Since we switched to Zoot ADSL months and months ago, I haven't been able to send mail to anyone at GOL.com, a popular Tokyo ISP. GOL blocks all mail from our provider as spam. It's really irritating, as I have a half-dozen correspondents and clients with addresses at GOL. Everytime I need to contact them, I have to do it through a web interface with an account I don't use much anymore.
Tod's been promising for months to look into it; he got as far as getting some information and advice from a knowledgable friend about a month ago. But he hasn't yet contacted Zoot to ask them to fix the problem. I've complained about this often enough now that he has spent almost 3 hours this evening looking for the perfect words to express the problem and its solution in Japanese because Zoot doesn't have English support.
For some reason, this insistence on perfection is really irritating me. I would (and actually offered to) bang out the mail in 30 minutes, looking up a few words and using a lot of katakana for the technical terms. Mine might not be perfect and it would certainly lack nuance and politeness, but it would get the job done.
But that's not Tod's style. So he's meticulously looking up words and phrases while I've been reading a book waiting for him to finish. Only I'm almost finished with the book and he isn't anywhere near done with the e-mail....
So much for a pleasant Saturday night.
Tara and I call that the "Get it done" vs. "Do it right" philosophy. Although it can be frustrating at times, it generally works well in concert.