Zen's Law of Time

I hate paperwork. I especially hate customs paperwork, which is what I spent a good part of the last two days dealing with. It's like this, see... I'm trying to buy scientific equipment from a U.K. company. I put in a purchase order for the equipment back in mid-May, and it's been held up over who's going to pay the customs fee. (At least, that's my understanding of what Purchasing told me.)

So they've got a customs broker involved. And now I have a set of government forms to get this stuff sent duty free. The forms ask a long series of questions like, "What is the research you plan to do? Why is this better than any domestic equivalent product? Did you contact domestic vendors? Did you ask for bids? Did you ask if they could modify their existing equipment to meet your needs?" And like that.

I thought this was a consumer society and that free trade was all the rage.

Anyhow, I'm going to keep trying to get the equipment I want, and hope I'm not committing the Concorde fallacy ("too much invested to quit;" a logical error a lot of gamblers fall prey to as well as British and French engineers).

Everything is following Zen's Law of Time: "Everything takes longer than you expect."

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Pages read of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: 200. I expect to be finished by December. We'll see what my Law of Time does to that date...