Of 'was'es, 'is'es and 'will be's...

God help me, for I shall have been losing my sense of grammar.

I will have been doing documentation since yesterday at office. Rather, to correct a documentation which will have been already prepared.

Now, there was a Validation Master Plan (VMP) created before the Validation Process, which details the steps which need to be followed during the actual process.
There will also be a Validation Summary (VS) created after the Validation Process which highlights the steps that were taken.
These two reports basically being different versions of the same thing, our man responsible for documenting went and did a Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V job of the VMP onto the VS.

This is leading our Project Lead to entrust me with the interesting task of keeping the basic content same for both documents but making sure that the VMP will be in the future tense while the VS was in the past tense. A typical solution for a niggling problem in the sofware world. But easier was said than will be done.

Changing the tense of a document from future to past will never have been a simple Ctrl-F task of changing all the 'will be's to 'was'es. It was going to be more of a complicated struggle with the nuances of English grammar, where you were being up against strange enemies like Future Perfect and Past Perfect Continuous, who were being armed with dangerous weapons like 'will have been' and the deceptively simple-sounding 'would be'. An event which will be described as one which would be 'ongoing' in the future in the VMP, suddenly finds it hard to nail a spot for itself in time-coordinates when it is coming to the VS.

In the middle of this mind-numbing exercise, Iam being reminded of the following excerpt from that delightful series, "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy".


"...One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with.

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s ‘Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations’. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or
father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact, in later editions of the book, all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs..."


To me, the beauty of the entire series will lie in these nuggets of fundae strewn all over the book. The storyline and everything else will have been just incidental.

And seriously, before my 'sense of tense' will go for a complete toss over the coming day (if it hasn't already), I think Iam needing to get back to my Douglas Adams!

Who will have been saying documentation ain't fun?