Welcome to what life is like in the banking industry. I've never had a computer I could install programs on or get anywhere close to my own email on. Googledocs? Fahgeddabowdit. I'm surprised I can even get onto Blogger.
System administration isn't our wheelhouse anymore, but when it was it went like this: You get your choice of: * You get our locked-down canned configuration. It will allow you to do you job, anything you can do in the browser, and use iTunes because we are not heartless. You do not get to install anything else, you do not get to alter any configuration, and if your home directory takes up too much space on our fileserver we will delete things according to our whims and, probably, make fun of your tastes in music and/or pornography. If you have problems we will take care of you; if one of the actual sysadmins is around they'll even be friendly about it, if not, eh, we'll try. * We give you hardware, you put whatever you want on it. If you have problems that aren't hardware issues, you deal with them yourself. If it's a hardware issue we'll replace it; if your problem affects other people/is a security issue for the company and you can't quickly fix it yourself you get our locked down canned configuration. This worked well and, while we weren't a bank, we were sitting on a lot of data we would rather not have been sitting on.