Argh! Buying things in a University is unnecessarily difficult. There's a maze of paperwork, and at least three different statuses for vendors.. Preferred vendors (like Dell) have apparently made the university happy in some way (greased palms?), and so ordering things from them takes only a small amount of paperwork. Known vendors have apparently filled out a lot of paperwork themselves, and require a moderate amount of paperwork to purchase from when a preferred vendor sells a similar product, otherwise a smallish amount of paperwork. New vendors require a great deal of paperwork to order from, or they can go through the pain to become a known vendor. Then there's a large set of rules for things in different price ranges for the whole order and individual units, with things over a largeish price requiring preferential treatment to companies run by women and minorities, and increasing paperwork at each stage. Admittedly, I'm still learning this stuff, but I've spent quite a lot of time with phone calls and visits to our purchasing people to figure out how all this works and getting it done. I have a cynical suspicion that all this is designed to strongly discourage people from buying things.. At some point, I'll need to decide when/if I start playing games with the paperwork, telling little white lies to get things done and save me a lot of pain.. It seems like everyone does it, to some extent. It still disgusts me..

This isn't something I noticed -- there's an article (since removed) from a news site I frequent that pointed it out, but the lyrics to that song we all sung in school, "This Land is Your Land", reveal it to actually be a parody, and we just don't sing the parts of the song that are the twist. Of course, that in itself is a twist for when we realize it. Here's the lyrics to Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land