In my profession I spend a lot of time justifying myself and the things that I do to crowds of auditors. It can sometimes be as much as twice a week that I find myself in a room with people seeking to find fault/make helpful suggestions about what I do.
I have various ways of dealing with these situations. My favourite (other than dancing on the table naked singing "I am the Walrus") is the 'play dumb' approach. Here, I volunteer no information and make my polite responses as monosyllabic as possible. This has served me well over the years.
The problem comes when one finds oneself accompanied by a Helpful. A Helpful will chatter away, spewing out potentially hard-to-explain facts like an incontinent hippo on a helter-skelter.
Today's Helpful had managed to keep quiet until the auditor complimented us on our documentation and got ready to leave. "Don't go!" burbled the Helpful, "Don't you want a demonstration of- erk!" He was cut off mid-sentence by an African tribal spear embedding itself between his shoulder blades with a satisfying 'thunk' and went face down onto the conference table, the spear at a jaunty angle with feathers attached to the end fluttering in the draft from the air-conditioning.
Fortunately it was only in my imagination.
Makes a change from thinking about sex, I guess.
