In a message dated 11/22/2004 12:06:08 PM Mountain Standard Time, joshua@hutchinson.net writes:

Rather, he explained the fallacies he saw in your argument.

I have no objections to having fallacies pointed out;

however, I had made no assumptions. I had

made a SUGGESTION and ASKED FOR COMMENT.

I had thought about the situation for some time before

I was ready to put forth the suggestion. Therefore, condescendingly telling me I had made

incorrect assumptions was maddening. I shall now

explain why I almost never make assumptions.

When I first became a crime scene technician,

my boss would never allow me to say a substance

was blood. I had to say "a red fluid which

appeared to be blood." Even if somebody is

lying on the floor with a shotgun blast through

his chest, he is lying in a pool of "a red

fluid which appears to be blood." I couldn't

understand why I had to do this, until the day

that my boss and I were trailing an injured murderer

down an alley by the places he had stopped

to bleed. The last blood spatter was in the

middle of a blind alley with no doors opening onto

it and a wall too high for an injured person to

climb. This made no sense at all to us. There

was nowhere for him to go from there. Nevertheless,

a sample was taken from each splotch. When

the lab report came back, we learned that the last

spatter was brake fluid. We had lost him on the street,

at the end of the alley, where he apparently got into a car.

I don't KNOW that he got into a car. He might

have gotten into a truck or onto a motorcycle

or bicycle. He might have gotten into a flying

saucer. It APPEARED that he had gotten into

a car. I cannot ASSUME what he did. I wasn't

there. I didn't see it.

Therefore I rarely make assumptions.

I asked whether my suggestion would work. I

have no problem at all with being told that it would

not work. It was the condescending attitude, in this

case and in the "old Tom Swift books," post, that

was like a red flag to a bull. And you have apparently

missed some posts, because this is the

third time in less than a month that Carlo

has dropped on me like a ton of lead,

assuming I have assumptions that I do

not have. The first two times I

laboriously explained what I was saying

and why and how I had not meant what

he assumed I meant. This time he got

me on a day when I was ill and already

crabby, and I bit back. I wished that I

had not done so two seconds after I

sent it, but I couldn't unsend it.

As to ISPs and programs, you explained

without acting as if I had an IQ of minus

thirty. Thank you.

Anne