Thanks for a much more constructive post, McKenzie.
Naturally, there is a lot more to your job than talking to us. What I was trying to point out is the difference in emphasis of your job and mine. If you have no aircraft to talk to, you don't have much to do. If we're not talking to ATC (outside CAS or out of R/T coverage, for example) we're still doing much the same as we were doing before.
Furhermore, I did not state that giving aircraft instructions is treating them like children. I said that telling them to carry out those instructions is treating them like children.
All I have tried to do throughout this thread is point out the erroneous assumption behind several posts here (and elsewhere in this Forum) that if a pilot fails to comply with ATC instructions he is lazy, or ignorant, or "not listening" or incompetent, that ATC are universally wonderful, know everything about you and what you are doing, know automatically what is in your best interests, and that if a pilot fails to carry out your "requests" he is therefore, without exception, endangering himself, other aircraft around him, has careless regard for your stress level and likelihood of a heart attack.
We make mistakes. (We try not to). We work in what is often a noisy environment, and if we miss a word or two, or an entire transmission, it is not necessarily our fault. You have the luxury of a desk in front of you. Non-sidestick drivers don't. The handling pilot may be the only one listening out at any given stage of the flight. He doesn't normally have a piece of paper in front of him to write instructions down. So sometimes things get forgotten.
My exasperation in the first post (and one or two later ones) results from being fed up to the gills with ATC demonising pilots, and not appreciating that we are as human as you guys are, and with the assumption that it's always the pilots who let the side down.
You will simply have to accept that sometimes we have our heads totally full with trying to keep all our beans in a row, and we can keep four balls successfully juggling. If a fifth gets missed, then it happens occasionally. Tough. Get used to it.