I still find myself chuckling, a dry, humorless sound, at the memory of nodding sagely during a team meeting while having absolutely no idea what "circling back" truly implied beyond some form of avian reconnaissance — it’s a quiet dread, this persistent fear that my decades of engineering acumen are slowly being corroded by an inability to parse casual American office-speak, like watching a sophisticated machine rust from the inside while everyone else is still debating whose turn it is for coffee.