The magical num pad

This is a more of a confession.

As the person in charge of the company's email accounts and a few other software, I often get calls about lost passwords and other login issues. One time a store supervisor reported that her password wasn't working. Since this was a recently installed workstation that I hadn't put my hands on, it didn't have remote access enabled, so I had to physically go.

Once there, I asked the woman to try to login, so I could see if there was an error message or anything I could use to diagnose the problem. Now, most of the people here absolutely cannot be trusted with a secure password, so they just have their name plus a string of numbers as the password. It's not like they deal with sensitive data, so this isn't a big issue anyway. When she typed the password I immediately noticed that 1) she wasn't looking at the screen, 2) as she typed, the number string wasn't captured, and 3) she was using the numeric pad for the numbers, which was disabled. But I didn't tell her, oh no. Instead, I made a few flashy "magical" hand gestures, finishing with me pressing the num lock key and then I asked her to try again.

She was astonished when it worked.

Many people here seem to think IT people are some kind of wizards, and that our mere presence fixes problems, so I decided to play the part for once. I enabled remote access and left, without telling her the secret.