in case you have not encountered the expression during your frequent visits to that infantile well of hormonal retardedness, TikTok, means disconnecting your phone and not responding to notifications. The mode got its name from the idea of “thinking like a monk”. One assumes this refers to focused yogic concentration as practised by adherents to Buddhism, rather than a medieval slap-head wanking in his monastery cell while fantasising about noviciates assigned to the kitchen garden blowing mud off freshly dug turnips.
My contact tells me the number belongs to one of her predecessors who has since retired. No, she will not give him a call. Instead, she gives me his complete mobile number, and his home number just in case, and tells me to hurry up as my meeting begins in five minutes.
I call the mobile number but it goes straight to voicemail. I call the landline it is answered after nine rings. “Hello, you don’t know me,” I rasp, explaining the reason for my call in one rapid, garbled sentence. “Have you received an SMS this evening?”
“Oh right,” he says to me. “Let me just switch it on.”
Monk mode, I knew it. [I glance at my watch] Four minutes. What’s his problem? He’s retired, right? Surely he has plenty of time to accept messages now that he does bugger all with his life. You’d think he’d welcome the occasional notification, just to liven up all that doing nothing.
“Ah let’s see… Hmm, it’s asking if I want to install an update. Should I press OK?”
“Nooooooo!” I scream back involuntarily, loudly enough to surprise myself as well as him. Then I hear two years of accumulating undelivered notifications finally reaching his handset in an orgasmic release of beeps and dings.
He finds the SMS and reads me the six-number activation code therein. I splutter a “thanksverymuchgoodbye”, hang up and type in the code on-screen.
Did it work? Of course not. The code was only valid for five minutes and it has timed out. That means – aargh, I’m supposed to be in the meeting already and letting people in from the waiting room!
I ring JR Hartley back and ask if it would be OK if I get another SMS sent to his phone. He agrees and I duly click the link to resend the code. We wait…
After a minute of waiting, I enquire whether the message has arrived. “Oh right, I’ll just switch it back on, then” he says. Monk? This guy’s in Pope Mode. Another minute passes while his phone boots back up. “Can I hear birds twittering?” he asks but it’s actually just me muttering shitshitshitshitshit while glancing at my watch every few seconds just to make sure it’s still there.
Ding! It’s arrived! He tells me the number! I type it in! It works! Hurrah!
This, however, has only got me into the backup Yahoo email. I’ll need to find the emailed activation code from earlier and…
Of course, the email containing the code notes that it is only valid for 10 minutes. I look at my watch: that ship has long since sailed, and so has my meeting start time. I will need a new code. This requires me to sign out of the second Yahoo account and try to sign back in with the first one, thereby forcing a new code to be sent, then sign out of the first account and sign in yet again with the second account to pick up the email.
Except it does not arrive straight away. Or even after a short wait. Or indeed at all.
Drastic measures are required. I fire up an alternative web browser so that I can sign in to both Yahoo accounts simultaneously, then click on the ‘Activation code not received? Send it again’ button in one app and wait for it to arrive in the other.
This does not arrive either. So I click repeatedly on the ‘Send it again’ button like I’m playing Galaxians while trying to WhatsApp the meeting group from my phone to apologise for “running a little late” [minus four minutes at this point]. I may have clicked a little too wildly as The Monk unexpectedly rings me up to say he has just received another SMS, this time telling him that someone has requested an activation code and asking whether he would like it.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” I yell. “Give it to me, baby!” He duly replies YES to the message and we wait a minute for the code to turn up. Ding! He tells me a new message has turned up and reads it out aloud.
It says that his activation code has been sent to him via email.
I launch Zoom again on the offchance and hammer away at its ‘Code not sent? Send another’ link a million times just for good measure: you never know. Half an hour later, still without luck, I message the meeting group that the meeting has been postponed indefinitely, then spend the evening doing other stuff. Ah well. I can try to sort it out tomorrow, perhaps.
I am awoken at 2AM by a slight vibration in my smartwatch. Followed by another, and another. Buzzt buzzt buzzt… and so it continues without stopping as I raise my wrist to my face to see notification after notification arrive on the little screen. So I haul out of bed, drag myself to the office and open my laptop. Hundreds of emails are dropping in containing activation codes.
It turns out that somebody sensible at my client’s had set up my email address as the Zoom backup, but possibly forgotten to tell me. And now the activation codes are tumbling in to my inbox, all at once, some from Zoom, some from Yahoo, having been sitting around doing fuck all for the last seven hours. And they all state they were sent at around 7.30pm the night before, and that they are all valid for 10 minutes only.
I quit my email, drag Zoom to the bin – and empty it – before shutting down my computer. I switch off my phone, unplug the cable from the router, bury my watch in the back garden (after a brief but moving ceremony) and flick all the switches on my fuse box to OFF.
I am now crosslegged on the floor of a darkened room and counting the seconds in my head until retirement.
Om.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He eventually worked out what the problem was: you have to agree to Zoom tracking your every keystroke, mouseclick and ballscratch via cookies. Still, it makes one almost wistful for the return of the wrathful God, Fodmu-Fal.
Are you allowed to search out people who are in "monk mode" and thwack them over the back with a wooden stick? (Something I actually experienced last year while visiting a temple in Kyushu. My phone was on silent at the time ...)
Great article. "we have emailed you a link"- Have you really? I'm sitting at my computer and nothing has arrived...