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Apology to Martin Erudjian

Martin,

I owe you an apology for how I treated you during last week's thread. Though I disagreed with you, you didn't say anything that deserved being insulted. I rashly formed a negative, and inaccurate, image of the type of person you were and didn't treat you with respect. I failed miserably at being open minded during my first few posts and ended up instead being condesending. Naturally you were upset, but you handled things more graciously than I did.

So a long overdue, "I'm sorry Martin."

Regards, Vinh

Since I can't help myself, I'll comment on something I noticed during last week's ill fated thread. Martin made the comment that an engineer's job is to deal with what ever crazy product specs get thrown at them. After thinking about it, I guess if you work on a huge project, where your part of the design is just one small box among hundreds, it's probably pointless to argue about the specs you are given. Good luck finding the person who created the specs. And you'd have even less luck convincing them to change their minds because the specs they gave you are a results of specs someone else gave them. Add to the fact that defense contractors have to work in secrecy, you'll always be kept in the dark. In the end all you can do is accept each assignment as a challenge to solve, and pray that someone in upper management is more enlightened than you.

I guess those of us on smaller teams have the luxary of arguing over specs, if we don't like what we hear. In fact it's our job to do a sanity check on whatever we're told to do. But, it's probably not the right attitude to have on a news group. It's not practical to expect a person to explain the entire context of their question to our satisfaction. We just have to assume they know what they are doing.

Reply to
Vinh Pham
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Oh, boy... Vinh, you didn't need to apologize. But I do appreciate the gesture. It's far too easy to get wires (messages, meaning, intent, whatever) crossed over this form of communication.

I did not take offense to anything you said. Yeah, maybe it bugged me a bit. But, when you are as busy as some of us are, you just can't let the lack of fluidity and clarity in a non-real-time conversation medium get to you or nothing gets done. I try to practice what I preach. The one thing that I keep repeating is that there are very few failures of process and that, if you dig deep enough, most failures are failures of design. And, with that comes my deep belief that one must be humble in understanding one's limitations, accepting criticism and evaluating other's opinions. I could go on, but don't want to turn this into a huge philosophy thread.

So, I just thought it was funny that it seemed I couldn't explain myself out of a paper bag. I kept saying "these are the specs" and you (and others) would say "never mind the specs, this is the better way to do it". And round-and-round in circles we went. No big deal.

But thanks, I appreciate it. I'll go ahead and take back all those bad things I said about you as soon as my wife gets home. I promise. :-)

-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Martin Euredjian

To send private email:

0_0_0_0 snipped-for-privacy@pacbell.net where "0_0_0_0_" = "martineu"

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Reply to
Martin Euredjian

Yeah I did. There were two annoying voices in my head. "You should apologize because..." "Screw that, you sholdn't apologize because..." I was getting sick of hearing them arguing :_p

Yes, it's difficult enough to communicate face to face, much harder when all you have are smiley faces. And we're always too lazy to read or write carefully. Another problem is it's too easy to forget there's a live person on the other side of the screen. We forget our manners and tend to write the first thing that comes to mind.

Then you have far more self control than I ;_) I tend to write overly long posts that most people never finish reading.

out

Yeah a silly little cycle we got ourselves into. At some point things start turning more emotional than intellectual. People's comments become overly critical and we end up being defensive.

LOL. I bet your wife will roll her eyes. If you ever watched the movie Swingers, there's a scene where a bunch of friends almost get into a violent confrontation with another group of guys, a gun gets drawn. A few scenes later, they're all hanging out together playing Nintendo like they were highschool buddies.

Anyways, thanks for accepting the apology and not rubbing things in.

Regards, Vinh

Reply to
Vinh Pham

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