dangling participle

so, for a while, I worked at this place. an office place with lots of rows of desks and cubicles and people hunched over computers at them. and at this office place I worked at, convention called for us to communicate with each other via IM. there was no leaning over cubicle walls, or picking up the phone for a quick chat. and god forbid you actually cantilevered yourself out of your executive aeron chair and walked over to speak with someone in person.

that just to set the stage. the thing is we'd conduct most of our business communications throughout the day via IM. a typical conversation:

12345Engineer: hey *s!, the product specs call for A, B and C
12345Engineer: but we can only fulfill 2 of them in the timeframe.
12345Engineer: which ones do you want?
12345Me: whichever two cost the least
12345Engineer: okay, we can't really do C
12345Me: yeah, fine. A & B, then.
12345Enginner: um, can we just do A?
12345Me: didn't you just say A and B?
12345Engineer: okay, so we really can't do B either. we don't have
12345Engineer: the technology to do it
12345Me: wtf? the specs call for A, B, & C. why did you agree to them?
1234 Engineer: we didn't really think we'd have to do it
12345Me: whatever.

well, one day, I was having one such conversation with one of my colleagues from the other end of the office, a colleague with whom I'd had fairly minimal, if fairly odd, contact with during my tenure at this office place. and in the middle of a conversation that looked very much like the one above, the script suddenly veered when this appeared on my screen:

12345Me: the contract we signed with the client calls for A, B and C
12345Me: to be completed.
12345Colleague: I love you

I'm actually one of those people who reacts well in an emergency. have a heart attack, badly cut yourself, get trapped in an elevator, have a damning secret you can't tell anyone, and you can rest assured that I will know exactly what to do, and do it calmly and well. but throw me this, and I sit like a squirrel at midnight, facing the headlights of a careening roadster. I sat there, blinking at the screen, then closed the computer and went out for a coffee. a big one.

and never, ever, spoke of it to anyone til now.


so this story has not real point or end. but more a question--what would you have done?