Still, you bring up a good point in that my comment could have completely backfired and made me look condescending to my own group of folks. A key to that, I think, is in the delivery. It is hard to get my sarcastic tone in this instance across in text, but you can imagine how I tried to make it perfectly clear that I was kidding.

Pete Johnson
HP.com Chief Architect
Personal blog: http://nerdguru.net

Interestingly, though, I have found that practicing that in my virtual communication makes me much better able to do so in my face-to-face communication.

“I think what you meant to say,” I said calmly, “is that nobody from knows how to write any code . . . . except for Pete.”

Joking or not, it seems unfair to refer to your team this way among your peers.

I happen to live in Japan, where concepts of personal space are different from those I encountered in the US. Here it’s normal to have someone jabbing their elbow into your side during the daily commute on jam-packed trains. I’ve adjusted to this by getting to the office earlier in the morning to avoid the peak crowds, but nevertheless find myself almost daily confronted with someone invading my space. My initial reaction was to get angry (Why me?!), which was soon followed by self-recrimination (Why not me?! Everyone has to deal with this — why do I think I’m so special?). The result was frustration.

These days I focus on keeping my side of the street clean, but as a big guy (relative to my fellow commuters) I do take up a lot of space myself. If someone’s jabbing me, I usually ask if they have enough room, and that seems to do the trick — either they’ll respond positively and relax a bit, or they’ll move somewhere else to avoid having to talk to me. Ha ha ha — either way the situation is resolved.