A Thursday Quickie

It suddenly occurred to me that after being swamped with work for the last three point five days, I'm actually free right now (I recently decided that I'm not going to use decimals anymore, unless I absolutely must. They're bulky and hard to use. I'm only going to be using fractions from now on. And no messing around with mixed numbers, you tricksters! Anyway, as I was saying, it suddenly occurred to me that after being swamped with work for the last seven-halves days, I'm actually free right now). Seriously, I have nothing to do, az in order to kill time for the last hour of the day, I looked through some of my old posts. My ninth post from August 31st, 2006 was a good one. It is entitled "Away Messages," if anyone is interested in reading it. The point is I mention that I made "a little SNAFU earlier with pronoun/antecedent agreement," which I didn't want to go back and fix. My excuse for that was "I just don't feel like going back to fix it. That's just my little way of sticking it to the man. Power to the people." You might be able to tell where I'm going with this. Basically, this episode reminds me of that commercial, which shows Sprint's CEO telling his assistant that he's now getting these ridiculous rates on his Sprint service. He says "that's just my little way of sticking it to the man." The rest of the commercial goes like this:

Assistant: But, you are the man, sir.
CEO: I know.
Assistant: So you're sticking it to yourself?
CEO: Maybe.

Anyway, it occurred to me while I was reading that post that I AM the man, az I was sticking it to myself. Just to set the record straight, I'm going to post the old sentence and then correct it, all for your viewing, reading, and grammatical pleasure. (Just so you know, the antecedent of the pronoun is "him or her")

Old sentence: "It could be that I really don't like talking on the phone and would prefer to speak in person, in which case I'd be asking for their whereabouts just on the off chance that they're in the neighborhood."

Corrected sentence: "It could be that I really don't like talking on the phone and would prefer to speak in person, in which case I'd be asking for his or her whereabouts just on the off chance that he or she is in the neigborhood."

Okay, so it's a little bit tedious, but at least it's robust. Now I can sleep easier. Easierly. More easily.