When my children were young, one of our favorite books to read together was If You Give a Pig a Pancake, by Laura Joffe Numeroff. It's an entertaining story of how one thing leads to another. It goes something like this:

If you give a pig a pancake, she is going to want some syrup. When you give her the syrup, she's going to get all sticky, so she'll want to take a bath. When she takes a bath, the pig will want bubbles in the water. It's just one thing after another, and the little pig ends up dancing around the house, sending pictures to her friends, building a tree house and doing other silly activities. In the end, she'll be so hungry that she wants to eat a pancake, and you know what that means….

What does this have to do with IT? In the past week, my PC has turned into a very hungry pig. My story is anything but a cute bedtime story for kids, but there's got to be a lesson here somewhere.

My company has a corporate client that hired us to provide services that require behind-the-firewall access to company resources, such as applications and data. Because of IT security requirements, the company took one of our PCs and loaded its common operating environment (COE) that includes desktop agents, security software and a VPN for remote access. The COE also includes the Microsoft Office suite of software applications. The PC functioned well and we did our work without a problem.

But then the company issued a decree that the COE could no longer be installed on PCs that it did not own. I suppose this decision has to do with security concerns or perhaps the cost of software licenses. Whatever the reason, we had to remove the COE from our PC.

As you well know, removing the image from a machine is no easy feat. We basically gutted the machine and took it back to its original state, reloading Windows XP Pro and all the applications. Reloading everything from the original disks -- which are more than two years old -- meant numerous hours of installing the updates, patches and service packs that have come out in the past two years. And this doesn't even include setting our own personal preferences for how we like things to work.

Once we had a pristine rebuilt machine, we went to install the client company's remote access software again. We still had a contract with the client and still needed to work behind the firewall.