What does escalation have to do with acing the evaluation - and why shouldn’t you do it? 2. Your added information says “he doesn’t want to see it”. Who is “he” and what is “it”?
A lot of what you’ve written in this thread seems to make leaps between different pieces of information that assume the reader possesses more knowledge than they do. To people without all the facts or the linkages that presumably exist in your mind, many of your sentences appear to be random non-sequiturs.
> As for the NSA, Fort Meade is a pit. Also kind of pricey to live there. I think a lot
> of workers commute in from Pennsylvania. That’s a heck of a drive each day.
NSA employees live in most of the communities within driving distance of Fort Meade, which means that they live all over the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area. Some live outside that area. Fort Meade is a army base, so few live there. They tend to live in Howard, Anne Arundel, and Prince George’s County, with smaller numbers living in Baltimore, D.C., Baltimore County, Montgomery County, and even Northern Virginia. Some, but not many, commute from even further, including from Pennsylvania. Of course, it’s expensive. It’s a major metropolitan area. Major metropolitan areas are crowded and expensive. To find a cheap place to live, you have to commute a long way. The cost of commuting and the cost of buying a house (or of renting) will always be a trade-off.
Listen. Thanks to this thread I’ve already lost 2 hours out of my weekend, as I’m going to have to watch Glengary Glen Ross again. Planting seeds about re-playing portal is just not on. I’ve got shit to do. Important shit. 5 hour video game sessions are not an option. So can it.
This whole thread calls that assertion into question. For that, your post #59 was reasonably intelligible. So you are capable of written English if you put your mind to it.
Serious question: Is there something in the thought processes and communication habits of engineers that leaves them so inept at written English? I wonder if the many lacunæ and non sequiturs that jjimm noted in dropzone’s text, leaping over large gaps in meaning and with barely a shred of context, may be patterned by a familiarity with machine operations, in which so much that is routine mechanics is automated and can be taken for granted, while the engineer’s attention is focused on specific details at any given time. There must be something about the cognitive mode needed to work with machines that habitually leaves background operations/context unexpressed while highlighting certain salient features. Is my guess.
My one Unix techie friend drives me crazy when she explains computer stuff to me, because she rattles off all kinds of techie jargon I’ve never heard of, and I always have to make her back up and explain in laywoman’s language each concept she is referring to. She never remembers that I don’t have her knowledge of the subject. Apparently once I’d won a way into her confidence by showing familiarity with some computer stuff, she slipped into the elliptical mode of tech talk in which so much is taken for granted.
dropzone, if it’s any comfort, I totally get what you’re saying. Always have, always will. And I think you write good. Or well. Or whatever. I’ve worked with engineers for so long I’m not sure anymore.
