Great! I can work with that! Here, if you'd like a visual aid...
[He pulls up the drawing application, and using some technical trickery, shares the screen through video. And on the screen, he starts drawing a flowchart.]
It's a lot like an engine: You have smaller components that perform a certain task in the larger system, each of which has its own design and considerations. And while they're interchangeable, if one of them stops working, it's going to start causing problems for everything else in the system.
[He starts getting a little more enthusiastic, talking faster:]
For example, there's one program that manages your contacts, and another which actually handles the sending and receiving of texts. The messaging system only knows how to communicate with the larger phone network, and relies on the contacts to store data on where to actually send it. If you've configured a contact incorrectly, it's going to try sending the message to someone who doesn't exist, and thus the data isn't going to go through. On the other hand, if there's a problem with the messaging configuration, no messages will be able to go through at all—
[And then he catches himself. Right, simplify. Steam engines.]
no subject
[He pulls up the drawing application, and using some technical trickery, shares the screen through video. And on the screen, he starts drawing a flowchart.]
It's a lot like an engine: You have smaller components that perform a certain task in the larger system, each of which has its own design and considerations. And while they're interchangeable, if one of them stops working, it's going to start causing problems for everything else in the system.
[He starts getting a little more enthusiastic, talking faster:]
For example, there's one program that manages your contacts, and another which actually handles the sending and receiving of texts. The messaging system only knows how to communicate with the larger phone network, and relies on the contacts to store data on where to actually send it. If you've configured a contact incorrectly, it's going to try sending the message to someone who doesn't exist, and thus the data isn't going to go through. On the other hand, if there's a problem with the messaging configuration, no messages will be able to go through at all—
[And then he catches himself. Right, simplify. Steam engines.]
... is... this helping at all?