Fulsome responses. Maybe too fulsome.

Some genuine responses I’ve emailed back in response to various work requests. Perhaps the SDMBers can suggest more?

[ul]
[li]O great and powerful master, supreme ruler of the firmament, whose smile is as the sun; whose very knees are objects of divine reverence; before whom the stars themselves bow down in rapture; who teacheth beans to sprout; whose smallest wish is the command of all right-thinking people, including ants; whose very countenance is like unto the gods themselves; whose loins shall be the foundation of dynasties of kings; who inspireth Lithuanians to speak in iambic pentameter, and Albanians to build small mud huts and sit in them with their eyes closed, holding their breath, though Lord knows why; and whose boot I am not worthy to polish with a viscous, sticky, brownish paste, I have done as thou hast commanded.[/li][li]By the beard of my grandfather, I swear that I shall neither rest nor eat, nor bathe, nor look at small yellowish pickles, nor swallow live rabbits, nor dance naked on stage before an audience of world leaders, nor pluck down the stars and fashion them into a gaud to ornament thy brow, nor form a smallish socialist cooperative and plot to overthrow world democracy; neither shall I sit beneath my desk and read aloud, in a strange voice, the verses of the poet Omar Khayyám, nor erect a two hundred feet tall statue of thee, made of rarest jade, standing in a pose oddly reminiscent of an epileptic beaver; nor shall I even whistle the third movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, off-key, as I float down the mighty Orinoco River in a half-inflated inner tube, before I take note of thy words, O My Master![/li][li]Lo, the eagle that wheels in the pale pink sky at sunrise, proud and aloof; the mountains, stern and inhospitable, capped with white and shrouded in mist at the breaking of the day; the forests and valleys, dark and green, awaiting the sun’s first touch; the quick, babbling streams, silver-white in the grey dawn’s half-light; the toasters, awaiting their first slice of bread; the gerbils, eating from their seed dishes and frankly not giving a hoot about the time of day; and the deluxe extra-sized novelty ribbed condoms in their plastic wrappers; yea, all these bear witness that thy bidding has been done.[/li][/ul]

(Thank goodness my boss has a sense of humour.)

Too fulsome, indeed. My default response is “I exist only to serve.”

“I’ll get to it when I get to it”

Are you by any chance shooting for the other definition of “fulsome”?

I don’t think so. “Fulsome”: that’s that prison from that song, right?

One time when I was working my computer job, our (internal) client informed us that they didn’t like the website we’d put together for them because, essentially, they’d changed all their requirement and didn’t bother to tell us. I responded with an email that ended up going to about half the company apologizing because I still had yet to receive my Madam Cleo home mind-reading kit that I had ordered several weeks earlier.

My boss thought it was hilarious. The vice president, when the email landed on his machine, found it less so. I got a talking to, but they knew I didn’t care, since I was on my way out anyway.

At an old job a few years back, everyone in my group had to submit a weekly progress report. There were only three of us, we all knew what each other was doing, our boss barely understood English, and most of our time was spent waiting (often for weeks at a time) for the client to send us new information, so there usually wasn’t much point to these reports. For my last week (the client had finally gone bankrupt and everyone was being laid off. We’d seen this coming a mile away), I decided to have some fun. Instead of the normal two-three line summary, I wrote a five-page report of my supposed adventures over the course of the week, including conversations with a sentient ball of lint named George. For Friday, I was offered a multi-million-dollar job at Morgan Stanley that I politely turned down because I still had five days left at X company and didn’t want to neglect my duties to them.

Several hours later, the manager came over and said in a very concerned tone, “Sub, if you have an offer at another company, you should go ahead and take it. This project is finished, so I wouldn’t want you to miss an opportunity just to stay here.” Not a word was said about the rest of the report. Odd.