My last job got around the "make people gravitate towards the simplest passwords" issue by giving you a list of 10 randomly generated strings you could pick. ( you could refresh the list a few times though)

So what happened anyways, like the person you are replying to said, is we had passwords written everywhere. One guy kept a sticky not on the back of his badge (which got turned around alot so he would walk around with his password showing), another kept it on a sticky under his keyboard, and just in general we would find passwords written everywhere.