a poser

[Kelly Hoffman <kelly -at- NASHUA -dot- HP -dot- COM>]

I seem to have some kind of writer's block (editor's block?) this
morning, and I'm hoping my fellow tech-whirlers can help.

I've been trying to rewrite the following gem:

        An end-to-end pair's traffic is assigned to a segment
        pair only when each end point of the end-to-end pair maps
        to one or the other segment of the segment pair.

It's really not as complicated as it sounds.  Here's what this
mess is trying to describe:

        You have an end-to-end traffic pair, call it A-B.

        A-B is assigned to the segment pair S1-S2 only
        when

                [(A maps to S1) and (B maps to S2)]
             or [(A maps to S2) and (B maps to S1)]

        Note that A-B is *not* assigned to S1-S2 if:

                [(both A and B are mapped to S1)]
             or [(both A and B are mapped to S2)]

After the offending sentence, I give an example, both as descriptive
text and a diagram, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it so much.
But it bothers me that I can't seem to explain this simple concept
in a clear, unambiguous manner.

The best I've managed is:

        An end-to-end pair's traffic is assigned to a segment pair
        only when both end points are on different segments and each
        end point maps to one segment of the segment pair.

Anybody have a better suggestion? (please? :-)

It's been a *long* week...

kkh
Kelly K. Hoffman                            kelly -at- nashua -dot- hp -dot- com
Learning Products Engineer
Hewlett-Packard, Network Test Division      "Reading the manual is
One Tara Blvd., Nashua, NH  USA  03062         admitting defeat."