When you’re typing, spaces always matter.

So, what would you do if a student insisted that her school login worked perfectly fine on her phone but not on the computer, and upon further research, you see that she’s entering it incorrectly?

Would you immediately show her what she did wrong? Or would you let the whole thing play out a little longer?

In the following story, one university employee has no other choice but to let it all play out. Here’s what happened.

Spaces are not invisible magic.

I work at a university where I occasionally help students with their IT problems in our computer lab.

Usually, I get maybe a few visitors per month (we have approximately 600 students using these computers), and most of the problems are pretty straightforward and, indeed, not really user error.

But this one made me seriously reconsider my life choices.

Here’s how the conversation started.

Student: I can’t log in on my computer.

Me: Are your credentials working with any of the university’s web services?

Student: Yes, I can access these sites. (Shows me on her phone as proof)

Just for context: We use the same login credentials for everything: all computers, web services, lab and exam registrations, and for the WiFi access.

Me: Alright, could you please try to log in on one of the lab computers while I watch?

Then, he saw the problem.

I already opened a remote session to look out for error messages and out of the corner of an eye I start watching her starting the login procedure.

She types in her username (which follows a known pattern for everybody), then hits the space bar a few times. Her hands move from the keyboard into her pocket, and she grabs her phone.

After a few seconds, she slowly starts typing a long, randomly generated cryptic password from her password manager into the username field. Letter … By … Letter.

It took a while to explain what was going on.

The whole password ends up in the username field in plain text because that field doesn’t mask input as the password field does. Then she cuts it from the username field, pastes it into the password field, and … surprise! The login fails.

Why? Remember those taps on the space bar earlier? Well, some of them ended up in the username input field, and some others were moved to the beginning of the password. Now, neither of the fields is correct.

It took me a while to explain that whitespaces actually matter in login forms and even more time to convince the person that a cryptic, unmemorable password from a phone for daily logins at a public lab computer may not be the best idea.

Wow! What a way to input a password!

Let’s see what the people over at Reddit think about what she was doing.

This reader also has a story about spaces.

Spaces cause problems for this person’s company, too.

That’s an interesting thought.

According to this reader, it’s good she uses a password manager.

Hey, at least he walked away with a good story.

Things could’ve been worse.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.