Never Wrong, Never Clear 😤

 Do you have one coworker you just cannot deal with? In meetings? In the chat sidebar? Or in the general sense of having to be alive in the same building as them for eight hours?

Mine has to be right. That's the whole personality. He isn't loud — not a shouter, nothing dramatic. He's a calm man in a shirt that is always one shade of blue off from all his other shirts, and he has never once been wrong about anything.

Here's how the chatting goes. 9:04 a.m.: "Can you handle the thing with the list before the sync?" No list. No sync on the calendar. I ask which list, and he writes, "the one we discussed." We didn't discuss it. We discussed his parking spot for eleven minutes. I ask again. He replies, "I'll let you run with it," which is a sentence that means I am now going to do something wrong in public, and he will be watching from a comfortable distance.

So I do the task badly, obviously, because there was no task. And he comes back in the thread, calm as a man reading out a verdict: "As I mentioned earlier, the list needed to be sorted by region."

As I mentioned. He mentioned the word "list" and the word "before." That is the entire record. I reread that message four times, the way you reread a receipt.

Meetings are the main event. He doesn't dominate them. That would require wanting something. He arrives two minutes late with a mug that has a hairline crack down one side, sits, and waits. Then, after somebody else has finally said something useful, he says, "Right — which is what I was saying." It is not what he was saying. What he was saying was twelve minutes of setup and a story about a previous employer. There's a whiteboard behind him and a marker that has been dead since spring, and every time he reaches for it I hope today is the day he finds out. It never is. There's also a bottle of hand sanitizer in that room that has said 2014 for as long as I've worked here, and honestly it's the most honest object in the building.

If you ask him a clarifying question, he says, "Good question. Let's take that offline." Then he never takes it offline. He walks off with his mug, and the question stays on my desk like a jacket somebody left behind.

Now — fair is fair — he has been wrong. Once. March, I think. He said the deadline was Thursday and it was Friday, and I had the whole chain, timestamps, everything. I brought it up. He tilted his head, said, "Ah, well, either way we landed in the same place," and that was it. No entry in the book. The book is one-sided and he writes in it with a pen I'm not allowed to hold.

In the sidebar he writes "no worries at all!" about things I was never worried about. He writes "per my last message" when his last message is one line and ends mid-thought. He writes "circling back" and never draws the circle. Every "quick sync?" he schedules runs fifty minutes, most of it him narrating a document back to me, and the document is fine. The document was always fine.

There was a doc I wrote. He sent it back with his edits and one note: "just minor cleanup." Forty-one changes. He rewrote a sentence I had carefully made bad on purpose.

So I've gone preemptive. Everything gets attached to everything now. Two files, a numbered list, a screenshot of the calendar, a subject line that repeats the request. He still answers with "quick sync?" and the sync still eats my Thursday.

That's mine. A man who is right, has always been right, and can produce the receipts for it that only he can see.

Tell me yours. Meetings, chats, or overall capacity — whatever the category is. Extra credit if they've ever said "let's take it offline," because I need to know it isn't just my guy.

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