No kidding.
No kidding again. Aside from the obvious flaw in conflating intelligence and knowledge, one, he feels smug because other people aren’t as familiar with MS Word as he is, and secondly, he’s not even right.
The fact that you know a code to make a degree sign has less to do with your being “a bright person” than with the apparent fact that you have had reason to use that particular code before.
I consider myself reasonably intelligent, yet I know very little about the finer points of computer formatting. It does not interest me, and I have limited use for it. I believe I have had rare occasions on which I could have used the degree symbol, but I concluded it was not worth my time and effort to look up the code instead of writing the word. And that is not the type of information I tend to retain if I do not use it all the time. The one code I do use is alt-21, as much of my word processing included legal citations. But the effectiveness of my work would be little impaired if I instead wrote out “section” or something like “S.” or “sec.”.
Your post makes you sound young and inexperienced in the vastly different ways in which people can be intelligent. For example, I happen to be a pretty good speller, and am regularly surprised at ostensibly intelligent peoples’ inability to spell words I consider simple and common. But after the first few thousand such episodes, I first learned to avoid any outward display of my surprise, and then I worked on not being as surprised - and certainly not conflating one’s awareness of a particular factoid with “intelligence.”
I recently encountered a co-worker who didn’t know how to display the sum total for a column of numbers in Excel.
He is not stupid. He’d just never needed to use Excel much before. Sure, I could have rolled my eyes, but why? I gave him a quick-and-dirty demonstration of how formulas work, and also showed him the sigma button. He picked up the ball and can do simple formulas on his own now.
Conversely, I’m pretty good with formulas, but there are some people here who can do some amazing things with multiple worksheets and pivot tables that I don’t know how to do. I don’t think they’re necessarily smarter than me. They’ve just learned more, and everybody helps everyone else to learn even more. It’s how a good workplace should operate.
So yeah, you do sound arrogant and judgemental, and if you can’t get over that, I’d work on at least not letting it show on your face.
How about addressing the real issue? Just a thought.
You are very arrogantly judging these people as ‘lesser’ based solely on their question. It isn’t about what you know and they don’t, or about how you’re so transparent with your feelings, it’s about what’s showing through of who you are, how you see yourself. Arrogant without a doubt.
You are betraying the ease and comfort these people feel with you, such as to ask a, perhaps obvious, question. They are clearly anticipating you will not be an obnoxious judgmental prick.
They are just questions, they are not stealing your life force, either offer up the obvious and simple answers, or don’t, but the save the judgment, it’s pure hubris, a self defeating and foolish ego stroking exercise, I doubt you really need. Let it go, rein in your ego a little, it will serve you well the rest of your life.
To expand a bit on what elbows said above, you seem to have a couple of issues to work on.
One is your apparently involuntary outward expression of your inner fleeting feelings. At work, in social situations, playing poker, almost any time, things generally go better if your face is not an instant display of every little thing you feel.
Another is your equating of some little thing that you know and someone else doesn’t as evidence of anything about your intellect. Surely you recognize that the person asking you about some minor detail of MS Word probably knows many things that you don’t know. You do, don’t you? You admitted that there are things you don’t know in your OP (such a humble and necessary admission). I think it’s safe to assume that any functional human being you meet knows things you don’t know.
Guess what I usually feel when someone asks me a question I know the answer to? Flattered and useful. Try it. It feels much better than what you’re feeling now. Think feelings can’t be controlled? Try doing some quiet thinking about what a person asking you a question is doing, what is behind their question. They have encountered something they need or want to know and don’t know. They have approached you admitting that they don’t know, and assuming that you do. They are paying you a compliment.
You began one of the sentences in your OP with the phrase “As a bright person”. What do you think that phrase accomplished for you in that sentence? I have a feeling that it didn’t convey what you hoped to convey.
I once had a boss who said that there were lots of things you didn’t have to know; you just had to be aware of where you could look them up.
Of course, this advice had to be taken in the context of knowing that he was an incompetent dumbass*.
*I depended on excellent control of the facial muscles governing expression during faculty meetings with this guy.
**I didn’t know how to create a degree symbol before opening this thread either. 23 years of education and I remain startlingly ignorant. 
There are many times when people ask things like the “Degree sign” question and I find myself thinking “I’m going to go to Google for it, just like you would have done if I weren’t here.”
I have even occasionally said as much to someone, though not in a nasty way.
As to the question from the OP:
In any group of reasonably intelligent people, say a good-sized corporate IT project team, there will be dozens of stories of people with common knowledge in the current environment, but with a different “alternate body of knowledge”
For example, maybe someone was raised by a builder and had a hammer in his hand since childhood. This person would have a very deep knowledge of homebuilding, and would be a great asset to other developers in the crew who don’t know how to patch a hole in a wall.
Someone else might have been in the Peace Corps for some years before settling down, and that person might have an extremely rich background of international travel, different cultures, and possibly different languages.
Yet a third person in the team might have completed a doctorate in biochemistry, only to find that they hate that work and love programming. Nobody knows that the unpretentious person who works alongside them simply stepped away from an entirely different career after many years of college. Clearly, that individual would have a huge body of “obvious knowledge” that they must take care not to either bore people with or assume is obvious to all.
My own background is different from most corporate IT people in that I had another life where I was a machinist for a few years, with several years of advanced technical drawing courses (now obsolete) and similar things. This means that I have some mechanical savvy that is not representative of the group as a whole.
In my case, I must always remember that things that seem obvious to me in the physical/mechanical world may not be obvious to everyone, regardless of how intelligent they are.
Some times this causes me to receive blank stares as I am discussing some cool steampunk-style manufacturing process I just read about. Other times I misjudge and annoy people because I explained something obvious that any idiot would understand.
No fresh blood in the water here, folks, just a legititimate ?. To those who got the question, and tried to answer, thanks, and to the rest of you proving how smart you are-You’ll are so cute.
I only counted one person trying to prove something in this thread.
So…what exactly do you want from this thread?
Is it, “Tell me about times when some idiot asked you a question, and you felt superior to that person, and we’ll all share that special glow that comes from being smarter than other people”?
Or is it, “People keep thinking I’m an asshole when I answer their questions. How can I answer their questions without coming across as an asshole”?
Ignorance is the lack of knowledge.
Stupidity is willfully remaining ignorant.
I had a quarter side-bet on attention. Shame, it was a nice quarter too. Shiny.
Well, to be fair, this conversation does happen a lot here. These types of threads only end one of two ways: Everyone masturbates to how much better they are than everyone else, or everyone gets told to get over themselves. Perhaps he was hoping for the former?
The answer to this question would be “Stop being an asshole.”
If we were to pretend for a moment that the OP was founded on a valid premise, that is, he is actually smarter than everyone else, and those around him are idiots, there is still the issue of the OP’s inability to be smart without being a jerk. I might be willing to believe that he can’t help but to feel contempt for people who aren’t up to his rigorous intellectual standards, but I’m having a hard time believing that Einstein over there hasn’t figured out the concept of being polite.
A lower case (or minuscule, if we’re showing off what we know) o is a much better aproximation: 30[sup]o[/sup].
Still far from ideal, but less ridiculous looking.
Sidenote - due to having my computer set up for non-English input, alt-codes don’t work properly for me - alt-0176 gives the same character as alt-176: ｰ So even knowledge of alt-codes wouldn’t save me, here. (Knowing where character map (in the OS)* and ‘insert special character’ (in my word processor) are, however, does.)
- If you’re looking for it, it may be under Start>accessories, not Start>programs - that’s where it is for me, at least.
It’s not always installed at all in some builds of Windows - but is easily added by selecting ‘Add/remove Windows components’ in the ‘Add/Remove programs’ Control Pane applet
Why does it not surprise me that his/her response would be to try to sound patronizing? 
A few decades ago I was wandering around Stanford U. and saw a sign that , in effect, said " I used to be amazed at how much I knew, until gradate school, when I became amazed at how little I knew".
You know, my 18 year old son has made this EXACT complaint to me before…how some people think he’s stuck-up or arrogant simply because he’s SOOO much smarter than they are. 
He IS very bright, natively intelligent, whatever you want to call it. He’s been impressing people since he was a toddler with his vocabulary and other intellectual skills.
He’s also generally popular and socially adept. With this singular exception.
He IS arrogant. He assumes he is brighter than most people, and even if that is the case, to assume it and worse, to be unable to CONCEAL the asumption is bound to render him the butt of contempt on a fairly regular basis.
It’s something he is just going to have to learn through experience; both that while he may be in an upper percentile as far as intelligence goes, that does NOT make him any better than anyone else and that when others get the impression that you think you ARE better than them based on your vastly superior intellect/knowledge-base (:rolleyes:), they quite rightly resent the hell out of you and don’t want to be around you.
My advice to the OP is the same as I have given my son: Get over yourself. Everyone ELSE has. (said with all due respect and love, of course:))
As others have commented, grad school will solve this problem (in the hard sciences at least). All it takes is a few instances of your arrogance biting you in the ass; being completely humbled and embarrassed by people far brighter than you.
The thing is, they already think I’m arrogant before they ask anything. And they know I’ll have the answer they need, or I know where to get it. A lot of people equate arrogance with being knowledgeable, so the only way not to appear arrogant is not to have the answers. If you appear to be stupid and ignorant they will leave you alone . . . but they’ll like you more.