Most of my professional work was done in the famous, very innovative and extremely self-important Silicon Valley -- the area south of San Francisco and north of Morgan Hill. Only 40 years ago, the area was lush with orchards growing plums, prunes, cherries and other kinds of fruit.
Today, it's buildings, shopping malls, houses, apartments and strips of businesses lining El Camino Real from San Jose to San Francisco. It's still beautiful, but one can only imagine with a stinging sense of sadness how naturally stunning it once was.
If you live in Silicon Valley, you know that you can't throw an iPhone without hitting an engineer -- which sometimes seems like a good idea. The place is filthy with them.
I've worked with lots of engineers. For the most part, I adore them. They can do all the things I can't from installing more memory in your PC or fixing a broken washing machine, to designing and installing a spectacular Christmas light display that's synchronized with classical music and broadcast for blocks on an unused AM radio frequency. Engineers are darn useful people.
And although I'm reluctant to generalize quite so broadly, unfortunately some of them also can be quirky, data-driven, literal-minded, socially awkward and as sensitive to the needs of emotionally driven people as a scorpion on a toilet seat. So I admire these engineers, too, of course, but talking to them can be as difficult as navigating your way through a company's voice-recognition answering system while gargling Tic-Tacs.
Here's an example that makes my blood pressure read like a pair of great bowling scores.
Whenever these latter engineers refer to the beauty of words carefully crafted, those pearls of prose strung together with the skill and precision of a master jeweler, they always -- without fail -- use the word "verbiage."
Oh, you've heard them do it. They stand there with their glasses on, right in the opening of your cubicle in their short-sleeved white shirt with the blue vertical stripes and they give a dismissive flick of their wrist -- as if writing were the essence of insignificance, lower in the scheme of things than a dung beetle's bottom, as disposable as a square of used toilet paper stuck to the sole of their Rockport shoes.
"And then," they say, "you can add the verbiage."
Its the way they say it. It's as if -- in their minds -- "verbiage" is a cross between "vermin" and "garbage." And not just any vermin and garbage. It's a bloated, bubonic-plague-infested Norwegian wharf rat with pus oozing from its open sores, and a dump truck load of putrid, steaming, maggot-wriggling trash that's been coagulating for a month in the sweltering heat of the sultry summer sun in Washington, D.C. That's what they seem to be saying!
Well, at least that's what it sounds like to me, he sighed.
So whenever anyone dares to say "verbiage" in front of me, I fine them a dollar and give them the long explanation why. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they just stare.
I'd be living in a palace in Barbados by now if they simply would have paid me.
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