Stupendous Perspicuity

Do you ever have those moments when people are asking you all kinds of questions about things which either aren't in your wheelhouse or you simply don't care about?

That happens a lot at my job.

Like, I had some guy - who told me up front that he had created a document in one program and then transferred it to another, which is when a whole bunch of weird characters started showing up in it - ask me why that had happened and whether or not his computer had a virus. To which I gave one of the following three answers (I'll let you guess which one).

• Sorry, I'm not an IT person. 
• Dude, I'm not a freakin' IT person with access to your computer. 
• You're a doofus. 

Sometimes, however, the questions come from inside the office - kind of like how, in horror movies, the call is always coming from somewhere inside the house.

Frequently, the ones from inside the office are the ones that cause me to kind of lose it and write weird responses. Like the person who wanted me to weigh in on whether "cow's" was correct as the possessive form of an informal version of "cattle." The response which I crafted for her to send to the author ended up having a lot of quotation marks in it when I explained that "cow" is not an "informal" version of "cattle" - and may also have included the word "dipshit." (I recommended she not include "dipshit" in her mail to the author. She, on the other hand, chose to use a completely different set of much more professional-sounding words.)

There are times when I'm busy and don't really have time to deal with other people's stuff. And those always seem to be the times when people say "Could you give me an opinion on something?" but then don't tell you what they need the opinion on. Earlier today, that situation resulted in me saying "Lime green is seldom a good hair color."

But my favorite spur-of-the-moment response today was the most recent one. I was asked my opinion on the change of a title, and how I felt the removal of a comma would alter it. My response? "STUPENDOUS PERSPICUITY!" of course. Even though, as I was typing it, I wasn't entirely sure that perspicuity was a real word - or that it was applicable to the situation.

Oddly enough, when I looked at the title - and verified the word's veracity - I found that there was, indeed, a certain level of clarity offered by the comma which was lost when it was taken out. So... in some serendipitous way I was actually both strange and spot-on in my response.

How stupendously perspicuous of me.