Enter The Most Annoying Person That Won't Just Go Away (or Mr. Tmaptwjgo for short - using the masculine gender for the sake of simplicity).
Mr. Tmaptwjgo is inconsiderate, arrogant, mostly a jerk. And guess what the good news is! He works with you. So close to you that you can hear him breathe. Hurraaaaay!
Well, I have met Mr. Tmaptwjgo. He scoffs like he breathes, he yells "What do you want?!" when someone says "Hello", and he believes that without prior training, you, in particular (don't ask me why - that's life), cannot perform a simple task because it is too difficult to read instructions by yourself. Instructions such as "check in section A if the boxes in paragraph 1 are checked" is of course the most complex arrangement of consonants and vowels, and it exceeds four words, therefore, it is too hard for you to understand.
"You can't do it, you just can't do it! No, no, no, you won't be able to!! It's too hard for you; too difficult and complex! You won't be able to understand anything at all. It's way too hard for you! Why did they even put you on the project?" He would passionately exclaim with such heavy drama that you imagine epic music playing in the background as waves violently crash against the walls of your office.
In addition to his enthusiastic speech, Mr. Tmaptwjgo gives you the wrong information to do your work, but will not take responsibility for it, although he knows he speaks lies.
He is, to me, the definition of a difficult co-worker.
How does anyone deal with this kind of person professionally??
Like any other life trouble I have that needs to be fixed... I googled it. Yes, I googled it, okay!
I learned that to make it better, the following had to be done:
- Offering someone $15 to kick him in the head
- Hoping the person gets fired for being useless and annoying
- Trying to ignore them as you sit at your desk getting more and more pissed off until-
I furrowed my eyebrows until I realized that I skipped the line that said "The following are bad ways to deal with this person and will only make the problem worse".
Right. The answer to all of my woes wasn't going to be by simply giving 15 bucks away. No, it was going to be much harder than that. In fact, Google's answers defied me to keep my cool and be the bigger person.
Now, it does make a lot of sense in the context of work to take a deep breath and suck it up rather than stir more trouble. Sure, that person's poking at me dangerously, and he is slightly crossing the line. Very slightly. But it is not as if he were trying to be verbally/physically abusive. I guess for now, I will swallow my pride, although it tastes like crap.
But if he so much as runs over my line, it is ON!
Be warned that some of the examples given in this post have been altered to protect the identity of a guilty, difficult co-worker. Because that's how nice and considerate I am.
Since I don't want to end this on a bad note, here is a joke to lighten up your mood! True story, by the way.
"I have a really bad memory."
"How bad is it?"
"How bad is what?"
