Everyone Loves Pedantic Coworkers!

I work in a formal office setting. Some of my coworkers can be very stuffy and procedural. It can be grating but they are good people. I tend to take a little more time with presentations and emails on important matters, and I avoid any written conversations with those types of people.

I need to catch up with one of “those” coworkers, so drop by his desk. Finding him not there, I write on a post-it.

Me: “Dropped by to catch up on projct slides. Catch you later. [My Name].”

I get on with my other work and said coworker appears at my desk.

Coworker: “Was this your note?”

It has my name on it — a unique name for this office.

Me: “Yes, that’s me.”

Coworker: “I couldn’t really read the writing.”

I don’t have the best handwriting, but it is clearly legible.

Me: “I wanted to catch up with you about the project slides.”

Coworker: “No, I got that much.”

Me: “Okay, well, it’s just—”

Coworker: *Interrupting* “You do realise that you spelt ‘project’ wrong? I mean, it’s not a hard word to write, is it?”

He laughs to himself.

Me: *Pauses* “Okay.”

Coworker: “And to be honest, ‘catch you later’ isn’t really appropriate office language, is it?”

Me: “It’s a post-it note, not a company-wide email.”

Coworker: “I’m just letting you know. So, what did you want?”

Me: “You know what? It doesn’t matter.”

He huffed and puffed but finally left my desk. If he wasn’t such an a**, I would have told him that the project slides he did were based on massively out-of-date information. I ran the same figures and found completely different numbers. As we would be both presenting in the same meeting, he would look the fool, and now I would certainly have the evidence that I was right to take into the meeting.