Interesting, I’ve always had the opposite problem - whatever I say they cut way too much off the top. Perhaps we should go together and order each other’s cuts?

I’m not sure I have anything helpful to say other than to suggest keep trying different places until you find one that listens?

This. Especially driving out of carparks.

There’s a small number of surprisingly aggressive and unhelpful responses here. People are different and the world, especially the workplace, is made by extroverts and that can be difficult for those of us that are more introverted.

In an ideal world your colleagues would be mindful of that but unfortunately that’s often not the case (and of course extroverts often don’t engage in a whole lot of self reflection).

You’re going to have to put up with a bit of annoying small talk. Try to find something that’s a compromise you can live with. After that I’d say being polite but direct is best… nice chatting but I need to get back to work. No further elaboration is required.

You can also try telling some people that you’re not a big chatter or something and that you like to just get on with work. See how that goes, people are often more understanding than you would expect.

(I should say I live in the UK and work in a technical industry so YMMV).

You probably don’t even need to remember much. Just asking how the kids are is enough, anything more specific than that is just a bonus.

This is good advice. Headphones can also work on another level as a signal that you’re getting stuff done and don’t want to be disturbed. Not all my colleagues get that but perhaps 9/10 do.

I’ll give you a short answer as you’ve got a lot of detailed ones already: to a native British English speaker “six oh five a m” sounds completely normal. There are other ways to say it that sound equally normal.

Not a direct answer to the question but one thing not noted in other answers is in computing you often work at a higher precision than you need for your final answer as the errors tend to increase each time you do a mathematical operation.

In the world of reasonably powerful hardware (laptops, desktops, servers, smart phones etc.) we’d typically work with 64 bit floating point numbers which gives pi to 15 digits (I think, not at a real computer now so can’t check). because it’s simple to do so even though we don’t need the full precision.

I’ve heard it suggested that they didn’t expect to get as far as they did into Israel and they barely expected to get past the border wall. If that’s the case they may not have planned what to do when they did and so there may be no grand strategy behind some or all of it.

I guess we’ll never know.

I’m not a big important decision maker but if I always came across your website when searching for answers about software X and your GitHub when looking for code for software X I would go to my manager and say “why don’t we just pay this person to sort it out, they seem to know their stuff” and there’s a fair chance we’d do it.

Could you expand on that please? (I sound a bit snarky but don’t mean to!)

This sounds like a great idea. What feed reader do you use? Are there ones specially for this or better suited to it or will any do?