How To Deal With A Dwight

The NY Times has an op-ed today on the booming industry of self-help books specifically designed to deal with "difficult people" aka the dolt, the whiner, and the sniper or in layman's terms: jerks, dolts and nitwits.

These are the people that haunt you everywhere: the office, home, or gym. Either way, you can't escape them. And instead of marginalizing the damage they create by reprimanding them, we must learn to adapt an attitude of tolerance and acceptance of their limitations.

:Here two people give their respective accounts of their encounters with difficult personalities:

“They’re very disruptive, these people,” said Brook Zelcer, a tennis pro and an English teacher in Westwood, N.J.

On the tennis court, Mr. Zelcer has been served up his share of overbearing and impatient parents. One stood out as truly difficult: The father who gave his wife play-by-plays of his daughter’s matches on his cellphone, disrupted games by shouting from the stand, encouraged his daughter to cheat during matches and drove her to tears.

Mr. Zelcer tried to control the father, but all he got was a phone call from the man insisting he loved his child. “That’s one of the reasons I quit coaching,” Mr. Zelcer said. “I couldn’t deal with these people.”

For Ann Rothman, a Manhattan real estate agent, her difficult person is a know-it-all friend who simply cannot be pleased.

“She’s a superior human being, and she comes from a superior area — Berkeley, Calif.,” Ms. Rothman said. “She has told me many times that there are only two places to get good food. One of them is Berkeley, and one of them is France. And France is only second to Berkeley.”

I guess all this helps to explain the phenomenal success of NBC's "The Office." We may all laugh at them, but bottom line is, everyone still hates a nudnik.