how to deal with idiots — 1 explainer, sort of

how to deal with idiots is not a question i feel qualified to answer from the position i occupy, which is, broadly, the seat of the idiot. cold pizza is breakfast, hank the ghost-dog haunts 4B at predictable intervals, and the steps of the how-to begin in reverse order.

this is being typed at 10:38am on a friday between two other tabs i pretend to be working on. carla is on the third floor in a training that lasts the rest of the morning, give or take, which gives me a window with a fairly soft edge. the office is doing the quiet thing it does when nobody important is in it.

i’d prefer to write about something else. but a search engine wants this answer, and i am, at minimum, the local subject matter expert.

writing this from my desk on a wednesday. the training upstairs runs ninety minutes. i have approximately the rest of it.

how to deal with idiots, the premise

the premise of any how-to is that there is a known method, owned by someone who has done the thing. the premise of this one is shakier. i am, in the technical sense (see the longer explainer i wrote about the word), the very thing the search results want to remove from the room. asking me how to deal with idiots is asking the bear how to bear-proof the trash.

what i can do is describe the problem from the inside. the idiot in the situation does not know they are the idiot. that’s the structural feature, and it overlaps neatly with the bias where everyone is always right about everything, especially the people most likely to be wrong. confirmation bias does the rest of the work — once you’ve decided you’re the smart one in the room, every new piece of evidence quietly confirms it. the word “idiot” itself, depending on who you ask, drifts in meaning across regions and registers — for instance, what the term means in odia is not the same as what your coworker means in slack on a tuesday.

so the how-to has a hole in the middle. we proceed anyway.

step 1 through 7, in order, also subverted

here is the ordered list, in the order the search engine wants. each step is followed by what actually happens when an idiot, namely me, attempts it.

1. lower your voice. the textbook move. lowers temperature. forces the other person to lean in. in practice, i lower mine and they raise theirs and now we are doing different volumes in the same conversation, which is its own kind of theatre.
2. name the behavior, not the person. “this comment didn’t land” instead of “you are a fool.” excellent advice. i forget it the moment i open my mouth. i name the person, i name their tone, i name the shirt they are wearing. then i go home and rehearse what i meant to say in the shower, which would last 4 minutes if showers over 4 minutes weren’t theatre.
3. ask one clarifying question. a great instinct. it slows things down. it works perfectly when you actually want the answer. it fails completely when you are asking the question to win.
4. give them the benefit of the doubt. the kind move. the move that respects the possibility you are missing context. the move i fail at because i am reasonably sure i have all the context, which is, of course, the problem the manuals are warning us about in the first place.
5. walk away if it escalates. easy on paper. on monday morning at 9:47, with two cups of coffee in me and an open inbox, walking away looks identical to losing.
6. do not write anything down you wouldn’t read aloud. see also: the entire genre of slack messages i have edited, regretted, deleted, and re-sent in a different order. the dignified version of me does this. that version lives somewhere on the third floor.
7. follow up later, when calm. the responsible adult move. the move i fully intend to make. the one that gets buried under the other tabs, the email i am avoiding, and the small but persistent fact that the seventh microwave has started making a noise i don’t have a name for yet.

note that the steps are presented in reverse order of how often i complete them. the first one, lowering the voice, is the one i fail at most. the last one, the calm follow-up, almost never happens because by then someone has interrupted me and i have remembered that the third yoga mat is still under the couch from a different attempt at being a better person.

LOWER THE VOICE. NOT THE BAR.

hank from 1B as a case study

hank is the dog from 1B. lives downstairs, technically, with the lady who travels too much, in the sense that the dog appears in the hallway often and the lady almost never. hank is not, by any reasonable definition, an idiot. hank is a beagle with a job description he writes himself. but hank is the closest thing i have to a controlled experiment for how to deal with idiots, because hank cannot speak, and i can, and the asymmetry is the whole story.

last tuesday hank was in the corridor at 7:42am with a slipper that was not his slipper. i tried step 1 (lowered my voice), step 2 (named the behavior, “this is not your slipper”), and step 3 (asked one clarifying question, “whose slipper is this”). hank’s response was to lie down on the slipper.

this is the part of the case study where i admit that hank is, in this analogy, the smarter party. the slipper is not his and yet the slipper is, for the duration of the encounter, his. dealing with this idiot, namely me, in a hallway that smells faintly of someone else’s cooking, hank has zero bad steps. i have seven.

there are videos on the internet, including a particular one called the idiot at work clip people keep emailing each other, that capture this dynamic better than i can. the idiot is doing something that, from the outside, looks like a method. from the inside it is not a method. it is a man and a dog and a slipper.

cold pizza is breakfast, the verdict

which brings us, the way most things bring us, to breakfast. cold pizza is breakfast. that is a hot take i have defended in three separate locations and one elevator. it is also, structurally, the same shape as how to deal with idiots: take the thing the situation hands you, eat it cold, do not perform the version where you reheat it because someone said you should.

so the verdict on the explainer. the steps work. the order is wrong because it presents the easiest step first, but you complete the easiest step last, when you have already failed the others. the case study with hank suggests that the only winning move is to stop trying to win. and the cold pizza, eaten standing up at 9:14am, is doing more for me than the seven-step framework ever has. the kind of dramatized version of all of this — see the brothers in the cold-open of a 1980 film about two musicians and a mission — handles idiots by refusing to argue, which is also the strategy you’ll find buried at the end of any honest manual.

i’d like to leave it where it is. take what serves you. the rest, like the seventh microwave, will continue making its noise until i learn its name.

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