The price of looking busy

The behavioural scientist Dan Ariely once found himself chatting to a locksmith with a curious problem. The better he became at replacing locks, the less he got paid. In the early days, he explained, he might wrestle for hours with a jammed lock, but because his inexperience made his job look difficult, his customers would pay without demur, often adding a tip. Eventually, however, he became highly expert, and could fix the same problem in minutes. Now his customers resented paying his call-out fee, and never tipped him at all.

Thirty years ago, companies buying a mainframe computer soon outgrew their first machine. The firm would duly write an huge cheque to a hardware provider to upgrade their struggling Zogvac 701a to a mighty Zogvac 709c. An engineer carrying fancy equipment would arrive at their premises and lock himself in the computer room for the day. What his hosts never knew was that their mainframe supplier, anticipating this upgrade, had already supplied a Zogvac 709c when the original mainframe was installed; a few lines of code had been added to restrict its processing power to that of the feebler 701a.