Similarly, if every perpetrator were arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, 80% of us would be in jail (the other 20% would be guards). While the average juror may not see the bargaining that goes on in the DA’s office, some of the compromises might make your skin crawl. Add this to the dictum about seeing how sausages and laws are made.

The ‘flood’ of interest to computer system developers and users relates to money. More particularly, credit cards. You sign a ticket after dinner, which gets dumped into a hopper with about 200 million others for that day, and this wends its way through hundreds of banks, millions of accounts, and tens of thousands of clerks. Most of the time, the person signing the card is you, and your available credit is sufficient. Most of the time, the transaction completes properly, it is posted to the right merchant account, and the vendor gets ‘plussed’ the same amount you get ‘minused’.

Most of the time. However, there is a dark side to this. If you run a web site with a shopping cart and process credit card transactions over the Internet, you soon become in awe of some of the impenetrable mysteries of existence. One of them is how the same bank can have three different numbers, each of which is progressively smaller as it moves toward your checking account.

First there is the ‘clearing’ operation. If you run a card through the transaction machine, this ends up at a clearinghouse where the amount gets added up to the other transactions that went through your account the same day. At the end of the day the sum of your transactions should be the amount you get, minus a processing fee, returns, and chargebacks.

Then there is the ‘security’ department, whose job it is is to make sure you are you. Security is interested in patterns. One thing they flag is a newly issued credit card that starts wandering across the country, particularly in the direction of Las Vegas. There are people that find their card isn’t working any more when all they’re trying to do is gas up in Joplin, Missouri. Security is also interested in ‘euphemisms’, such as the purchase of ‘flowers’, at $33 a shot, three times in one night in downtown Miami.

Security is also watching merchants, since there is a small probability such operations are less than pure as the driven snow. There are outright crooks, and then there are simply the ‘Thoreau’ merchants, those that live a life of quiet desperation.

The latter typically have something on the public record, such as a tax lien, summary judgement, or pending civil lawsuit. They may have an excessive number of chargebacks from unhappy customers. It is the habit of ‘security’ in this situation to cover their bets, meaning that in some cases the money transacted in doesn’t make it out. In this situation Mom and Pop have an obligation to deliver something to the customer, but they can’t have the money to buy their supplies, meet the payroll, or pay the rent. Invariably this triggers long desperate calls to the bank, where there are three separate registers of funds: Clearing, Security, and Commercial Accounts.

The first issue, of course, is getting beyond ‘voice mail hell’ to where one can actually talk to a person. This person is, more than likely, overwhelmed. First, if anyone is calling, they’re angry. Second, the person taking this call has to get two other people within the bank to come to the phone; one in Clearing and the other being the account representative from the branch the merchant banks at. Third, they need to be able to play their bank’s transaction system like a piano, tracing the path of the money from entry in the merchant’s accounts to it’s final resting place. Transactions in late on Monday may not get posted until Tuesday, so there are no end of opportunities for funds that cleared X not to be in Y.

The consequential damage is significant. How many merchants are spending one full workweek out of their year trying to find out what happened to their money rather than designing new products, editing their catalog, interviewing prospective employees, or firming up a lease for a new place? While this workweek might only be 2% of their time, can we afford to lose 2% of our talent to distractions like this? The entire US economy may be stuck on hold, literally and figuratively.