The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Microsoft Certified IT Professional

Hi kid--so you want to be the IT guy? Well, I suspect it might be something like this:

You'll save up the money you make from selling pirated software and eventually go to one of those "certified" Microsoft places. There you will learn about ethernet hubs and the latest version of Windows or whatever the hell the think you need to know when the office staff are panicked because their email won't work. They'll also teach you the importance of buying every patch and updating any microsoft or affiliated company products which spew forth each month.

You'll get hired on at some middling insurance or investment company and there you'll soon make yourself invaluable--the network is so buggy and flawed that it needs tweaking on a daily basis, and only you have the insider knowledge to make it function. You'll also practice the other things they've taught you at the training institute; you mock and abuse everyone for being less computer savvy than yourself, and you make a nice second income blackmailing those whose porn surfing you discover when checking web logs. You'll also cover your ears and scream whenever anyone says anything counter to MS orthodoxy, like the idea that Linux is a great user-empowering operating system, or that the main problem with Macintosh is that they didn't properly copyright a window-based operating system before MS ripped it off.

Eventually you'll want to move onto the next level, and you'll go to the elite technician seminar held in Washington state each year. There you'll hear about even more ways you can make yourself indispensible to companies which let you abuse them while you manage their computers. You'll also learn that you are able to double dip--earning ever higher tech salaries from helpless corporate technophobes, while secretly getting kickbacks from Microsoft each time you con your employer into buying yet another "better" operating system.

It sounds pretty good, doesn't it? That's why what happens next will be so tragic. You'll be wandering through the hallways of the vast Microsoft complex in Redmond when you'll make a wrong turn--you're looking for the one passable-looking female in the training group who wandered off earlier, and you happen to slip through an unlocked door (they're good at electronic walls and gates, but with the real ones, the geeks slip up sometimes)

You see something there that shocks you--Bill Gates is talking to a large screen--to Bill Gates. You don't understand it, but you're fascinated. They're arguing about some things you don't fully grasp, but later, when you're strapped on a gurney by the MS security drones it is all explained to you.

Bill Gates is a twin. His secret brother, Brent, is hidden on an island somewhere in the South Pacific where he is the mastermind behind a shadow corporation that makes knockoffs of windows products for sale in Asia and creates most of the viruses and other attacks aimed at whichever version of windows is most current. They are constantly locked in an almost mythic battle that most of the world is not aware of--but you will be. (He's also the actual person in that widely-circulated old arrest photo--not Bill)

You won't be able to do anything about it, though. You won't be killed--Gates has a weird fear about one day being hooked to a lie detector and asking if Microsoft has murdered anyone, so he insists on your joining the band of brain-implanted gardeners who wander the grounds of Microsoft and his various estates.

Unfortunately, because the implant is a MS product, you'll need to have your head cut open every 90 days for an update or patch. On the bright side, you'll have access to a mental catalogue of all the major weed species of the Pacific Northwest just by tapping your forehead with a rake.

Hey, could you figure out why my computer freezes when I go to the Dixie Chicks fan page?