Going fractal

IBM lost a sale of PurifyPlus this morning.

What happened is I got into a process I call “going fractal.”

This is where doing something that ought to be fairly straightforward (spending $1500) becomes nightmarishly complex as you have to jump through hoops of ever-increasing complexity taking you further and further away from whatever it is you wanted to get done.

In the linux world, this happens when you have a “pressing need” for new trivial feature X in special program Y, which in the end turns out to require recompiling the kernel.

In this case, once I was shunted into IBM’s explanation of corporate ID management strategy, I realized IBM was going to make it difficult for me to purchase. While this is a tried and true strategy (prescreen customers by requiring large time, and if, possible emotional commitment), I just have other things to do this morning. I’m not on salary after all.

In any case, I’ll probably pick it up before Jan 1, but it’s still annoying to have to “task out” a purchase in stages.

Tagged as: Fractal distraction, programming, VC++