Hey, That's Not Fair!

Not enough sleep last night (finishing a client website order, watching DVD's, and generally being silly with my darling = 6 a.m. bedtime) leaves me a bit unqualified to write much of anything today...but I'm facing my first personal experience with just how sanctions placed on Iran by the U.S. can affect one's life.
I've noted repeatedly since we've been here that I simply cannot see in what ways sanctions have impacted Iran - of course I'm not an economist, nor do I have a good understanding of how these things are supposed to work, but I thought the general idea was to inflict some sort of punishment on the sanctioned nation by removing access to goods and services originating from the States.
With American label products on nearly all market shelves and in showrooms all over Tehran - not to mention Iran's capacity to simply make everything it needs on it's own - I had a difficult time seeing just where the sanctions were making an impact, exactly.
Granted, we don't have Starbucks or Microsoft here (although you can apparently purchase a copy of any program you can imagine along with access code for about one dollar U.S.) but things run smoothly and the effects of the decades long sanctions on Iraq I'd heard described by my uncle (who visited the country in the 90's with Doctors Without Borders) obviously never made themselves known here.

However, while attempting to pay for various purchases via Paypal (a quarterly Christmas-every-season ritual we've established with my darling mother shipping our internet ordered goodies to us wherever we happen to be on the planet and thus satisfying my penchant for Michael Kors shoes and Hamid's for programming books) I was faced upon login not with the familiar account summary and funds balance but a big red-letter warning that the country from which I was trying to access the service was under sanction and therefore inaccessible to me.
What a pain.