People who ‘know it all’ are stupid, not smart

Stephan knows everything. At least whatever he knows, he believes he truly knows it better than anybody else. For instance, how much it would cost to call out a fire truck. Some, or most, say $150. Stephan insists it is $145. He will not stand to be corrected. His is a world of the non-negotiable. It’s my way or the highway. If there are three different ways to reach a place you better believe it that Stephan knows the shortest route.

“Come with me, I’ll take you, I’ll show you, you’ll see how much quicker this one is.”

What he doesn’t mention, of course, is that it involves walking right across a busy highway — finding a sprintable gap in the traffic — then climbing a steep ramp, vaulting a rather low, but challenging concrete parapet, hopping across another not-so-busy road, bending as low as a tight-muscled back can manage to squeeze through a gap in the wire fence that protects the railway lines and finally on to the home stretch. It is indeed quicker, but far more exhausting. Stephan will argue, “You said quicker, well this is it.”

At work do not be surprised to feel a sudden tap on the shoulder followed by a voice saying, “Come with me, I’ll show you an easier way to do that. Just stand over this wall with your bag of rubbish and throw it down into the open skip below.”

“What?”

“Yes you heard me right. Think of the minutes it saves you going all the way round carrying that huge bin bag. Saves time, saves energy.”

But, Stephan, you counter, isn’t that the wrong thing to do? I mean what if you’re hurling that bag all the way down and someone is standing at the skip. Wouldn’t such a move endanger people?

“Ah, now I said I’d show you the easier way. I’ve been doing this for months and am yet to hit someone!”

On the way home from work, Stephan knows which is the best train to catch or whether it’s more advisable to take a bus — depending on when one signs off from work.

“Come with me,” he’ll say, there’s this train it should be arriving in 15 minutes.

“Isn’t there a bus in about eight minutes, Stephan?”

“Yeah, but they’re never on time. Come with me.”

Stephan also knows the ins and outs of cricket. If he finds himself up against another cricket aficionado — like myself — he chooses not to talk much about the subject.

“Who was the Aussie cricketer bowled under arm in an ODI?”

“Ah, can we talk about something else, Kev?”

One is not sure if he is embarrassed at being Aussie on that score, or simply afraid to admit someone knows more; one feels it’s the latter for I’ve heard him chattering up a storm on cricket to a bunch of non-cricketing co-workers until I arrived upon the scene whereupon he decided to indulge his audience in a treatise on footy, a version of rugby.

Back in the day when I was in school I think I and a few of my classmates were fortunate to encounter a teacher — let’s call her Mrs V. She was quick to see how full of ourselves we were as youngsters — young, promising, Mr Know-It-Alls. She it was who took the trouble to introduce the contrary-sounding compulsory leisure reading and post-discussion of every book read. It didn’t matter what the book what the genre — science fiction, non-fiction, plain old Mills & Boon romance — you read the book and you spoke about it — to her, in person. If you learned anything from the book you revealed it: a foreign place, a canny personality, a conjuring trick.

Her philosophy was simple. “Surround yourself with people smarter than yourself and watch how you yourself grow as a person. And be open-minded.”

Years later I realise that used to be an opinion propounded by the television presenter Andy Rooney.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.