Advice for coping from fellow Narcissists

Might be part rant but with my deployment the overqualifications I have for my current position have come into sharp focus. I am a trained analyst and yet I find myself sitting at the unofficial help desk for the command. Now granted its not supposed to be like that but my predecesors lacked a backbone and the duties have been saddled onto our office and there is little I can do about it at this point. All that leads to my particular problem as a Narcissist of dealing with people with genuinely ignorant questions on a constant basis day in and day out. (such as do you know where so and so is? Can you give me his number? A close second to asking someone on the corner of a NY street city for Joe Shmoe's number) I know I look at them like they have dicks growing out of their foreheads as if to say why the hell are you still in my office? As they look at me with that deer in the headlights look. My contempt for these people has been steadily growing (despite the 4 star coin I got this morning) and its only a matter of time before I become pissed off enough to piss off someone much higher ranking than me.

To the people on the board with NPD. When you are forced to deal with people who you don't even give a chance to value, and fit all your criteria to be immediatly devalued. How do you keep the mask on?

Phoenixrising81704 wrote:To the people on the board with NPD. When you are forced to deal with people who you don't even give a chance to value, and fit all your criteria to be immediatly devalued. How do you keep the mask on?

My first ever paid employment was doing IT troubleshooting work as a part time job. "Help, the printer isn't working", that kind of crap. So I know what you mean. I had a number of strategies that helped.
1) I took breaks as often as possible. Put my phone on hold for several minutes between calls. Anything I could get away with. If anyone asked, I was doing paperwork regarding previous incidents.
2) I padded my timesheets. I figured I was worth far more than they were paying me anyway so I was just helping make things right.
3a) I tried to make the people I was "helping" feel as stupid as possible while I showed off my knowledge. I always made sure to use technical terms they didn't understand and gave them an irritated look when they asked me what I meant. Then I would go into long explanations of whatever I had just been saying.
3b) For about 10-20% of people who seemed really genuinely appreciative, I didn't do the things in 3a. I liked helping those people. Especially if they were young and female.
4) If it's going to be a long annoying conversation with a problem that can't be dispatched in a few minutes, tell them I have to "research" it and call them back. This is especially effective near the end of a shift.
5) I quit after 2 years anyway. It was more than enough. If a job is beneath you, no amount of coping will change that fact.

I can do all those but pad the time sheet, on salary here but I am sure that would help me feel better if I wern't. Thanks Sfguy, I do help the ones that seem to have genuine questions, or the cute ones, and General officers. I think it's a matter of being somewhat spoiled. Aside from briefings (which I love) when doing my real job I don't interact with too many people. It's just me and my sources, that and my field tends to have the brighter bulbs in the military and I am not exposed to too many idiots. Here I have to interact with supply, maintinence, ect..

My cousin was working an IT job and I can imagine your frustration Sfguy, he told me about the lady that was complaining that windows started up fine she saw the logo, then it crashed and all these little icons appeared!

Make stupid $#%^ up.

It's actually a lot of fun. I used to be a lifeguard, and when I didn't want to work I would fake a pool fouling to close the pool for 4 hours (and get paid), or if someone asked me why the pool was so cold, I would say the PIB levels were too high. PIB means "penis in bum". Juvenile I know, but it helped pass the time. When I was on the deep end, and had to test kids on how well they could swim, I would give them a password and they would go to another guard to get their bracelet. I would make up passwords such as Bukake and the like.

Luckily I only work with those with Ph.D's now, so its hard to get bored from dealing with them (when I actually do, considering a lot of my time is spent on my experiments).

Phoenixrising81704 wrote:To the people on the board with NPD. When you are forced to deal with people who you don't even give a chance to value, and fit all your criteria to be immediatly devalued. How do you keep the mask on?

I have a similar problem, phoenix. My job entails partially a helpdesk sub-role and we receive an abundance of calls - a majority of which are blatantly ignorant questions.

I might side with sfguy75x on this. I do enjoy helping those who genuine appreciate our assistance. I do keep a heavy facade on. Most of the time, I go through their query and break it down into understandable components. If they still don't understand it, I re-iterate it in a way that the advice we're giving is untenable. Whether or not it makes sense to them is not my concern, I put it in a way that it sounds so logical that no dimwit could misunderstand it.

In the end, it's just a job.

Phoenixrising81704 wrote:All that leads to my particular problem as a Narcissist of dealing with people with genuinely ignorant questions on a constant basis day in and day out.

Hey Phoenix

That must be hard - can you explain a bit how the dynamics work? Is it that you feel your intelligence is being insulted or just that it is irritating? Or is it that someone who you consider to be inferior dares ask you something - and that is in some way denigrating your intelligence?

How do you feel about being in challenging situations where it is possible you may not 'come out on top'? Do they make you feel anxious or do you enjoy being challenged (whether you 'win' or not)?

Normal? wrote:That must be hard - can you explain a bit how the dynamics work? Is it that you feel your intelligence is being insulted or just that it is irritating? Or is it that someone who you consider to be inferior dares ask you something - and that is in some way denigrating your intelligence?

It's annoying to be doing work that someone with much less intelligence could do just as well. It's annoying to do a job where the questions I am answering barely scratch the surface of my depth of knowledge. In the IT world, it's very annoying that some people take computers for granted as if they were as simple as a toaster oven, the most annoying customers think the computer should "just work" all the time and that if the tech can't fix it in 2 minutes then the tech is incompetent. They are impatient, if you try and explain anything to them they think you are just making excuses and don't want to hear it. It's demeaning to feel unappreciated, narcs are of course at the high of sensitivity but this is obviously something normal people can understand as well. Anyway, I haven't done work like that for a long time, and I wouldn't ever want to. I only like dealing with smart people, I hate the "general public".

Normal? wrote:How do you feel about being in challenging situations where it is possible you may not 'come out on top'? Do they make you feel anxious or do you enjoy being challenged (whether you 'win' or not)?

It depends. Your question is way too broad to answer.

Normal? wrote:For what it's worth I find it difficult too to deal with some of the people who I work with - especially the ones who feign ignorance about their role or responsibilities (I always think they can't possibly be stupid enough not to understand and are therefore just swinging the lead). I'm afraid my response is often scathing sarcasm and it doesn't always work either but I don't know how to stop doing it. It annoys me that these people don't do their job properly (and let others down - particularly students) just because they are lazy. My boss once told me that when managing people I shouldn't expect them to be the same as me since 'trust is not a management virtue'! It winds me up!

Your boss's advice is natural but misguided. I would say it differently: naivety is not a management virtue, but trust (within reason) is. Numerous studies have shown that most employees act the way the expect to be treated, if you don't trust them they will act in a way that reinforces your belief. The conditions that make employees maximally productive and satisfied have been well studied, but they are difficult to apply. What works best is giving them clear objectives and deadlines, and then giving them trust and space to do it without micromanaging. However, there also has to be accountability, if you give the employee trust and they abuse it, then there has to be consequences. It's important that the employee understand that losing trust is their own fault, and not just a result of managerial spite.

Normal? wrote: must be hard - can you explain a bit how the dynamics work? Is it that you feel your intelligence is being insulted or just that it is irritating? Or is it that someone who you consider to be inferior dares ask you something - and that is in some way denigrating your intelligence?

My current position is an insult to my intelligence, a waste of my $50,000 training, and bad for my career. (admittadly good for my post retirement prospects) I am an intelligence analyst, and a damn good one too. Ran red cell operations as a PFC for a brigade sized element, was the lead analyst and big picture analyst for Abu Ghuraib (after the scandal) and before this assignment the S-2 (intel section) NCO in charge and lead as my LT was air defense trained. Now I am a secretary with a clearance. I went from creating actionable intel that had direct impact on the mission in theatre (got bad guys killed, saved good guys) to answering questions like why dosn't my badge work? To say there is a discrepency with job satisfaction is an understatement.

Normal? wrote:How do you feel about being in challenging situations where it is possible you may not 'come out on top'? Do they make you feel anxious or do you enjoy being challenged (whether you 'win' or not)?

I do my best work when it's a challenge. Especially if nobody thinks it can be done, either way I get praise. If given something thats in my field and worth my time I set the standard.

Phoenixrising81704 wrote:. I went from creating actionable intel that had direct impact on the mission in theatre (got bad guys killed, saved good guys) to answering questions like why dosn't my badge work?

Dude that sucks. What did you do, sleep with your boss's wife? Someone must have been pissed off for that kind of demotion.

I got greedy, re-enlisted for a cherry assignment and got it, but I only got the location. The office I am in now needed bodies, and I happened to be the next one in... I ranted when I first got there but realized that this position (as much as I loathe it) opens up civilian jobs outside the sphere of Government that pay even more. (such as preventing industrial espionage) I have to also add that the times where I am doing what I love are also while I am deployed, can't have the sweet without the sour can I?