Impress Them With Your Arrogance.

Today I had lunch with a friend who got annoyed enough with an arrogant HR person from Big Academic Company (you can guess which one) and decided to try fighting snotty, stuck up bullshit about You Need Three Top Tier Papers with... arrogance.

Et voila! HR Person backed down and started treating her like an equal, or even better, someone worth hiring.

So maybe it's not that I'm not nice enough.

Maybe I'm nice to the wrong people (the ones who are more impressed by arrogance, like certain admins around here), and being "arrogant" with people who can't appreciate it (people who are threatened by smart women, for example).

I am tempted to test this out. Perhaps instead of turning on the charm, I should just start intimidating the hell out of people. If you can't make them love you, you can make them fear you, right?

I've always wondered if maybe I'm not self-promoting enough in that really obnoxious way that works for a subset of people whom no one can stand but everyone is impressed by anyway.

Like the story about the grad student who stopped all the classmates in the parking lot, one by one, and asked them how many papers they had published yet, as an excuse to brag.

I mean, that takes balls.

Maybe I just should go around bragging about what I've done, drop names, and so on.