"Can you opine?"

I get strange requests/questions at work all the time. Since I announce internal releases for databases and patch sets to pretty much all the groups related to database development, I have fairly high visibility. I guess people [who don't know any better] seem to get strange ideas like:

• "Hey, Robert announces these releases to us. Therefore he must be familiar with the *fill in the blank* of the database."
• "Hmmm.. I can't install this database release. Let's call up Robert and he'll know how to fix my problem." (I HATE being tech support for other engineers... that's why we even have an IT department!)

Anyway, so last night this engineer from another team in India emailed me asking whether I think it's crucial for them to perform a certain test on a database product. I found it strange and idiotic that some other team should be asking me (and I'm not even a manager) about how they should go about their testing.... and I told him that, in a friendlier, yet still-annoyed way. I guess his manager (who, I think, should be the one making this decision) probably got annoyed at the fact that I wasn't given them a straight answer and emailed me as well. He basically asked the same question in a different way and ended the email with the question, "Can you opine?"

At first I almost fell out of my chair laughing, because I thought that this was perhaps another case of Engrish at work....... I was thinking, "What the hell is... 'opine'? Is this even a word? Is this another case of words that look like they're written in English, but they're really not?" (This is always the first thing that crosses my mind because I often receive emails from Asian engineers that look like they're written in English, but I can't seem to understand them when I try to read them.) When I finally came to my senses, I tried looking up "opine" and found out that it is, in fact, a perfectly valid word! Maybe outsourcing does have some advantages after all.