coffee, black   no sugar

Ever come across a situation where someone told you: "Yes, we know it's silly, but you have to do it that way..."? You feel like a slave to something which supposedly no one wants/can/has the energy to change. What are the parameters of such a situation?

• Shortness: the pain will be shorter than the time to fix it.
• Penalties: there will be retaliations if you avoid the whole thing alltogether.
• Small area of effect: the one most suffering from it is yourself. No one outside of it will be hurt but you.

Since it only affects a small number of people (often only yourself) it is hard to find allies in fixing the situation. On the contrary, when asking for help you might get the: "yeah, we all had to do it once, so you should too or else we look stupid..." answer.

*Sighs*

The Atom working group is just suffering such a situation:

On 25.07.2006 at 00:46 Paul Hoffman wrote:

> At 5:55 PM -0400 7/24/06, Robert Sayre wrote:
> I'd like our AD or another IESG member to tell us 
> why they think a requirement will improve interoperability. 
> We know many small installations won't support TLS, we 
> know many big installations won't use Basic, and we know 
> Digest is broken.

At this point, pissing off the IESG by rubbing their 
noses in a pile of poop they already know about probably 
will delay APP becoming a standard.

We know the rules, we know that they aren't terribly 
consistent, and we know that getting them to be consistent 
will delay APP becoming an IETF standard by many months, 
possibly years.

Please consider dropping this line of argument.

"possibly years": any suffering will be shorter than this, right? "pissing off" when telling someone that it does not make sense - does not sound exactly like you will be rewarded for it. Oh, and it's mostly only one working group affected at a time.

There are calls for a hero however:

Am 24.07.2006 um 22:27 schrieb Tim Bray:
Hey Julian, volunteering to write it?  I promise to say
 all sorts of nice things about you in public if you 
do.  Seriously, we all agree (I think) that such a thing 
would be beneficial.
  
-Tim (who, thank goodness, is manifestly unqualified 
and thus  doesn't feel guilty about not volunteering)

So, whoever reads this: it's your chance for fame and immortality!

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