The finicky nitpicker

Being a writer in a MedComs company has its consequences when it comes to daily life (just look at the title of this post). You know you take your job too seriously when:

-You unconsciously proofread newspapers and criticize the grammar/punctuation/sentence structure used.

-You capitalise the first letter of the first word (also known as sentence case) in every new sentence when chatting with people on Skype and MSN.

- You're the unanimously appointed writer/editor of the family and are called upon at 3am to proofread and share your 'expert' opinion on resumes, cover letters and CVs.

- Text alignment, page margins, colour schemes and font size can be a source of manic depression or insane glee.

- You become a paranoid hypochondriac overnight. Writing about pneumonia makes you wonder whether you've had it all this time (that darn cough that never went away) and reading a manuscript on overactive bladder syndrome makes you want to pee constantly.

- You can generate impressive bios based on 2 line CVs from the most boring people on Earth in the blink of an eye.

- MS Word, Powerpoint and RefMan become the Holy Grail of your existence. Nevermind the bombings in Baghdad and Obama's strategies to fight unemployment; Word crashed on you today and the world as you know it is ending.

- Illegally obtaining a reference paper to support the fact that 30% of all women suffer from breast cancer in Singapore can make your day.

- Your opinion of a person relies heavily on how many typos there are in their emails to you.

- You dream about having an asthma attack, not knowing how to use your inhaler properly, and then dying as a result because you can't remember the steps from when you were drafting the patient information leaflet.

- Your 'spam' mail consists of updates on medical advances and clinical research from Medscape and Wed MD.

- You completely lose it when someone hands you a letter to read with double spaces between some of the words.

- You cringe inwardly and outwardly when people say 'Oh yeah, the feedbacks we got were very helpful; there were some stuffs that needed to be improved on though.'

- You can sit through a perfectly normal conversation about infant diarrhoea over dinner and not gag once or lose your appetite.

- Your 'lingo' sounds something like this:
'So then you go Ctrl+A and Ctrl+F. Or just do a Ctrl+H to save time.. *pause* You don't know what Ctrl +H does? Where have you been living- on the moon??'
'Ok, Shift + Enter will help better with sentence alignment than just Enter. No orphan words remember? Why don't these things bother you?!'

I think I've made my point.