Is there some special trick to this? This is not someone above me, but at the same level. I’m not sure he’s even aware of it, although I’ve heard other people remark on it. It just grates on me. I’m not sure if I might be obsessing about it or overestimating its importance though. It’s not like i have to work directly WITH him. Just not sure when or how (or even IF) I need to stick up for myself or not. Given the office politics where I work, I can clearly see that anything I do in response would be labeled as me having a problem, not him. Just kind of a perpetual low-level irritant.
I am curious what answers you get.
I am probably guilty of giving a specific coworker this treatment, but it is 100% unintentional. For me, the problem is that she gives very few signs that she has comprehended what I have said (and I have to say a lot to her, since I am her trainer). Blank facial expression, and few verbal cues (“gotcha”, “that makes sense”)make me nervous. Also, I think I am a horrible explainer sometimes, so I often compensate by over-explaining. Like, I won’t tell the coworker she should “average the data by date and location” because I am not sure if she knows what I mean by that or how to go about doing that. So I will go into this long-winded set of step-by-step instructions that she may not even need. Since she has never cut me off and said, “You mean do blahblahblah?”, I assume she needs those step-step instructions. But it is painful to hear myself speak sometimes.
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Does he do it just to you, or to everybody?
I have a coworker who seems to just have a naturally condescending personality. As in, she calls everyone “honey”. She also insists on re-reviewing my requirements documents after I’ve incorporated her feedback from the first review - no matter how trivial it was (sometimes just fixing typos or missing punctuation), which implies to me that she thinks I’m not making her changes. Some level of distrust. She’s not my boss, just one of the dev leads that I work with.
I don’t think she realizes she’s coming off that way, though. I do my best to ignore it.
I work with a couple of “know-it-alls” (which is funny, because aside from work specific stuff, they now very little).Is this when he’s talking to you about work issues or just shootin’ the breeze? If the former, I’d listen up to the point where you have all the information you need and then tune him out / cut him off by saying “got it” and either change the subject or remove yourself.
If it’s personal conversations, just give him a blank look and interject an “oh” here and there. I watch my boss do this all day and it seems to be pretty effective.
Well, I AM stupid, so I deal with them the same way I deal with everyone else - stupidly! 
If he’s like that with everyone (except his boss, who I’m sure he sucks up to) just ignore it. If he’s only like that with you, then stop him after every single sentence and ask him to explain what he means. Make it a contest! See who will crack first.
Death stare and long uncomfortable silence.
I once, briefly, did typesetting under a woman who had a strange way of answering questions. If I asked her what font to use for a job, she’d say something like “Well, obviously Garamond Oldstyle Italic,” as if you were a total idiot for asking. Everything, to her, was “obvious”. Needless to say, I didn’t work there long.
Never worked with any but my brother in law assumes everyone else is an idiot.
Once on a trip to visit them in Georgia from Tokyo where I was living, we were in the kitchen of their house. There was a spill and he asked me to clean it up “with two paper towels.” Not one, not three and five was right out.
Somehow I could manage to get from Tokyo to Georgia but couldn’t be trusted to determine the required amount of cleaning supplies.
He is apparently an expert in his field, but universally hated at work for obvious reasons. He never made manager, to the surprise of only himself.
It would drive me nuts only seeing him once a year. I have no idea what I’d do if I had to work with him.
Have you tried formulating this as “Perhaps you don’t realise this, but when you say/do [whatever], it gives the impression that you think I’m stupid [or whatever] - and I’m not alone in that. It gets very tedious and doesn’t help us to work at our best. Could you try [some acceptably non-condescending alternative] instead?”
That’s an easy one - “Why is that obvious? Did you get that info from a style guide or something? I’d like to see that.”
*OMG! * This brought back a memory. I was staying with some friends - I’d known then since college, so about 20 years when this occurred. As he was showing me around my room and bathroom, he explained that since they were low-flush toilets, I’d need 3 flushes: “one partway thru, one when you’re done, and one for the paperwork” :eek: :eek: :eek:
I don’t know what he was pooping out, but I seemed to do fine with a single flush after use. Dare I mention that this guy also had a start up and shutdown checklist for the car that he insisted his wife use?? I know he thinks he’s smarter than everyone, but maybe there’s a little OCD in there??
You went to school with Sheldon Cooper?
heh - funny, I never made the connection, but in a lot of ways, he’s Cooperesque.
In my first college prof. job I worked with a person who was Ivy League all the way. So I was talked down to for a while. E.g., “You’re a lot smarter than I thought you’d be coming from a state school.” :dubious:
And this from someone who pronounced “idea” “idear”. (Hearing him present our work at conferences made me cringe.)
I was finding errors in his work, improving his ideas, etc. But it was still a hard slog.
E.g., he figured out a more efficient way to solve a problem. Great? Except two people had already proved that it couldn’t be done efficiently. So, their mistake? No. His.
The fact that I knew the two people, was present in the first seminar where they had presented the idea, that I had already published papers in the area, etc. didn’t matter. They were wrong cause he went to Harvard, etc.
Took a good while to find and explain his error to him.
If he just accepted that people from the non-Ivy world knew stuff it would have been a lot simpler.
(Note that in research you try hundreds of things that don’t work until you find something that does. So being wrong at first is okay. It’s continuing to be wrong despite someone else pointing out that it can’t be right simply due to “status” that gets me.)
So, for me, it was just show them how bright you are.
I might be that coworker.
I have a terrible habit of telling people obvious things. For example, when my husband is driving, I will give him directions to get home. He often does not need directions. He has a better sense of direction than I do. I have also told one of our maintenance techs how to do a task he was doing while I was out there waiting for him to finish.
Most of the time, I am not consciously thinking “Oh, that idiot!” It’s like my mouth has a mind of its own and it needs to narrate what’s going on. I am honestly working really hard to stop doing this.
Yes, I have a co-worker who will tell you things she knows you know, correct your littlest "mistakes, and in general treat you like the village idiot. When ringing up a tax-exempt sale, she asks you “Did you write down the totals?” She once cited me for putting the bags on the hook through the teat-off hole, not the hook hole an inch lower, yada, yada, yada. I think she just does it for attention, so I ignore her.
Speaking of Sheldon Cooper, I use Penny’s “What is this? My first day?” when she asks me about doing something I’ve done thousands of times.