Overly generic design

Remember when I said that I'd retell the recent performance fail cases? Well, I lied a little. This one is really old and uses a technology you have probably never heard of, but it's instructive anyway. Bear with me.

Context

This problem occurred ages ago, in the time when the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) was still fashionable. What is CORBA, you ask? Back then, it was a distributed object communication protocol – this was quite a nice idea, as you'd not only be able to compose your program out of some objects living locally on your computer but also on other computers somewhere in the network. I was working on a project at a big telecommunications company then...