Still, you bring up a good point in that my comment could have completely backfired and made me look condescending to my own group of folks. A key to that, I think, is in the delivery. It is hard to get my sarcastic tone in this instance across in text, but you can imagine how I tried to make it perfectly clear that I was kidding.

Pete Johnson
HP.com Chief Architect
Personal blog: http://nerdguru.net

Interestingly, though, I have found that practicing that in my virtual communication makes me much better able to do so in my face-to-face communication.

“I think what you meant to say,” I said calmly, “is that nobody from knows how to write any code . . . . except for Pete.”

Joking or not, it seems unfair to refer to your team this way among your peers.

I happen to live in Japan, where concepts of personal space are different from those I encountered in the US. Here it’s normal to have someone jabbing their elbow into your side during the daily commute on jam-packed trains. I’ve adjusted to this by getting to the office earlier in the morning to avoid the peak crowds, but nevertheless find myself almost daily confronted with someone invading my space. My initial reaction was to get angry (Why me?!), which was soon followed by self-recrimination (Why not me?! Everyone has to deal with this — why do I think I’m so special?). The result was frustration.

These days I focus on keeping my side of the street clean, but as a big guy (relative to my fellow commuters) I do take up a lot of space myself. If someone’s jabbing me, I usually ask if they have enough room, and that seems to do the trick — either they’ll respond positively and relax a bit, or they’ll move somewhere else to avoid having to talk to me. Ha ha ha — either way the situation is resolved.

I don’t think I ever knew what anger was until now.

There have been so many instances where we find ourselves outraged at some new incompetence by the city or federal government, there are so many times when we have to suffer someones poorly informed opinion on the what “they” should do with our city, and there are so many visiting idealists who grow impatient when we don’t want to re-imagine or envision rather, we just want to get our streetlights fixed.

In my computer work in the days of yore, I would find myself upset about some disagreement about which language to use, or hurt by some slight about my abilities. I’d fume and fuss and tell friends about how stupid the other person is.

But, now I see things that are just so awful so frequently, I don’t have time for fuming and fussing.

When I find myself getting very angry — you know what it’s like, your turning over offense in your mind, saying how could they? who do they think they are? — I catch myself and I vocalize along these lines.

Wow. I sure am angry.

And it suddenly turns into something else.

I just melts away.

I relax, my thinking clears up, I drop it and very often I start to laugh.

Then I have a lot of creative energy. It’s just weird.

You know, it’s very hard to think of funny things to say when you’re angry. Which is why the snappy comeback usually only comes to us the moment we step away, because we relax enough to become creative again.

When we do relax, we go straight to humor. Besides anger, humor is a natural response to adversity, anger just gets in the way.

I occurs to me that what has changed is that I’ve come to trust myself in that if I’m angry, then something is wrong.

Before I’d spend justifying my anger, which meant thinking about what made me angry, which would only keep me angry. Now, once I realize I’m angry, that is enough for me. Something is amiss.

Hey, maybe it’s me that’s wrong. Whether or not I’m right or wrong isn’t the issue, it’s that there is a reaction. It is probably not the one that the person intended. I go from feeling angry to saying, okay, what’s up with that? I’ll say something about it, maybe humorous, but sometimes it can be as simple as. You lost me there, I can’t possibly imagine how you could see it that way.

Which is to say, you will learn to use humor in time. You don’t have to become a comedian to apply Pete’s advice. For starters, just do a time out on the situation that makes you angry. So much of humor is simply the straight man saying, “uh, are you sure about that?”

It’s never fun to hear about people trashing you behind your back. This CEO you used to work for doesn’t sound like someone you’d want on your Christmas card list, to be sure. I think you have to judge what you might get out of confronting this person.

My initial reaction upon reading your comment was “take the high road and don’t get into it with them.” But as I thought about it more, it depends. In your situation, your reputation is being trashed in an ongoing manner, so that makes it slightly different than what I experienced in the story above.

If it’s only to make you feel better for a few minutes by letting your justifiable anger out on this CEO, that’s probably not a good enough reason. If, however, you think the confrontation might stop the behavior, it might be worth it. You could stop the bleeding your reputation is suffering from and it sounds like the person isn’t going to be doing you favors any time soon anyway so you don’t have much to lose.

I think the key, though, is how you approach the situation. If you are calm and present a lot of supporting facts, that’s always better than using a heavy dose of screaming. At least, that never seems to work for me 8).

I hope that doesn’t sound monumentally stupid on my part. Good luck with it!

Pete Johnson
HP.com Chief Architect
Personal blog: http://nerdguru.net

Hmmm glad I got that off my chest.

I have been tempted to confront him several times as we run into each other all around town…..Any thoughts on that type of getting even ? ;)