By Erick Rommel • Catholic News Service • Posted May 10, 2013

No one likes waiting. As children, we hated waiting for Christmas. We hated waiting for snow to start falling. We hated waiting for weekends to come.

Actually, that’s not just children. As an adult, I still hate waiting for weekends to come.

The truth is that many of the things I hated waiting for as a child I still greatly dislike. That includes the wait for Christmas and the wait for the first day of summer.

There is a difference, however. As an adult, waiting becomes less significant. Exchanges of gifts leading up to Christmas dull the Christmas-morning anticipation. Tired of waiting for the first flake? With enough money and desire, you can travel and see snow on your schedule, not Mother Nature’s schedule. And with enough planning, a nice boss and a flexible time-off policy, a Wednesday doing whatever you please is no longer out of reach.

All of this flexibility comes with a downside. The ability to eliminate waiting makes it more unbearable to wait.

If you doubt that, think ahead to an upcoming movie, book, video game or album that you’re greatly anticipating. Each has a release date. There’s nothing you can do except remain calm and cross out days on your calendar.

But let’s be honest. There are plenty of things you can do to eliminate the wait. The only limitation is your willingness to break the law.

The missing step between wanting something and not wanting to wait for it and taking action to get it without waiting is justification. We create excuses to make our sins acceptable.

Recently, video game developer Greenheart Games found a unique way to educate video game pirates about the true effects of piracy. Its simulation game “Game Dev Tycoon” is much like “SimCity,” but instead of building a town, you’re building a company that makes video games.

Knowing their $8 game would be pirated, the developers released a pirated version of their own. Those who played the illegal version received a special message during the game, “Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buy it legally. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.”

Those who play the pirated version soon lose because their virtual game company goes bankrupt after too many virtual customers play without paying.

You could say that Greenheart Games found a novel way to poke fun at game pirates. That fun is anything but funny. By tracking user data, the two people who made the game learned that 93 percent of the “Game Dev Tycoon” downloads were the pirated version.

Piracy affects the little guys like Greenheart Games. It’s easy to say that a big company won’t suffer in the same way and won’t miss the money. That may be true. But, easy and true don’t make something right.

That’s a lesson we learned as children, and it’s a truth that no amount of waiting will ever change. Some justifications simply aren’t justifiable.