Well, Actually ...

Being a little too smart for their own good, geeks often find themselves correcting others in a pedantic manner.  Unfortunately and unwittingly, we build walls between ourselves and others when we focus on unimportant details in this way.  Over the years, through trial and error I've learned to avoid this more often than not, but it is something I need to work at and keep mindful about.

Courtesy xkcd

Here is an important post on the subject by Miguel de Icaza where he explains elegantly and concisely the problem and how to avoid it.  This one hit a little close to home.

As we mature as developers, finding logic errors and incomplete solutions becomes our way of life. It defines us.

But our engineering strength is also our social weakness. Countless times as engineers you will find yourself interrupting someone telling a story, an anecdote or a joke to correct a false assumption, provide an extra fact that the narrator overlooked, give a bigger perspective on the problem or point out that the joke premise is actually flawed.

Most misconceptions, or slight errors in communication are simply not important enough to derail conversation.  If one makes a habit of interrupting people take notice.  As such, I plan to put this it in my yearly reading list and recommend detail-oriented geeks everywhere do too.

Do you have the  "Well, actually ... " problem, and any techniques to avoid it?