I was consulting for a very large European company - first day in the office put in front of a workstation - I asked for a password - "Oh that comes from our IT people in the USA - normally takes 2 weeks..............................."
So I checked the desktop - nothing - so then opened the desk drawers. In the bottom drawer was a legal pad with a sticky note underneath with a string of characters. Enter that into the machine et voila!
Three months later, on my last day, I carefully removed the pad and put a sticky note with a 2.5 month old password on it and shut the draw....................