So imagine you just barely finished attending to a troublesome email before your boss calls for you. You grab pen, paper and diary (you never know which will come in handy) and you rush in and say ‘good evening Sir,’ only for your greeting to be answered with a statement like: ‘you look tired and harassed.’ How do you handle this?

Do you retort, ‘But of course! I’ve been working for the past 8 hours part of which hours were spent under the hot sun,’ or do you smile shyly and pretend it was a rhetorical statement, or perhaps you smile and stumbling over your words, you chant, ‘Of course not Sir, I don’t look tired, this is my normal look.’

Whichever way you choose to handle the above or any other similar situation, you should bear in mind that while a quick-wit is sometimes equated with a smart mouth, they are not necessarily the same because while a quick wit can give you a safe landing, a smart mouth may likely land you in trouble and may not be much different from a dimwit after all.

So be guided accordingly.