To comma or not to comma

You know the worlds in a downward spiral when what happened in my office this morning happens at all. I work for an appraisal and consulting firm, which does appraisals and consulting for large industrial companies all over the USA, all over the world for that matter. Our tasks range from developing benchmark studies regarding a specific industry to consulting on property tax issues. Our staff is comprised of engineers, economists and freeloaders (I’m not an engineer or a freeloader). Most of our finished products come in the form of large bounded reports. Our reports can be as small as a few pages and as large as a thousand pages. A lot of time is spent on researching, compiling and analyzing data. Then we write up a report pertaining to the data. The report usually has several pages of boilerplate bull and 50 to 75 percent of actual narrative. I am often the person who writes the narratives along with all the other tasks that I am responsible for.

Then my co-worker, the “Can of Corn” (I call him the “Can of Corn” because this is the name a woman once gave my little brother’s pecker. She had finished riding him and told him that she felt like she had just rode a can of corn. I thought it best fit my co-worker, thus his office name) reviews the report and he makes the appropriate changes. Our agreement is I don’t care if he changes what I write but never, I mean never mark the report up in red marker and then expect me to make the changes. He has a computer in his office too and he can make the changes himself and let me know about them later. This has worked well for some time. He catches the errors in the tense used and other grammar-type errors and corrects them himself. But he never changes the content, the intent or the view of the report. This has been an excellent arrangement; it has worked well without a problem.

This morning my beloved anal-retentive “Can of Corn” went completely nuts and flipped out. He asked me if there should be a “comma” before the word “and” when listing a strand of objects. I told him that it was one of those areas in writing that is up to the discretion of the writer. In my eyes it is redundant but others may see it another way. With work up to my eyebrows and deadlines knocking me about I really didn’t give a flying fuck one-way or the other. This wasn’t good enough for him. The quandary took hold of his angst and he couldn’t let it go.

Then I see him coming down the hall from the library carrying a butt load of technical writing books and books on writing styles. He is totally in a rage about the issue. He has thumbed through all of the books, sticky marked several pages and cannot find where the rule applies or any specific rule that may apply. Then the engineer next door (the Walking Dumb as I refer to him) decides this is his opportunity to get into the fray and if you have ever been around engineers, they know everything. Before you know it I have two grown men debating a non-issue in my office. The volume was getting louder and my pleas of “I don’t give a rats ass”, were lost in the din.

After twenty minutes of incoherent debate I stood up from behind my desk and said,” Gentlemen when you have decided if a comma belongs or doesn’t belong call me on my cell. I’m walking down to Starbucks to stare at the ass, the lips and the tits on the new barista. And I didn’t use a comma.”

Man I love this job.