The forty percent solution.

We've been having a lot of trouble lately with a particular vendor: their account rep won't return our calls, they sat on a $200,000 order for a week because they were confused by something that could have been cleared up if they'd actually bothered to ask us, and now we're still struggling to get their damn software to work because they have a licensing system so stupidly cryptic you could be excused for suspecting the involvement of some covert, quasi-military intelligence agency and they still can't give us the right codes to make things work.

So there's a fair bit of ill-feeling towards this company at the moment. In fact nearly everyone who has to deal with them and their product (except the Amazing Toad Man, who wants to lock us into a three-year contract with them, but he lives in a parallel world to the rest of us) would gladly be rid of them both and are starting to explore alternatives.

And then Gimli comes stumping through, fresh from a presentaion by this vendor and their "partner" (a certain hardware vendor who also like to dabble in software sales and invariably messes it up), all fired up on how we should buy yet more stuff from them.

And why?

Because their hardware-selling "partner" owns forty percent of them. 

Why is this a good thing?

They own forty percent!

Will the stuff Gimli thinks we should buy actually do what we want it to do? Do we even need it?

Forty percent, mate! Forty. Per. Cent!

And that's what the argument boils down to. We should buy more stuff from a loathed and unreliable supplier because they're part-owned by another supplier that provides average service on its core business products, and lacklustre service on the stuff Gimli thinks we should be interested in. To make it worse, we'd have to order the stuff we don't need from the vendor we can't stand through the partner; in effect, multiplying their inefficiencies and poor service.

Gimli only makes it out of the room without being stoned because it's late in the day, we're too tired to realise that trying to figure out any logic in this is completely futile ... and we're fresh out of stones.