E-mail today from a favorite student. (Names removed to protect the innocent...and the irretrievably stupid. 'Xxxx' is the student; Yyy is the boss.)
You'll never guess what one of the boss' told me the other day... I wrote them a proposal for something that they asked for and he came back to me at my desk and said, "Xxxx, as Yyy and I's net-worth goes up you need to use smaller words and simpler sentences. This is too hard to read. Make this paper into a bulleted list." No joke. Isn't that insane?
<sigh> Makes me wonder if there's really any validity to the things I tell my students about communication skills and grokking the big picture. Maybe I have become too cloistered in my ivory tower to understand the world they have to work in. Maybe while I sit in my office, the entire outside world has remade itself using Dilbert as a blueprint.
Blech.
