Sometimes real life is the stuff of which legends are made. Sometimes, it just produces angry rants. This one sprouted from work yesterday, where I am an editorial assistant for a medical journal. Doctors, as I have said on more than one occasion, are extremely intelligent, just not always terribly bright. This is a shining example of one such MD who I have the (general) pleasure of reporting to.

A morality tale about The Importance of Grammar

“No women in houston”

This is the phrase written to me by my editor-in-chief. Clearly, it requires some deciphering. Surely “houston” must refer to Houston, Texas. This is known by the fact that I was asked only a few moments before to locate the email address of a specific person at Baylor College of Medicine which is, in fact, located in Houston, Texas. So we can thus adjust the phrase to be “No women in Houston.” But could there really be no women in Houston? Women are roughly half of the general population… There must certainly be women in a place as large as Houston, Texas!

Through a bit of creative navigating, I managed to figure out that the name of the individual that I was asked to locate was spelled incorrectly. It was not Mallady as my editor-in-chief had written, nor Malladi (which was the only approximation I could find at Baylor), but Malety. Ah, slight difference in spelling there. So when I had located a Malladi, his response had been the miraculously confusing, “No women in houston.” So now I had the correct spelling of the name I was looking for, yet that still does not shed any additional light on the mysteriously emailed phrase haunting my inbox.

But what’s this? Dr. Malety is actually a woman?

Ah… suddenly things are looking a bit clearer. The phrase was not, “No women in houston,” as had been written, but was actually:

“No, (she’s a) woman in Houston.”

Apparently the Malladi that I had found originally was a man. My mistake. For a while there I was unclear as to whether or not there were any women currently working for Baylor, considering I had been informed that there weren’t any women anywhere in Houston, Texas.

This just goes to show that even gastroenterologists (who I spend a good amount of time working with and for) need grammar, too. It makes things so much easier for me (the support staff) when I can understand what you’re talking about the first time around.

Also, while we’re on the topic, stop writing your entire email sans punctuation in the subject line. It does not facilitate communication, goodwill, nor a timely response on my part. And don’t respond to one email while actually physically hitting the Reply button to another completely unrelated one. It makes me unhappy. I don’t ask for much, really. Just some punctuation every once in a while. Maybe a correctly spelled name when you ask me to look up someone’s email address. I mean, for fuck’s sake! Just take an extra 10 seconds on your emails and we’ll all be a lot happier.