In 1996 at my first job as a programmer, the company had a system where the password field in the login screen was obscured by using wingdings as the font. :)
nice! I worked at a place in 1999 that had an RTF file on a public share that had the passwords for everything. It was ok because it was encrypted with wingdings...
But... that's not clever. Someone with a good memory can just remember the symbols and test out each letter on the keyboard using the font.
"Person, woman, man camera, TV"...
Yes, I do believe that's the reason the story was related.