That does show up in a tendency to neglect stuff that I'm not being actively hassled about, but it also made me well aware that my superiors often didn't know enough about what they were talking about and were trying to impose inappropriate and sometime self- contradictory priorities.
My expertise in prioritising my time does represent more than a simple record of what other people told me they wanted and it does include the signficant insight that the predictive powers of everybody involved (including me) aren't all that wonderful. On one occasion I produced a project plan (for a fairly simple project) in parallel with one of my colleagues - neither of us knew that the other had been stuck with the job, so we didn't collaborate - and both of us came out with much the same total figure (some 1300 man hours) to within a few percent
Neither set of time estimates had that much to do with the length of time took to complete our part of the project.
You may think so, but since you don't ever seem to have done the kind of work I was doing, it isn't a particularly well-founded insight.
In this particular instance, the distinction between "fairly clear" and "perfectly clear" is purely a matter of style.
I was telling krw to go soak his head, but since I didn't have to be ostentatiously rude to get the point across I could afford to soften the wording.
You need to find a dictionary - even in Texas yoour local library should have one -and look up "metaphorical".
You may need to go further and get advice on interpreting idiomatic phrases, of which "teaching your grandmother to suck eggs" is an example.
Or you may just need to give up on the lame jokes that only a Texan oaf would bother making.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen