On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 22:07:16 -0500, Chip Olson wrote:


This what in the software industry we call "yak shaving". As in, you have
one simple job to do, but can't do it without getting something else done
first (upgrading a piece of software, or what have you), which in turn
depends on some other thing, and four or five dependencies later you're
outside shaving a yak (or, at the very least, doing something that appears
completely unrelated to the original task).

It's also the old house routine: you start to do A, find you have
to do B, then C, then D, then back to B before you can finally
finish A.