Freelance dilletante

When you write your CV or your letter of motivation for a job in my line of work, one of the things you always say is that you have the ability to 'master a brief' quickly.

What that often means is that you have the ability to get a superficial level of understanding of more or less anything and then write something that sounds vaguely convincing. 

The last couple of months I've had to learn about:

• Oil pipelines (see above)
• Dermal fillers
• Cloud-based applications for small businesses
• Frequent flyer programmes
• Health supplements
• the Yellow Pages in Hong Kong

and so on and so on. How much do I actually know about these things? Not a lot. But does it really matter?