It's difficult to not unintentionally make a convincing case for this specimen being a handy workplace gadget. She's the perfect personal assistant. She'll be your mental scrapbook, effortlessly keeping up as you deposit everything of note, consequential or not, to her. Faultlessly methodical and systematic, she'll readily be your secretary, fully living up to every titular connotation, even those lurking in the darker recesses of your imagination, if you happen to be that lucky person. She's about as eloquent as your compact thesaurus, but a smidgen tinier than it. If you happen to be damaged enough to thrive on pointless dissertations on the semantic analysis and cultural imperialistic implications of the most commonplace words, you've met your intellectual match.
If you take her out to dinner, she'll insist on splitting the bill, but more notably, arrange her share of the payment in the ascending order of denomination, coins through notes, which should distract you enough from the fact that she'll never let you pay for her. More of a geek than your carefully concealed gender bias will permit, she'll occasionally send you affectionate texts formatted in tidy, indented Java syntax - whitespace, brace brackets and all. She's admirably assertive, yet polite - unless you're a caller from an insurance company. Invade on her privacy and personal space without warrant, and you'll have a real situation on your hands. Full chain mail suit recommended, apology bouquet not.
But don't let all this disillusion you entirely, for hiding behind those guarded walls, lies a softer side that's apt to surprise you. And once you discover it, you'll wonder why you didn't see it all along, because this is the charming, lovable, thoughtful side. The one that manages to contort the foulest scowl on your face into a shamelessly toothy grin with the little things about her, the simple, yet endearing and enduring minutiae. In short, she has the potential to leave you feeling sloppier than a baby sploshing about in a tub of melting butter. Ordinarily, that might not be a good thing, but with her, it is.
If you spend enough time sieving through her bookshelves that splinter and split under the weight of massive Kafka and Dostoevsky volumes, you'll find copies of Meg Cabot sitting unabashedly, assured of their place, however infrequent, in her reading cycle. Also behind the studied, penetrating glare lies another hidden side. Pure dementia. One that bellows incoherent debasements of everything from supposed instrumental sounds, to long-hallowed school anthems, with equal parts deafening volume and grating atonality. One that spews the most bafflingly inane utterances imaginable, enough to furnish you with enough material to compile a sufficiently large tome of laughably inadequate epigrams, which she will insist on spell checking and proofreading prior to publication.
While all this sounds like a wonderful package, there is a single piece of pertinent advice to be taken very seriously. Her idea of light-hearted fun just might not suit you too well, unless you enjoy feeling like a ravenous hound in heat for the greater portion of your day. Hide your buttons well, because if she finds them, she'll push them until they break, or more probably, you do.
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