He wanted “Asterixes.” You got Asterix.

If someone tells you precisely what they want and you are an obedient slide jockey, there are two humane options: correct them now or comply exactly and let reality do the education. I chose the second. Mid‑00s marketing: Paul—pacing, dictating, unshakable—said he wanted “asterixes” on the presentation. I asked, he insisted. I put little Asterix (the moustached Gaul, not a punctuation mark) on every slide. The man got his brand of clarity.

A toy model: suppose a boss wants authority (Y) but is lazy about details (Z). He uses an ambiguous term that sounds technical but, crucially, cannot be corrected without admitting error and losing face. The literalist who implements the instruction trades a small bit of social discomfort for maximal leverage: you deliver exactly what was asked and the world corrects itself. (He refused to be called out; we called him “Gaul,” which one commentator memorably condensed to “He’s a Gaul, not a Viking.”)

Legal sidebar — Asterix Error Doctrine: when an instruction uses a near‑homophone of a standard technical term, the implementer will interpret it as the pop‑culture referent unless explicitly told otherwise. Remedy: literal compliance; damages: faint smell of roasted boar and a coworker insisting the Washington Monument is “an Obelix.” Also, for completeness, there is a worse misreading—asterixis, which is a medical flapping tremor—so yes, this story could have been edgier in a hospital way.

So what did we learn, besides how fun the French comics rights department would have been? Literal compliance is an anti‑argument: low cost, high pedagogy, theatrical. Paul’s slides looked exactly like he ordered, and the team learned two things at once—his stubbornness, and the correct spelling for asterisk—at no additional agency expense. Efficient, in a for‑certain‑values‑of‑efficient way.