"Lost" (Not the show)

Had one of those wonderful class-war encounters this morning. In my day job I deal with University personnel at all levels--from food service to regents. A professor was in this morning and he had to fill out a form indicating that he'd lost something (to get a replacement). When he hit the part where he had to explain why it got lost he said as he wrote "Well, it's lost because it's lost." and he wrote "lost" in this space.

I tell him "You need to expand on that; describe the circumstances in which it was lost". He gets a bit more cranky, starts trying to throw a bit of weight around and I tell him "Look, they don't like facile answers on these things." There's a dead stop. I look up from what I'm doing and realize he's puzzling out whether he's been insulted or not. Hedging his bets, he turns friendly, after a last "well, if they don't like that, they can take it up with [the university president]."

But he's not done with "facile": "That's a great word. I should use that on some of my students' papers. Some of them read like they've been translated from Russian." I smile and nod. The rest of the encounter is brief and to the point; and now he's gone, ready to tell his students that their poor writing skills are facile.

With a job like this, why would anyone want to make comics, I ask ya.