You can find difficult people everywhere. Sometimes we work with them, sometimes we play with them, and sometimes we even live with them.

I call the difficult people in life the Bozos of life. If you let them, they can ruin your day, or worse.

There's the key phrase, if you let them.

The IEOE

There is one special type of bozo that I find particularly irritating.

The IEOE is the Instant Expert On Everything, the classic know-it-all.

On the TV show Cheers, it was Cliff the mailman. Expert on everything, complete with facts and figures that would bore you to suicide. You just know they must have spent their childhood and their adult spare time reading the encyclopedial and The Journal of Meaningless and Trivial Information.

The IEOE bozo is really irritating when they wander into your area of expertise.

ALthough they would be good to have on your team in a game of Trivial Pursuit.

What to do

There's an old saying that goes something like this:

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." Might have been Mark Twain, sure sounds like him.

In other words, let the IEOE ramble on, they will eventually expose themselves for what they are.

Visit Secrets of Stress Management for more tips and tools for dealing with the stress is your life. You can also check out How to Beat the BOZOs for more tips on how to deal with different types of difficult people.