Common Decency Has Logged Out

(Our small company hires a new tech guy who is kind of a jerk. He really likes to lean hard into the “everyone but people who work in IT are helpless and have stupid problems” stereotype and takes it beyond harmless teasing, even when the issue you have is legitimate and out of your control. He also tends to be very arrogant and condescending. One day I’m trying to update something in our database and keep getting an error. It’s something I’ve done a million times before, as outlined by the steps left behind from our previous tech guy who moved away, and the system isn’t giving me any information that I can use to troubleshoot besides the error. I call up our tech guy and give him the error I’m seeing, plus the steps to reproduce it, and everything I’ve tried.)

Tech: “Huh, that shouldn’t be possible. You probably aren’t logged in.”

Me: “I am definitely logged in. I couldn’t see the dashboard if I wasn’t.”

Tech: “You need to be putting these things in the assets folder.” *drags the word “assets” out long, as if speaking to a dog*

Me: “I just told you, I did. You can see them in there for yourself. I know the error it gives me when it can’t find them, and that’s not the code it threw. Did you try to replicate it?”

Tech: “We’ll do that later if necessary. For now, let’s just make sure everything you’re doing is on the up and up.”

(Frustrated, I walk him through everything that’s happening, again. He just keeps reiterating that I must have done something wrong, and I keep asking him to try and see if he gets the same error. When he loops back around to saying I must not be logged in, AGAIN, I hang up and go down to his office, make him move aside, and show him, right in front of him, what I’m doing and the error I’m getting. I have to tell him to pay attention multiple times because he keeps sighing in a put-upon way and fiddling with his phone.)

Me: “Okay. You just saw me do everything correctly, right in front of you, and I still got the error. What is happening?”

Tech: “I told you, you… Oh. Well, why aren’t you doing [completely different process than the one I’ve been following for years]?”

Me: *baffled* “Why would I? That’s not the way the system works.”

Tech: “It is now. I made some updates yesterday, so you need to do things that way from now on. I told you about this, hon.”

Me: “You absolutely did not, and please don’t call me ‘hon.'”

(While he initially insisted he did, when he pulled up his email to prove it, what he’d actually done was save the message as a draft instead of sending it. He never apologized for the confusion or his attitude. I found out from another coworker that he’d gone to complain to our boss about my “bad attitude.” My boss just laughed and said, “I’ve never heard her so much as raise her voice; what did you do?” Keep in mind I still HADN’T actually raised my voice to him at all. He quit a couple weeks later, saying he was looking for a company a little less “high maintenance,” right after he’d been reprimanded for coming in more than an hour late three days in a row. Can’t say we miss him, and the new guy we hired is absolutely fantastic.)