Changing the specs

It causes bloatware, cost-overruns, and products with odd quirks. "We forgot to tell you--the web page needs to have a calculator function, and support both kinds of virtual keypad."

I was introduced to this early.

When we lived in LA, my mother would dry clothes on the clothesline. When other matters occupied her, and I seemed to the uninitiated eye to have time on my hands, I was instructed to take the clothes down and bring them in.

I was only 7, and therefore something short of my full adult height. Reaching over my head to unpin laundry was fatiguing, so I developed a more efficient way of removing the clothes. The clothes came off briskly, the clothesline would dance in pleasing vibrations--sometimes even harmonics of the natural period--and the clothes pins sometimes followed fascinating trajectories.

Only after the job was done was I confronted with a change in the job specifications: I must not only bring in the laundry from the line, without accidently dragging items in the dirt, but I must also bring in all clothes pins and parts thereof, and refrain from tugging on delicate items.

Was that fair?