Some of these people don't even know the difference between indicated airspeed and groundspeed! Last week going into Madrid we reduced speed to 250 kias as requested (with 125 track miles to go of course) and the next thing the controller asked us in the usual abrupt and sarcastic way why had we not reduced speed as told and said we were doing 360! Yes we were doing a groundspeed of 360, the VMO on my aircraft is 340 The Captain tried to explain this and even gave him a bit of a lesson on the effect of altitude on indicated airspeed, but the controller just didn't get it.
Of course the Iberia ahead who was also told to do 250 had obviously slowed to 220 without telling anyone to try and f!@k us over and that didn't help things....
If this is true do you think this is a problem coused by managements lack of understanding that you have to give controllers education or do you think it is because the controller is stupid?