I suppose you could call it "nonverbal communication"

Got a haircut over the weekend. Wandered into work this morning, and my co-worker Felicia stopped to say, "Hey, Kenny, like the new look."

I thanked her. Then she added, "There's just one problem -- now that you've got short hair, how are we supposed to be able to tell when you've been thinking hard?"

I thought this was pretty funny, and mentioned it to my friend Jennifer later that morning. She grinned and said, "Yeah, we were all talking about that the other day...you were late for a status meeting and [project manager] August said, 'Could somebody go find Kenny -- but if his hair's all messed up, leave him alone because that means he's figuring something out...'"

Speaking of Jennifer, I haven't often seen her speechless, but Duane Liong (he whose spare bedroom I lived in for a few months) reduced her to that hapless state this morning. Jennifer, who is an important informational resource to me in my task of single-parenting teenage girls, was patiently explaining to me why it costs so much more money to return a young lady's hair to its natural brown from an artificial jet-black than it took to make it jet-black in the first place. (These are matters in which I am the neo-est of neophytes.) Duane came up and I said something to him about how much I appreciated the help Jennifer is to me on such matters. "Jen has been a huge help to me," I said, "because Jennifer was once a teenaged girl, which I never was."

Duane has three-year-old twin girls, of course, and so he said, "Hey, I could use somebody like that, too" -- apparently forgetting, momentarily, the fact that he has an exceptionally wise and competent wife. Then, I suppose on the no-time-like-the-present principle, he turned cheerfully to Jennifer and asked happily:

"So, what was it like?"

The problem with Duane's questions, the Gentle Reader perceives, is their undue specificity...