When getting close to graduation, many "computer science" or "information systems/technology" majors found they had to obtain some kind of "industry certificates" in order to get a job. So the best of the students scramble around, burn some midnight oil, or steal some time in the classroom by hiding "exam cram" books underneath the desk, to prepare for the exams before graduation, so they could obtain some "certificates" in time for the impending job interviews. While quitters of computer science would just walk out on the trade, the average computer students try to get certificates after graduation by burning midnight oil, steal some time from employers while working part-time at an entry level computer technician's job at local computer stores, or the Wal-Mart computer and electronics department.

But computer was still not as important as dating at this point of life for these would be IT employees and they still put partying and drinking as their number one priorities of their lives. To their pleasant surprise, they found supplies of girls that looked like Sandra Bullock were actually increasing, because no matter what many girls' nature hair colors were, they could always dye them blonde. While Internet was booming in the last decade, hair-dying technology advanced even faster. Some guys even started dying their hairs blonde.

With newly regained confidence in "coolness" discovered in hair colors and remaining confidence in "hacking" capabilities, this new generation of IT employees enter the work force to meet David's generation of old "unpleasant smells".

The entrenched generation seemed to be anybody, including accountants, scientists, engineers, artists who just happened to knew how to program a little, or change computer systems a little, or design web pages, and happened to be on the right spot at the right time, with very few changing their hair colors or that of their spouses'. This old "unpleasant smells" generation looked several waist sizes wider, 50 pounds heavier than the newer generation on average, and they truly smells worse, especially when they talk.

There are good reasons for the bad smells, because as people get older, metabolism normally slows down without being noticed. For IT employees who develop routines and sub routines for a living, many would simply eat the same amount of food as they did year ago, without giving a second thought those food could not be consumed as fast as before, thus the accumulated remnant fat in the waistline. Sitting in front of computers all day puts enough pressure on stomach even without any stress from work, but now, there are slowly accumulating fat like glaciers bearing down on one's stomach, therefore many IT staff would eventually develop stomach problems of some sort, if not careful. When the stomach finally lost its youth, the smell of a portable garbage dump start to surface and no Listerine or mints can seal the bad odor. The smells would relentlessly seek ways out up or down; hence there is this generational decay, physically and mentally, among IT professionals.

When the new generation meets the old, the old gassy generation would start to "train" the new employees with stern warnings and severe restrictions, disguised as "friendly advices". Many of such advices started from "Forget what you've learned at school. The first thing I had to do after getting out of school was to unlearn myself -- in order to be successful". This "in order to be successful" part usually came after a pause, in order for it to sink in. Even without trying hard, it seemed always easy for the older generation to "shock and awe" the new, because after all, computer and IT was all about tips and tricks in the eyes and ears of the audiences and even calling the same thing by different acronyms could be tips and tricks too. The new IT employees usually got pummeled by the entrenched IT employees with fancy terminologies and forgot to throw back punches with their own sets of tricks and tips. If being assigned as a referee, and to be fair, David knew that many IT employees of his generation did not obtain formal certificates and did not know in many subjects as well as someone fresh out of school. But those employees could decorate their wall with dozens of certificates of "2 day courses" in various technology subjects and silence the youngsters who even dare to contemplate challenging their authorities, at least when the youth was still young.

When the youth was no longer a youth, the youth would have become one of the old.

After a few years, now the used-to-be "new guy" IT employee worked along side other experienced IT employees and become an experienced one. They all lost the ambitions to hack into anywhere being it for curiosities -- like an average kid, for noble courses -- like the Matrix guys, or for criminal intents -- like the Italian Job gang. Hacking into the city traffic grid is out of the question, umm, umm, umm, can't do. They finally realized that even with the systems that they know all the usernames and passwords, they could not connect successfully all the time and ironically, that was why their employments existed -- often to fix connection problems for not being able to connect with proper credentials, but only very rarely, to fix problems when unexpected connections were made.

Experienced IT employees finally understood that IT is like many other professions in the real world as oppose to the superficial glamour, fashion or "coolness" of the outlaws and dreamers, as common boys and girls understood it portrayed in the Hollywood movies. The part of IT that builds connections for expected connections includes jobs like those of real estate developers, blue color construction workers, plumbers and electricians. The part of IT that defends against unexpected connections is tricky. It is like the work of security guards, but the demands for this line of work is highly dependent on how many cyber terrorists there were in the world, and more importantly in the public minds. Since cyber terrorists likely to become old and lose their interests in "hacking", professions in this line of work not only need to learn to defend attacks, and also need to learn to sell "fears" to the general public like those in the insurance business. One of the things they had done was to ask Hollywood to make movies about how likely it would be for hackers to cripple the traffic grid of an entire city in "the Italian Job", or steal identities and ruins someone's life like in "the Net" and so on.

As IT become a profession like any others such as real estate or insurance, only the ones that are destined to excel in those professions would remain to be passionate about their career choices. For the others, "it's a job", "who cares", "I am busy", "damn… what now?" are the most common thoughts in their minds. They look at other "crazy" employees who still like their jobs and think they must be "insane", with the logic of the anti-hero Yossarian described in the novel Cache 22. "How could these morons get so excited about 'creating user accounts', 'change permissions', 'automate processes' or 'write scripts'?" they ask themselves.

In the traffic jams in Bud's car, David listened to all familiar problems Bud's were complaining about, which he had seen in the past 10 years day in and day out in various IT departments cross the world. As a contractor and a subcontractor, they of course hoped that Burrito House IT employees would express more enthusiasm on upgrading equipments, systems and software applications, so they could gain more profits from, like the good 'o times of Y2K. But since selling is always a hard nut to crack, they could only crack a few jokes about how IT employees commonly react to support requests.

Bud: "No body seemed to be taking initiative in Burrito House IT department to streamline the operations in the restaurants. It seemed that everyone was just punching in time to get retirement money, and nobody was thinking about going extra miles to help anybody else".

David asked: "Is that what employees are supposed to do? I mean 'punching in time to get retirement money'. You are a business owner for too long and you probably forgot, Oh, now I am a small business owner too and I shouldn't think like that, but that is probably the true career goal for most IT employees or any kind of employees. Look, if you sell them a new system, then they would need to learn a new system and probably operate two systems in parallel for a while. All these would be extra work to ask a poor guy or gal to perform with no real benefit to him or her personally. No matter what they tell you in their interviews, most people in this world only work for the Benjamins, and that was why communism failed in a world wide scale, no matter how lofty and noble the idea was and no matter how diligent and dedicated a small portion of people worked toward it".

"Oh! Right, you grow up under communisms did you? How was it?" Bud suddenly appeared interested with sparkles in his eyes, which reminded David that Bud seemed to have always been a cultural kind of guy. When they worked in South Dakota in 1992, Bud asked him why the features of the American Indians looked liked that of Chinese, while performing his duty to send his team members to the small airport of the Rapids City. At that time, David answered his questions that Chinese and American Indians both belong to Mongolian sub species in the sense of anthropology. But he was still speaking broken English back them therefore they didn't talk to much about culture. This time, he decided to do a much better job explaining communism to Bud based on what he remembered from high school text books in the 1980's and from what he had read after coming to US.