I've spent most of my career as a support engineer or lab technician for some very smart people. It didn't take long for me to figure out Erik's personallity, and if he were to call me an "idiot" I'd just run the comment thru macro expantion and come up with something similar to your comment. But I have the advantage of years of experience both in dealing with this kind of interaction, as well as years of my own engineering success and failure, student's often do not.


Over the last 10 years I've also worked with a large number of people from India, China, and elsewhere. I have come to respect and hopefully understand some of the cultural differences. Often it's the simple contracted expressions and slang that are lost in translation, and in this case I wanted to point out that sarcasm can be particularly difficult for someone from another culture to understand becuase of layers of linguistic indirection. In calling Erik out on it, I was trying to help make him a better poster in this environment.