Manager: We (meaning you) need to do task A. How long will it take?
Me: Task A will take X days to do.
Manager: That seems awful long.
Me: How long do you think it should take?
Manager: It surely could not take any longer than Y days.
Me: Ok, it seems you have an answer to your question then.
Later:
Manager: It’s been Y days, why isn’t task A done yet?
I deeply dislike sarcasm. It’s neither funny nor helpful.
There was a guy I worked with that was pretty much always sarcastic.[1]. I’d ask him if he’d written the run book yet and he’d say like “Yes, it’s written in the style of a sonnet with hand drawn illustrations”, and I’d be like “I don’t know if that means you wrote it or not”. Everything with him took extra steps because his communication was such a swamp of insincerity.
[1] well, when I asked him to stop being sarcastic he said it wasn’t sarcasm. He was merely being ironic. Nonsense.
Just take his word as straight as you can make it. Mail to management that Mr. Sarcasm (in CC) said the document was written with added graphics. Then wait for the inevitable “I didn’t mean it like that”.
Yes, exactly. Adding consequence is always a good way to make someone change their behavior.
Works wonders with my kids. If there’s no consequence, there’s no change.
I have a similar coworker. Tries to be funny with sarcasm but that doesn’t translate well with slack messages, and he ends up sounding like an asshole instead.
Sounds really frustrating.
Ironic that he didn’t know the definition of sarcasm while employing it so heavily…
Simpson’s comic book guy vibes