Dealing With Armchair IT Experts

At some point in your IT career, you have or you will come across an armchair IT expert. What's that? You may ask. It's the client from hell who can barely turn on the PC, yet they feel it's their duty to teach you about computers. You offer a solution to their problem but they want to tell you what they found on Google or what their friend told them. What do you do with these annoying clients? Do you pimp smack them into tomorrow? Do you loose your cool and tell them to shut up? Or do you just take one for the team and absorb all of their abuse?
TechRepublic actually came up with 10 tips to help you deal with these individuals. Below is an excerpt from the article '10 tips for dealing with armchair IT experts':

"1: Be prepared

The number one bit of advice I can give anyone with regard to speaking or writing about IT is to be prepared. Make sure that your information came from a reliable source and that it is not outdated. Otherwise, someone is sure to call you out on it. Being prepared and knowing your stuff are the most important things you can do to avoid confrontation with those who have a point to prove.

2: Learn from them (if you can)

Although it is often the jerks who will publically challenge you, you can’t automatically assume that the person who is questioning you is an idiot. About a year ago, I sat in on a session that a friend was presenting, and someone stood up and challenged him during his presentation. My friend told the guy that we were all here to learn and that if he had something to add to the material then to go ahead.

The person who was challenging my friend actually made a perfectly valid point. It was a little bit outside the scope of the presentation, but it was good information and it did not directly contradict anything my friend was discussing.

3: Give them enough rope to hang themselves
I once gave a presentation and had someone stand up and tell me that everything about my presentation was wrong. At that point, I had two choices. I could have called for security to have the guy removed, but that would have left everyone in the room wondering about the validity of his comment. My other option was to give him the floor.

I asked the guy to be more specific and to tell me exactly what I was wrong about.The guy thoroughly embarrassed himself and was soon put in his place by other attendees."

To read the complete article click here!

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