Questions out the wazoo

"The candidate has teaching experience out the wazoo," I said, upon which my colleague from the biology department said, "Where, exactly, is the wazoo located?"

As a trained grammarian, I am accustomed to being accosted by desperate people needing immediate answers for life's difficult questions: is it i before e or vice versa? And what does vice versa mean anyway? Is it related to veni, vidi, vici? What is an ide and why should I beware of it? Exactly how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable are all the uses of this world, to the nearest whole number? If you read every seventeenth word of Tristram Shandy starting from the end, does he ever grow up? And is it true that if you deconstruct Derrida, your brain will explode?

These questions I can handle, but I'd rather not get mired in the controversy raging over the exact location of the wazoo. Besides, I may have committed a minor indiscretion: I believe the condition of a candidate's wazoo is probably one of those "don't ask, don't tell" questions, the questions search committees wish candidates would just go ahead and answer without being asked, like do you enjoy sexually harrassing students? How often? How many open cases? Any substance abuse problems? How likely are you to try to run over a colleague with your car? Did you write your cover letter yourself or did you get help? How much help? From whom? Any plagiarism in your Master's thesis? Inflated degrees on the resume? And do you really have teaching experience out the wazoo or is that something else entirely?

But we can't ask those questions and even if we could, what kind of confidence would we have in the answers? So I stick to i before e except after c and leave the whole wazoo question in the capable hands of the biologists.