Why Are Geeks So Short Tempered?
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Have you ever looked around the IT department at your work? It’s filled with some personalities isn’t it? There are always a few that you are scared to talk to. You may be afraid they will bite your pinky off if you ask the wrong thing. I can say the same thing about myself. I am sometimes short tempered around certain people.
A situation recently arose where a woman asked me to get some information she needed from a third-party. We’ll call her ‘Jane’. I assisted Jane, but couldn’t help but think ‘Why can’t Jane call this person herself?’. I Googled the name of the person, found the company and called the switchboard. Within minutes I was connected with the person and requested the materials needed.
An hour later, I get a call form Jane stating that the materials still had not been sent over to her. She wanted me to call again. Now I’m really furious. The nerve of Jane to ask me to do her job for her! I had to go sit in the corner alone for a moment until I cooled down. Normally I probably would’ve fired an email back, angrily pointing out that ‘I don’t have time to do your job for you!’. Instead, I wrote a kind email stating ‘At the moment I am quite swampled, but here is the phone number I called. Perhaps you can contact them?’
I empowered Jane to take care of this herself. She later thanked me. That’s when I realized that Jane might not be as resourceful or as smart as I am. She may have thought that asking me to call for the materials she needed was the only way to get them. There was no malicious intent to dump work on me.
So goes the theory of why geeks are so short tempered. Geeks tend to be way smarter than the average sales rep. They can’t imagine a person that doesn’t know how to Google something to get the information they need. Immediately they think it’s just laziness whenever anybody asks them a question. The result is a short tempered explosion in some cases.
If you’re a geek, remember your skills are valuable no matter how common you may think they are. You are smarter than the average Joe. Try to be patient with those that aren’t.
4 Comments
leftystrat
September 5th, 2009
at 7:40pm
I have a different theory: personality types are attracted to certain jobs. In any given IT department, you’ll have short-tempered, attention-impaired workers.
In marketing and sales, you’ll have much better looking, outgoing, borderline annoying workers
Also, the further up the line, the greater the cluelessness.
Or so I have observed.
Joe Whitehead
September 7th, 2009
at 5:53am
To previous: Dilbert syndrome indeed!
Shtanto
September 13th, 2009
at 3:32pm
I totally agree. Dilbert FTW! The more clueless you are, the more likely you’ll be promoted to a higher paying position where you’re even less sure of what you’re doing! After all, the grunts do all the hard work and they need to know what they’re doing.
Even on small practical jobs like manning a toboggan slide conform to this principle. The slower weaker grunts get to nudge people off the top, while the tougher faster grunts have to run around gathering the empty toboggans at the bottom before hauling them back to the top again!
A Gatten
September 28th, 2009
at 4:58pm
That absolutely makes sense! Completely.
I may just be an accountant, but I’ve worked with engineers for 18 yrs, married a tech/RC/web developer geek, and I get beyond frustrated with cow-orkers who can’t understand error messages from a cheap accounting database (usually explained by GIGO).
Cluelessness gets promoted because they stick together & yes, managers don’t like folks smarter than they are.