Ego Boost

My ego was boosted a lot today. The engineer that I work with that has been accompanying the last few audits has been getting on my nerves. He does not respect my authority in these audits, he is arrogant, he interrupts, he misunderstands things that have been made clear and wastes precious time on them, frustrating not only me, but also the people who have already explained as well as the translators who have already translated. He makes statements like "Do you want to check this?" and "Shouldn't we see that record?" before I have a chance to even begin to ask, as if he is leading the team and has to direct poor, little, ignorant me. I have been very patient, but today I snapped. Today I interrupted him, reworded a question that we were having trouble with, got my answer, and then declared that we were going to move on and not linger on this issue.

Because of this, at lunch he was a little snippy. So, after I spoke some Mandarin to our hosts, he said "You can hear her accent, right?" And the woman who I had been speaking to said, "No, she sounds just like a Chinese person." And she said it in Chinese and I understood. Hmph.