Back when I was 14 I interned at the local department of transportation office doing IT, which at the time meant creating filemaker databases, scanning and manu

Back when I was 14 I interned at the local department of transportation office doing IT, which at the time meant creating filemaker databases, scanning and manually entering lots of forms, carting massive CRTs and desktops around, and deleting viruses from civil engineers' computers. I still clearly remember the day I was showing one of the other interns an application I wrote in visual basic. I was quite proud of it since I was fairly new to programming at the time, and I had been working on mastering GDI. If you know what GDI is, you can probably guess where this is going. It was what game devs call a "map editor", where you could take a palette of images and place them around in a grid to author scenes. This was during our lunch break. One of the supervisors walked over, saw something "game-like" on the screen, and angrily unplugged the PC at the back. (Good thing I didn't have any important files open.) Once I explained what it was he wasn't angry anymore, but he didn't apologize. So I guess "no fun allowed, even if you're learning" is a pretty old mantra everywhere.