I *hate *it when I tell a client that their file is prepared incorrectly, and I get an email in response explaining basic things about the software that I “might not understand.” I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I just leave my office and walk around for a few minutes until I can respond in a non-murderous tone.
Well, it could take a few hours, if it happened at night. The Chinese might know it in 8 minutes, but we wouldn’t until dawn (or non-dawn).
I recently had an acquaintance write a post about problems housebreaking her dog. She specifically tagged me and another person for our advice since we both work with dogs. She completely dismissed my advice as “that won’t work for my dog” and went with some very poor advice from someone I don’t know. The other person she tagged never responded. I think I know why. It’s very frustrating. I don’t intend to responded to her if she asks for advice again.
One assumes whoever noticed it first might post about it on Facebook or Twitter fairly quickly.
Whether you are correct or mistaken, your angry rage stems from being attached to ‘being right’. We’re only human so, of course, we are far more ‘attached’ to having those who, we assume, know us and respect our knowledge base, respect our informed opinion. When that doesn’t happen, and we are caught off guard by them also questioning our opinions, it definitely stings!
But if you’re right or wrong doesn’t change that your rage IS because you are very attached to being right, most especially in this persons eyes.
So, you can view this only through the lens of, ‘Am I right or not?’, or, you can move forward by recognizing, ‘I am extremely invested in appearing knowledgeable to THIS person!’
Because if it had just been some kid at the garage who didn’t believe your assessment you wouldn’t give a shit. So it’s not about you being right or wrong, it’s about you being, in certain instances, VERY invested or attached to the need to be ‘right’.
Next time try just releasing your attachment to being right, just shrug your shoulders and say, “You don’t have to believe me, that’s okay, I understand!” And plaster a smile on your face. Practise this a couple of times and you may find that you don’t carry unresolved rage from a spat 40yrs ago! Good Luck!
One of my sisters created a Knowledge Nugget page on FB where she shares random trivia that she generally gets from her Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers. Several times, I posted responses, with links, showing where the “knowledge” was wrong. She’d delete my posts. So I quit following her page. I didn’t need the aggravation. If she wants to believe that “raining cats and dogs” has to do with family pets falling thru thatched roofing, that’s her choice. :rolleyes:
True. But …
If I had a nickel for every time I had to teach a clerk some aspect their own job because their boss hadn’t bothered I’d be able to buy quite a few grande Starbucks. Not to mention all the terminally scattered thinkers out there who couldn’t be thorough or repeatable if their lives depended on it.
My favorite:
Oh, so if he was female you wouldn’t? 
There is a lot of truth here. The more I think about it the more I can see that it does make a big difference who is involved. I have been retired for several years so the issue seldom arises anymore but thinking back over the years I would say that probably 50% of the times it happened involved a superior at work, 25% involved an employee, maybe 15% involved my ex wife and the other 10% someone I wanted make a good impression on for whatever reason.
When I look back on it the only ones that can still bring back the same ire are the ones that happened with the old boss I spent 25 years with and to a lesser degree the ex wife. I have actually gotten some vindication that softened up the resentments a bit. The ex wife after being divorced for 26 years still sees me as her main adviser on money and life issues. The branch I worked at immediately lost its national standing as #1 when I retired. They fell completely off the charts into mediocrity.Ok, but the need to bask in their, (in your eyes righteously deserved), bad Karma is only more manifestation of your attachment, y’know!
That’s why you gotta practise the indifference of, “That’s okay. You don’t have to believe me.”, a few times. If you do, after a few goes, you’ll find you won’t be feeling to revisit such events, years later with still unresolved feelings. Practise. That’s all I takes to shift this from rage to indifference.
But it’s all on you. Nobody else can get you there. Change your mind. Change your life.
My head just popped off and flew across my cubicle in sympathetic outrage. ARRGGHH!
The last thing I probably raged about went something like this:
I am a recognized expert in X (an employment issue).
My nephew seeks my advice at a dinner/bday party… over dinner. He knows my expertise; he seeks it.
I have been contracted by Fortune 100 companies and was very successful because of my skill with X. It’s no in question.
My mother dismissed everything I said; she talked over me; she reference anecdotes from the 1950’s; she was factually wrong over and over again; my nephew pleaded to let me be heard; she told us she didn’t care anyway. I even addressed my mother, instead of my nephew. She was discounting everything I said and was projecting herself as the expert, despite not actually being employed by any actual company since about 1961. It was exhausting. She told my nephew to ignore all my advice.
I was… livid.
.
Was the subject you are an expert at workplace violence by any chance? 
My ex-wife used to do something similar to the OP’s scenario. It broke my heart.
She would start doing Something Inadvisable, and I’d be like “Hey. I understand what you’re trying to accomplish and fully support you, but the current approach is not going to work. If you continue with Something Inadvisable, the end result is going to be Unpleasant Consequences. I would try Other Thing instead.” At which point she’d double down on Something Inadvisable, which would lead to Unpleasant Consequences, and then she’d get pissed off at me for being right about it.
This wasn’t a one time thing, it was CONSTANT. I assumed that at some point she’d figure out “Hey, he’s right about this stuff an awful lot.” (I was wrong.) It made me feel like my opinions and advice were beneath consideration. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now.
I am also curious why you sympathize with him since he’s male, but wouldn’t if the OP was female.
Sometimes everybody gets very attached to their own understanding of a problem, and ridicule others when they come up with different answers than ours. Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes we are all talking at cross-purposes, and we cannot agree upon a correct and meaningful answer.
I’m sure that your “baboons” are rather ignorant of scientific issues, and your facts are correct. But I’m guessing they were working off of the scientific knowledge that it takes millions of years for “a photon” (or at least the energy of the photon) to get from the core to the surface of the sun. I have heard this since my youth. Neil deGrasse Tyson has said it himself, repeatedly, in writings and television, more recently.
I’m sure that the baboons didn’t fully grasp the concept, and I’m not defending them, but you can see how a snappy answer of “8 minutes” doesn’t really answer the question of “how long it would take us to know if (that which powers the sun and ultimately sends life-giving energy to our planet, the core of) the sun went out?” any better than "millions of years.
I don’t know how long it would take us to find out if the core magically failed. I think a lot longer than 8 minutes. Maybe a lot less than millions of years, but maybe not. Maybe an expert on that will pipe in.
But yeah, I think we all get pissed off when we our area of expertise is dismissed.
I think these sorts of things, as it seems you also seem to realize, arise from a perspective that is our own, as in, those who are upset. The person who did something didn’t act in malice or even really in a way that’s necessarily unreasonable, though perhaps to some minor amount, but it somehow generates an emotional and/or visceral reaction that is way out of proportion with it. As such, I think in gaining an understanding of the perspective, we can learn to align our responses to be in line and that trigger and substantially lose its edge, if not completely vanish.
A few thoughts for you on this that might help get to the heart of the matter: Since you don’t have an issue with the person with the differing opinion, it seems to me that it’s not an issue with disagreement or being wrong or even believing incorrectly. Rather, it strikes me that it’s along the lines of not feeling heard, a disregard for evidence, or even something like willful ignorance. As in, it’s not the other guy’s fault for not knowing, but when the guy asking the question is presented with an ignorant opinion and a knowledgeable one, he chose the former.
Does this feel related to the previous example? If so, maybe you just feel like your opinion, which should be valid (as you were the boss), is disregarded, much in the same way your opinion in the above example was disregarded. It seems to me that the fear of losing control is part of the irrational reaction and not necessarily part of the trigger. Do you feel that these employees would disregard your instructions because they just didn’t think they mattered or didn’t agree with them? Do you think maybe they just didn’t understand?
These can be, the possible reasons they trigger are just a few thoughts from my own experience or when I’ve seen others triggered by similar situations. We all fail to communicate our ideas from time to time, but the question really should be, how does one react when that happens? Are you able to identify when a miscommunication has happened, calmly disarm any potential situation, and reword your thoughts so that everyone is on the same page? Or do you feel like you’ve effectively communicated and not realize that there was a miscommunication until after things have started to go awry.
For me, I tend to have a range or potential reactions I expect from someone based on what I know about them, where someone I might know well would give me more or less leeway in some aspects and someone I don’t know I’d expect some typical range of results. I can then identify when something is going awry when I’m getting a reaction to something I’ve said that doesn’t fit with those expectations. Now, of course, sometimes my expectations are just off, but usually it’s pretty easy to tell, especially when I’m saying something neutral or positive and I get negative responses. I do make a point of reminding people that I often have misunderstandings with that, when that happens, they should try to remember, as I make an effort toward them, they the underlying intention is always positive, and to try to interpret my actions in that light, though it doesn’t always help.
And sometimes it just helps to really take the time to think through what I’m going to say. I love to communicate complex ideas, and I spend a lot of time thinking about them, but sometimes I’ll just stop and take my time to think about them before I continue, as it’s better to take longer to say something, but know it’s understood as intended, than get it out quickly and then have to do damage control, for no reason other than a misunderstanding.
Sounds like an arrogance problem.
I think I am not on board with elbows’ theory of having to be right. While I am a pedantic know-it-all pain in your ass, I am not attached to being right. I like to learn. I like to be corrected when I am wrong.
But what the OP is talking about – and I think it happens to everyone – I take it as disrespectful and even edging into gaslighting territory.
I get that a lot with grammar/language/spelling questions. People know I am an editor. My family and friends know I’ve been working with language for 25+ years. If you need to know where a comma goes, you come to me. That is established. So I get white-hot livid angry if you come to me specifically because you know I have expertise in the matter and then you either: ignore what I told you, argue with me, or go with some non-expert’s advice. That tells me that you don’t really think I know my shit. And it’s disrespectful to ask for a tidbit of my expertise and then argue with me about it, as if I haven’t been answering that same goddamn question for 25 years. I get a little hot just thinking about it.
And there’s also some childhood baggage in my case. My dad’s default assumption is that all children lie, all the time, and a parent should always assume a kid is lying. So he’d ask me a question (where have I been, what have I been doing, did I finish XYZ chore yet, etc.) and then when I gave him a straight up honest answer, he’d accuse me of lying. He rarely believed a thing I said. So, as an adult, it’s not that I realize I’m being perceived as incorrect, what bothers me is that I’m perceived as lying. If I’m not completely sure I’m correct, I will say that. First. “Well, I’m not sure but this is what I think.”
If you don’t think I know my shit, then why are you asking me?
There’s a whole other situation that I think is more of a gender dynamic and that seems maybe a little bit different from what we’re talking about here. Many, many times, I’ve been the only woman in a conversation with three or more people and I interject something that I think added a little value to the conversation. If it’s all men I’m talking to, sometimes, the men will completely ignore me as if I hadn’t even spoken. I’ll look around and note that not one person I’m talking to even looked at me to acknowledge that I just spoke. It never fails, five minutes later, one of the men will repeat the same goddamn thing and the other men will not only acknowledge him, but will act like he just said the most brilliant thing in the world and that he was the first person to think it up. THAT makes me stabby. But I tend to just walk away.