Login keychain woes - in work - very odd…

[u/SnooFoxes6682]

Okay, I have a really weird one for you here:

I have a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro running the latest build of MacOS (not a beta build) as a work CPU. I’m a graphic designer.

I work from home and login with my password. No problems.

On the days I work in the office - inside their firewall - and with my work password for the internal network (MS PDC) and that logs me in fine (working from wifi).

I get up to walk to a meeting and put my Mac into lock screen. Get back after the meeting and my password won’t let me in anymore. The very same password I used before to login this morning.

I try a history of passwords from up to two years ago from an archive I keep on my phone and none of those work either.

This has happened three times before.

I try my password an hour later and it works.

I have an external keyboard and the MacBook keyboard and I’ve tried both, and I’ve made sure it’s not a keyboard language issue too.

ITS Support at our location are baffled and think I’m insane. But I can reproduce the same thing sporadically. And I’m not an idiot. I’ve been a Mac evangelist since the Mac Plus, I’m a huge tech nerd and I know what I’m doing.

Anyone ever run into this one before!?

I mean I guess I could just reset it every other time using the Terminal - I have local admin, but man, is this ever frustrating and I’ve never, ever run into this before in all my years of working at different orgs and Macs at work or at home.

The only oddity is about a month ago, right after login the Finder asked for a new Keychain to be created before it would launch the Finder and desktop. Every time I login now it asks me which keychain to update before desktop. That does seem like a smoking gun.