ATC miscommunication question

Sorry but that is piss poor phraseology. If you give me maintain 2500 when I'm at 3500 for brevity, it'll take an extra 30 seconds to confirm what you meant when you could have said descend and everyone would be on the same page.
Honestly if you give me something like that, I assume you've lost your SA and now don't trust much of anything from you until I feel like you've got a handle on things again.

Cool. I do it all the time and have never been questioned.
 
He didn’t think you were at 2500. He wanted you to descend to 2500. Although not perfectly by the book, “climb/descend and maintain” is often left off in favor of “maintain” for brevity.
You and I are in the same page.

I agree with clarifying but my clarification would have come with the "descending 2,500" read back. That's what happened in reverse in @natid82's situation, but the conversation would have been shorter :D

Listening to the dialog, I thought the initial "maintain two thousand five hundred" sounded clear. And I agree it was no biggie and clarified without incident.
 
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@natid82, I wasn't there so I'm NOT throwing a stone. A lot of these miscommunications are due to our own laziness (myself included). Make sure you state "tree thousand, fife hundred" and not "thirty-five hundred"....and so on. @Stonecold is dead on; use the correct verbiage because it will save your bacon some day.

An example is your own words; "I'll keep 3,500". In the future, use the word "maintain" rather than keep. Our brain is programmed to listen to certain words, sometimes these are the only words we hear.

No harm, no foul on this one. Good learning tool
 
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