The guy I’m working with here — let’s call him “Doug” — is having problems pulling a report and he just complained to me for the umpteenth fucking time about it. Normally I would try to care deeply — deeply, I tell you! — about this problem he’s having, but this time around I just can’t. Because he’s not trying to pull the report out of my software, he’s pulling it out of someone else’s, software I don’t know a damned thing about, software he’s supposed to know how to use because he’s been using it for years. Not my problem, bro, handle it yourself.

So Doug came over to me just now, showed me the report, and bitched about how “what we need to do is figure out how to eliminate this column from the report.” And then he stared at me, expecting me to have the answer.

I gave him an answer: So you’ve got a goal now, Doug. It’s good to have goals.

For me, that’s tact.