Get to the point, Jack!

I’m generally a fairly happy-go-lucky fella, and have a pretty high sickness tolerance. However, intermittent bouts of clean-freak-ness overcome me. It could relate to all sorts of things. Sometimes, it’s my room. Sometimes, the garage. Other times, the kitchen. On smaller scales, it could be filing cabinets, sock drawers, the gaps between the keys on my computer’s keyboard, my ear canal, even my navel. Last week, though, it was the turn of my Inbox. After re-reading only a few mails, I knew at once, that I had quite a task at hand. You see, I found that a lot of my emails had been clueless victims of my verbal diarrhoea.

Where a simple “I need this. Now! Please send, ASAP” could do, I am likely to find myself having said “It would be extremely considerate of you to consider expediting the dispatch of…”. Now, this is likely a time-hardened process within my head, and probably happens quite naturally, but I found it quite disturbing when revisiting old emails. I know that most of my victims aren’t reading this, but I offer all of them my sincerest apologies. If I had been the recipient of my emails, as responses, I would’ve sent myself beer that’s gone flat, or Rhino Poo in a Box, probably even death threats. Upon further reflection, though, like everything else that’s flawed about me (which is quite a list), I would like to apportion the blame for being unnecessarily verbose, to somebody else.

And, that would be every person who has been involved in educating me in a formal capacity. English teachers from high school, history and social sciences rhetors (they’re especially culpable), those that taught Manufacturing Processes and Materials Science during my bachelor’s studies, and finally, the fine folks who took a perfectly enthusiastic engineer and converted him into a disgruntled non-researcher during my master’s course.

A “quarter-page” (how ’bout we switch to turning in exams in pocket notebooks in that case?) answer was absolutely necessary if it was in response to a “4 mark (has to be followed by the incredulous look that the local grocer gives you when you’re haggling with him and trying to save 50 paise or snag an extra potato) question!”. I’m surprised how I managed to retain use of the extremities of my right hand after repeating myself through nearly twelve pages of misery while answering the paper on foundry technology. There’s only so much you can do with gooey stuff and a box of sand. Ask any kindergartener who has played in a sand pit! Oh, and to save the best for last, when I went to university for a master’s degree in an engineering discipline, I managed to get through it having written approximately forty-thousand words in reports and other such junk and not bothered with one engineering drawing. I was told this was because it was a “Master of Science” degree. I can only surmise that scientists are, in fact, secretly, novelists.

Anyway, there’s likely no cure for this ailment of mine. Expect no let up in the word count the next time you’re around here, if you’re brave enough to visit again, that is!

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