Last week, one of my co-workers approached me and asked if I would teach him Java. He thought we could build a application that would make our jobs a little easier and I could teach him Java in the process.

You see, we have no administrator privileges on our machines, so we can't install anything. There is a certain application that most people in my group used in the past, but has been taken away because we aren't allowed to have any software that isn't approved by management and since you have to download and install this particular application, it's considered "dangerous". He thought we could build an application that had the same functionality that the "illegal" software had.

We started to draw up a design. We realized that it would make our lives easier if we could use the Sun Microsystems NetBeans IDE to develop the app. The IDE is free to download. When we approached IT about having in installed, they said we needed approval, but they didn't see any problem. They emailed our boss explaining the situation. I bet you can guess our boss' response. "I don't approve of this." That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a show of her power. We were going to build a *free* application, in our spare time, when most people surf the net. I'm sure there is a perfectly reasonable reason for the denial.