In 1952, a junior researcher named Gilbert Daniels was assigned to Wright Air Force Base with a problem that was killing people. The Air Force had a high rate of pilots losing control of their aircraft. After blaming the pilots and the instructors and the weather, the military finally looked at the stickpits.

They had been designed for the “Average Man,” a statistical ghost created in 1926 from the measurements of thousands of soldiers. Daniels decided to test how many actual pilots fit that average. He measured 4,063 men across ten physical dimensions: height, chest circumference, sleeve length, and others.

He expected most would fall into the average range on at least a few traits. He was wrong. Out of 4,063 pilots, exactly zero fit the average in all ten dimensions. Not one. By designing a stickpit for everyone, they had designed a stickpit for nobody. The “Average Man” was a fiction that forced real men to fly in cramped, dangerous positions that eventually led to a crash.

01

The Statistical Ghost of Modern Software

The software industry is currently obsessed with its own version of the Average Man. We call them “Pack Sizes.”

Standardization is a tax on the unique. A vendor looks at a market of a million souls and sees four tidy buckets. They build the buckets-the 5-pack, the 10-pack, the 20-pack, and the 50-pack. You are then expected to pour your company into one of these containers, even if you overflow or leave a vacuum at the bottom.

The categories serve the seller’s logistics; the buyer pays for the rounding. It is a subtle, recurring form of theft that we have all agreed to call “efficiency.”

Kofi and the prime number thirty-three

Kofi is on the phone with a sales representative whose voice has the polished, friction-less quality of a stone at the bottom of a river. Kofi runs a mid-sized logistics firm that has recently expanded. He needs exactly thirty-three Remote Desktop Services Client Access Licenses.

He has counted the heads. He has checked the workstations. The number is thirty-three. It is a prime number plus two, a messy, human number that represents thirty-three specific people who need to log in and do their jobs.

“We have the twenty-pack or the fifty-pack,” the representative says.

– The Sales Representative

Kofi pauses. The silence on the line is heavy with the weight of the seventeen licenses he does not need but is being asked to buy. If he buys two twenty-packs, he pays for forty and wastes seven. If he buys the fifty-pack, he wastes seventeen.

There is no option for the company Kofi actually runs. There are only options for the two companies the vendor imagines: the Small Office and the Mid-Sized Enterprise. Kofi’s company, with its thirty-three desks and its specific, hard-won growth, does not exist in the vendor’s catalog.

Shelfware: The legalized fraud of vacuums

As an insurance fraud investigator, I spend my days looking for the gaps between what is claimed and what is true. I look for the “ghost” in the ledger-the person who doesn’t exist but is still drawing a paycheck, or the fire that started in a room with no wiring.

But in the world of software licensing, the ghost is the “shelfware.” Shelfware is the industry term for the licenses you bought because the pack size demanded it, which now sit in a digital drawer, unused and unloved. It is a form of legalized fraud where the seller knows you are paying for a vacuum.

I cried during a commercial last night. It was a simple ad for a brand of crackers, showing a family sitting around a table that was exactly the right size for them. Everything in the commercial fit. The chairs were full. The portions were exact.

It was a lie, of course, but it hit me because my professional life is a sequence of misfits. I see the 17% of a budget that vanishes into rounding errors. I see the IT manager who has to explain to a CFO why they spent $2,142 on “air” because the vendor didn’t offer a 33-pack.

Linguistic Aikido and the Cage of Dropdowns

Standardized offerings impose a tidy shape on a messy reality. We round ourselves down to fit, or we pay to round ourselves up. When you are forced to buy more than you need, you aren’t just losing money; you are losing the ability to have your business seen as a distinct entity.

You become a data point in someone else’s fulfillment strategy. The vendor’s SKU list becomes the ceiling of your reality.

The representative asks Kofi if he wants to “future-proof” his purchase by getting the fifty-pack. This is a brilliant bit of linguistic aikido. It turns a limitation-the inability to sell an honest quantity-into a benefit.

It suggests that by overpaying today, Kofi is somehow protecting himself from the growth of tomorrow. But Kofi knows his growth. He knows that thirty-three is the number for this year and likely the next. To buy fifty is to give the vendor a zero-interest loan on a future that might never arrive in the way they predict.

This is where the friction of the “Average Man” stickpit meets the digital age. Most licensing platforms are built on dropdown menus. A dropdown menu is a cage. It offers you a pre-selected list of identities.

If you are a 33, but the menu only says 20 or 50, you are forced to lie to the system. You click “50” and, in that moment, your company’s actual shape is erased. You become a “50-user company” in the eyes of the database, even as thirty-three people sit in thirty-three chairs.

The alternative is a return to human-scale commerce. It is the realization that a business should be able to buy exactly what it requires to function. This is why custom-quantity quotes are more than just a pricing convenience; they are an acknowledgment of existence. When an IT administrator finds a source like the

RDS CAL Store, the relief isn’t just financial. It is the relief of a pilot finally sitting in a seat that was adjusted for his actual height, rather than the average of a thousand dead men.

The ability to license thirty-three users-not thirty-five, not forty, not fifty-honors the reality of the environment. It recognizes that the server infrastructure is a tool for the people, not a template that the people must be stretched to fit. A perpetual license should be a reflection of a perpetual need, accurately measured.

The Rebellion of the Thirty-Third Chair

In my investigations, I often find that the most honest people are the ones who are the most frustrated by “the system.” They are the ones who want the numbers to match. They are the Kofis of the world who feel a physical twinge of guilt when they see a line item for seventeen unused licenses.

They aren’t being cheap; they are being precise. And precision is the only defense we have against the creeping bloat of modern corporate life.

The vendor’s logistics are not your problem. Their desire for “clean” numbers in their quarterly report should not be funded by your rounding error. When we accept the pack size as inevitable, we accept that our companies are just approximations. We agree to be “around fifty” or “about twenty.” We surrender the specific for the convenient.

I remember a case where a warehouse claimed they had lost forty crates of high-end electronics in a flood. When I got there, the water marks on the walls told a different story. The marks were consistent, except for one corner where the dust was undisturbed.

They had “rounded up” their loss. They figured that since they were already filing a claim, they might as well fit the “standard” size of a catastrophic event. We see this everywhere. We see it in the way we order food, the way we buy clothes, and the way we license our servers. We have been trained to think in multiples of five.

But life does not happen in multiples of five. Growth happens one person at a time. A new hire arrives on a Tuesday. A contractor is brought in for a six-week project. These are the moments where the “pack” fails.

If you have twenty licenses and hire your twenty-first employee, the vendor wants you to buy another twenty. They want you to pay for nineteen empty seats so that one person can log in. It is an absurdity that we have lived with for so long that we’ve forgotten it is absurd.

The Most Extraordinary Thing You Can Be

When Kofi finally finds a way to buy exactly thirty-three licenses, the tension in his shoulders drops. It is a small victory, but in a world of standardized “stickpits” that don’t fit anyone, any act of precision is a form of rebellion.

He is no longer flying a ghost plane. He is running his company, exactly as it is, without paying a tax on the gap between his reality and someone else’s spreadsheet.

We need to stop rounding ourselves. We need to demand that the tools we use-whether they are stickpits or Client Access Licenses-are built for the people who actually use them. The “Average Company” doesn’t exist any more than the “Average Man” did in 1952. There is only your company, with its thirty-three users, its specific challenges, and its refusal to be a round number.

The next time a rep asks you if you want the twenty or the fifty, remember Gilbert Daniels. Remember the pilots who crashed because they were trying to fit into a ghost’s seat. Demand the number that matches your chairs.

Precision is not just a budget strategy; it is a way of asserting that you are real. And in a world of digital abstractions, being real is the most extraordinary thing you can be.