Nelson thought he hit the jackpot by getting a paid internship the summer after his sophomore year of majoring in Software Engineering. Not only was it a programming job, it was in his hometown at the headquarters of a large hardware store chain known as ValueAce. Making money and getting real world experience was the ideal situation for a college kid. If it went well enough, perhaps he could climb the ranks of ValueAce IT and never have to relocate to find a good paying job.

A notebook with a marker and a pen resting on it

He was assigned to what was known as the "Internet Team", the group responsible for the ValueAce eCommerce website. It all sounded high-tech and fun, sure to continue to inspire Nelson towards his intended career. On his first day he met his supervisor, John, who escorted him to his first-ever cubicle. He sat down in his squeaky office chair and soaked in the sterile office environment.

"Welcome aboard! This is your development machine," John said, pressing the power buttons on an aging desktop and CRT monitor. "You can start by setting up everything you will need to do your development. I'll be just down the hall in my office if you have any issues!"

Eager to get started, Nelson went down the checklist John provided. He would have to install TortoiseSVN, check out the Internet Team's codebase, then install all the dependencies. Nelson figured it would take the rest of the day, then by Tuesday morning he could get into some real coding. That's when the security prompts started.

Anything Nelson tried to access was met with an abrupt "Access denied" prompt and login dialog that asked for admin credentials. "Ok... I guess they just don't want me installing any old thing on here, makes sense," Nelson said to himself. He tried to do a few other benign things like launching Calculator and Notepad, only to be met with the same roadblocks. He went down the hall to fetch John to find out how to proceed.

"Dammit, they just implemented a bunch of new security policies on our workstations. Only managers like me can do anything on our own machines," John bemoaned. "I'll come by and enter my credentials for now so you can get set up."

The trick worked and Nelson was able to get the codebase and begin poking around on it. He was curious about some of the things they were doing in code, so he opened a web browser to search for them. He was allowed to open the browser only to get nothing but "The page is not available" and a login prompt for any site he tried to browse. "Son of a..." he muttered under his breath. He got up for another trip to John's office.

"Hey John, sorry to bother you again. You'll love this one. As a member of the Internet Team, I'm unable to access the internet," Nelson quipped with a nervous chuckle. "I was just hoping to learn some things about how the code works."

"Oh no, don't even bother with that," John told him, rolling his eyes. "Internet is a four-letter word around here if you aren't a manager. The internet is dark and full of terrors and is not to be trusted in the hands of anyone else. They expect you to learn everything from good old-fashioned books." John motioned to his vast library of programming books. Nelson grabbed a few and took them home to study after a frustrating initial day.

After a late-night cram session, Nelson arrived Tuesday morning prepared to actually accomplish something. He hoped to fire up a local instance of the eCommerce site and make some modifications just to see what he could do. As it turned out, he still couldn't do much of anything. He was still getting blocked on local web pages. To add injury to insult, any of the .aspx pages he had tried to access were replaced with the HTML for "page not found" in source.

After travelling the familiar route to John's office, Nelson explained what happened, hoping to borrow admin credentials again. "Sorry, kid. I can't help you," John told him, sounding dejected. "The network overlords noticed that I logged in to your machine, so they wrote me up for it. Any coding you want to do will have to be done via notepad."

"I already said I can't even launch Notepad though... literally everything is locked down!" Nelson exclaimed, growing further irritated.

"Oh I didn't mean Notepad the program. An actual notepad." John pulled a spiral pad of paper and a pen out of his drawer and slid it over to Nelson." Write down what you want on here, give it to me, and I'll enter it into source and check it in. That's the best I can do."

Nelson grabbed his new "development environment" and went back to his desk to brood. It was going to be a long summer. Perhaps Software Engineering wasn't the right major for him. Maybe something like Anthropology or Art would be more fulfilling.

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