IT pilot fish gets a job working at a government facility, and he’s well-qualified except for one not-so-small detail: He needs a security clearance.

And there’s a Catch-22: “I had to have the clearance before I could start on the job, but we couldn’t apply for the clearance before I was an active employee,” says fish.

“Clearance could take six months or more if there was anything strange in the employee’s history. During this time we had to show up for work, but largely sat around in an area they called ‘the leper colony,’ because the employees who were already cleared couldn’t be anywhere near us ‘lepers.'”

The uncleared IT people in the “colony” also can’t be assigned to IT work that uses their skills but doesn’t require clearance. Fish soon learns that no one will even put him on a programming project, because as soon as his clearance comes through, he’ll be immediately shifted to the job he was hired for, leaving the others on the project high and dry.

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