In the middle of the nineteenth century a man named Ignacy walked into a city office with a jar of dark thick liquid that could light up the world and he wanted to sell it as a medicine because the laws of his town only had rules for things you swallowed or things you burned in a hearth but not things that did both.

The clerk looked at the jar and then at his ledger and then back at the jar and he told Ignacy to come back when the liquid decided what it wanted to be and so the town stayed dark for a few more years while the rules caught up to the reality of kerosene. This happened because the human mind and the systems we build to manage it would rather have a wrong answer that fits in a box than a right answer that sits on the edge of two different boxes.

I am sitting here sketching a man in a wooden chair who is trying to explain why he stole a car and he is using words that do not exist in the legal code and the judge is getting a headache because the truth of the man does not fit the shape of the law. I bit my tongue while eating a cold sandwich this morning and now every time I try to form a word or even just sit in silence I feel a sharp pinch of physical regret that makes me want to look at the world with a narrow and angry eye.

Petros and the Ship Valve Factory

Petros is a man I know who works in a room filled with the hum of cooling fans and he is a master of the invisible architecture that lets a company breathe and he found himself in a fight with a piece of paper that he could not win. He was tasked with setting up the remote access for a firm that built valves for ships and this firm was split into two very different worlds.

One world was the office where thirty people sat at desks with their own dedicated laptops and they took these laptops home and they worked from trains and they worked from hotels and they needed to reach the server as individuals. The other world was the factory floor where sixty men moved in shifts and they shared ten rugged tablets that were bolted to the workbenches and they used these tablets to check the specs of a valve and then they moved on to the next task.

Petros sat down and did the math and he saw the path forward with perfect clarity and he knew that he should buy thirty User CALs for the office staff so they could roam free and he should buy ten Device CALs for the tablets on the floor so the sixty men could share them without paying for sixty individual seats. It was the best solution and it was the most honest solution and it saved the company thousands of dollars because it matched the reality of the work.

He opened the procurement software and he found the section for software licensing and he saw a single dropdown menu that asked him to select the license type for the project. The menu had an option for User and it had an option for Device but it did not have an option for Both and there was no way to add a second line for the same server.

He tried to select User and then he wrote a long note in the comments box explaining the split but the system flagged the request as incomplete because the quantities did not match the total head count of the company. He tried to select Device and he wrote another note but the system rejected it again because the finance department had a rule that every office worker must have a license tied to their name and not a piece of hardware. Petros was staring at a screen that was telling him he was wrong even though he was the only person in the building who was actually right.

This is the hidden tax of the modern world where the form we use to ask for a thing dictates the thing we are allowed to receive. We think we are making choices based on merit and cost and efficiency but we are actually making choices based on what the database designer thought was a normal day back in 2005. The system is a filter and it only lets through the shapes it recognizes and if you bring it a new shape it will treat it like a bug or a mistake or a lie.

Petros spent four days trying to find a way to trick the software into letting him be smart and he eventually had to give up and split the request into two different projects with two different budget codes just so he could buy the two different things he needed.

Think about the fact that 64 percent of all corporate delays happen not because the money is missing but because the request does not match the software used to track the request and that is like saying two out of every three times you wait it is because a machine did not understand your sentence. We live in a world where we have optimized the speed of delivery but we have ignored the speed of permission and we have made it so hard to ask for a complex truth that people just start asking for simple lies instead.

Petros could have just bought ninety User CALs and no one would have complained except the budget and he would have been done in five minutes but he cared about the right answer more than the easy answer.

Seeking a Reality-Based Solution

When you are looking for the right way to handle your own servers you often run into this same wall where the big resellers want you to pick a lane and stay in it because their systems are built for bulk and for simplicity and not for the messy reality of a warehouse and an office sharing the same backbone.

You might go to a place like the RDS CAL Store and see that you can actually get the specific packs of five or ten or fifty that you need and you can see the difference between the versions but your own internal boss might still ask why you cannot just pick one style and stick to it.

They ask this because they want their spreadsheet to look clean and they do not care if the clean spreadsheet costs them an extra five thousand dollars in licenses that nobody is using.

I am looking at the man in the chair again and he is crying now and the judge is telling him to stick to the facts but the facts are exactly what the man is trying to say. The facts are just not the facts that the judge is trained to hear. My tongue is pulsing with a steady beat of pain and it reminds me that the world is full of these small frictions that we ignore until they become the only thing we can think about. We build these categories to save time and we end up spending all our time serving the categories.

The best solution is often the one that looks like a mess on paper because the world is a mess and any system that demands total neatness is a system that is lying to you. If you have a server and you have people and you have machines you have a puzzle and you should be allowed to use all the pieces of the puzzle to solve it.

Petros eventually got his licenses and he got his server running and the men on the floor were happy and the people in the office were happy but he was exhausted and he felt like he had been punished for being good at his job.

The Gatekeepers of Normalcy

We see this in every part of life where the middle man or the software or the rulebook acts as a gatekeeper that only cares about the bucket the information falls into. If you want to buy a house or get a loan or even just get a prescription for a medicine that is not on the primary list you have to fight the ghost of a person who decided ten years ago what a normal person looks like.

We are all Petros in some way and we are all trying to explain that we need thirty of one thing and ten of another and the world is just staring at us with a blank face and asking why we cannot just be simple.

I wonder how many great ideas have been tossed in the trash because they did not fit the template of the grant application or the hiring portal or the purchase order. I wonder how many people have just stopped trying to find the best way and started looking for the way that gets approved the fastest.

It is a slow decay of the soul to have to compromise on the truth just because the software has a limited vocabulary and it is even worse when you know that the people on the other side of the screen do not even realize what they are losing. They just see a green checkmark and they think everything is fine while the company loses money and the workers lose time and the sysadmin loses his mind.

We need to start building systems that can handle the word and and the word both and the word maybe because those are the words that actually describe the lives we lead. We need to stop letting the shape of the box define the value of the gift.

I am finishing my sketch now and the man is being led away and I have captured the look of total confusion on his face as he realized that the words he spoke never even reached the ears of the people who were judging him. He was a round peg and they had a square hole and they just kept hitting him with a hammer until he disappeared.

I will go home and I will put some ice on my tongue and I will think about Petros and his server and I will hope that tomorrow I find a way to say something that does not have to be translated into a category before it is understood. We should all spend a little more time looking at the dark liquid in the jar and a little less time looking at the ledger because the light is more important than the list.

The Path of Real Efficiency

If you are the person who has to buy the licenses or the person who has to write the rules try to remember that the most efficient path is the one that actually fits the feet of the people walking it and not the one that looks the straightest on a map.