Only an Englishman can say F-Off and make it sound magnanimous.
The throw away scene in which this line occurs is perfect as part of an all too lucid workplace allegory.
To frame the metaphor, imagine you’re at your job, and you’ve just been told to handle The Big Emergency. You‘ve got to chase the Giant up the Cliffs of Insanity and rescue the princess.
You jump right on it. You use all of your strength and skill to climb the impossibly high cliff. Just when you’re almost at the top, your only tool – the rope, or your laptop, or the purchasing database – fails. A lesser person would say Fuck It and fall into the the sea. But not you. You resolve to keep working, with your bare hands. It’s torturous, but you’re making headway. You’re going to save the Princess!
And then the Spaniard (the Boss) pops-in. He knows you’re busy. He’s the one who sent you up the cliff in the first place. He pretends to make a little casual conversation but you both know he is actually asking for an update. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to reply as the Man in Black does:
Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but this [climbing a cliff without a rope] is not as easy as it looks, so I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t distract me. (Again, that British gift for understatement)
The Spaniard leaves, but like many Bosses, he has the bizarrely alchemical notion that just by inserting himself into the situation, shit will somehow transmute magically into success. When the Spaniard returns, he actually asks if things can be sped up, which is when the Man in Black delivers this great line ( as you read it, imagine saying it to your boss next time you’re in the middle of a Big Emergency):
If you’re in such a hurry, you could lower a rope or a tree branch or find something useful to do.
In the movie, Indigo the Spaniard is not actually the Boss, he’s more like a mid level manager (which is allegorically better). Vizzini is the Boss; he believes blindly in the power of his intellect and blames the world when, inconceivably,
it doesn’t follow his plans, but that’s a subject for another post.
For now, I’ll work on delivering my sarcasm with a bad british accent.
