"If you think about it..." "oh just GTF out of here"

Please do, this word-vomit rant was terrible. “Structure” and “flow” are not optional in composition.

I left my word salad fork in my other pants…

Can someone tell me what it is the guy thought the OP should think about so I can judge who the real asshole is?

I’m sure you’ll figure it out…if you think about it.

An engineer wrote something convoluted and difficult to read? Say it ain’t so! :stuck_out_tongue:

I sincerely hope that the OP is more clear when communicating with the “squirrel” than he is here.

Insecure aging engineer grievously insulted by young college grad using figure of speech deemed not sufficiently deferential. Film at 11.

On the plus side, it’s nice to see Wally from the Dilbert strips is alive and well.

Wow, that was incoherent. Took me an hour to parse that verbal diarrhea down to the operative trigger:

Ok, it’s the “Perfect Ain’t Good Enough” program. Ouch, that’s a scary one. But at least we can reconstruct what happened:

(1) Mr. Chap spends weeks on his presentation, working out every single detail and every contingency plan, not so much for the good of the company but to validate his worth in the eyes of every other person in the company.
(2) Despite all his hard work, there’s a flaw in his plan. (Hard to say what it is – the OP doesn’t bother to mention anything about the meeting that matches, you know, reality.) A junior engineer points out his flaw of logic, carefully using words which, for most people, would be taken as respectful and non-judgemental.
(3) Sadly, this “triggers” the program in Mr. Chap’s head. All of a sudden, he’s faced with the fact that he’s made a mistake, one he should have known about, and suddenly he’s transported back in time to that second-grade report card containing nearly all “E”'s, all carefully and desperately earned…but his parents send him to his room w/o supper and take his allowance away, because of that single, unfair “S” he got in Gym Class.
(4) Unable to control his rage, Mr. Chap casts an area-effect Transfiguration spell that turns all the other people into mutant, diseased rodents.

I wonder why that last part was kept out of the news? At least, there’s nothing on Yahoo! or CNN about diseased chipmunks suddenly running amok at an engineer’s conference. Well, I guess it’s the sort of thing most people wouldn’t want to hear about…if you think about it. :wink:

I started to, but realized that I just didn’t want to think about it.

“If you think about it”
is usually a nice way of calling someone out for not thinking things through.
Sort of a reminder that they may not be seing the forest through all the trees (aka ‘dude, you’ve spent so much time on this project you lost sight of the big picture’)

Some people take constructive criticism, some get defensive.

…and some lose their minds and go WTF, WTF, WTFinginallthatissacredF?

I wouldn’t even go that far. I’ve often heard it used simply as rhetorical glue to jump from proposition to supporting statement, e.g. “Or we could just cater the lunch. It’ll cost $20 per person which, if you think about it, isn’t that much more expensive and a whole lot easier.” The implication isn’t “if you would actually think about it, dummy, you’d see X” but “once one takes this to its logical conclusion, they would likely conclude X”.

Reads as if he’s been sniffing his rhetorical glue.

Man, of all the people to be criticizing others’ use of language . . .

You don’t seriously mean that, do you?

The hell you say.

Bwhaaa… made you look!

I had no idea I had admonishing power around here. Cool! :smiley:

Sorry for the pain and suffering.

Should have stopped here. That last line was golden.

Okay, that was funny.

Not really, I was enjoying the thought of mollusks with sabreteeth and got distracted.

Or perhaps lapsing into a comma.

Okay, now I’m starting to feel insecure. I was able to breeze through the OP without any issues and was actually quite entertained.