Things I've written that have amused other people, Episode 7

A customer asked for advice on how to accomplish something, the details of which are not important, except to say that what they were trying to do was far more complicated than the twenty-word summary would suggest. And I wasn’t convinced that it was a good idea, sort of like asking for advice on how to catch a baseball in your teeth or pick all the cheese off your cheeseburger. I explained several of the pitfalls of their approach, the ones that I could think of off the top of my head, things they need to watch out for or take precautions against, and I concluded with the sentence, “This idea is fraught with peril, and I fear that my answers to your questions will be interpreted as approval rather than reluctant assistance.”

That sentence immediately went into many people’s Raymond-quotes file.