A middle-aged guy was driving the sedan and rolled down his window to shout, “Where’d you learn how to drive? You didn’t even stop, I nearly hit you. Where’d you get your license, a box of cracker jacks?” Moments later a younger guy — maybe 20 years old — gets out of the driver’s side of the minivan and starts swaggering towards the sedan.

“You better stop honking at me or I’m gonna fucking…” I couldn’t quite make out what the young guy was threatening, but from his stance and demanor, I was pretty sure it was a  physical threat.

I’m standing  there, dismounted from my bike, watching this go down, not 10 feet away from me. The light has probably changed and I’m wondering if there’s going to be violence. Like it often does in tense situations, time seemed to slow down as I watched these two go at it. Strangely, I didn’t feel at all scared or threatened, just concerned. The two interlocutors didn’t seem to take any note of me at all.  I decided that it might be best if I actually stayed there, that having a ready witness might serve as a tiny disincentive for someone to step it up notch, as cars started to line up behind the sedan.

“You’re gonna what? Are you threatening me?”  the middle-aged guy yelled back, with the kid now standing barely a yard away.

The kid responded that he was going to do something, this time not quite loud enough for me to understand.

The middle-aged guy looked back at him somewhat stunned, but not quite scared and told him, “Well then I’ll call the cops.” He seemed to be aware of my presence and the people watching from their cars behind him.

The kid seemed taken aback, and said, “Fuck you, if you ever honk at me again…” waving his hand as if to brush the guy away. He swaggered back to his minivan, got in and made a right turn out of the intersection.

I was certainly relieved that things ended without a physical fight and was ready to get back on my way.  But the light was still red so the middle-aged guy pulled up to me. Obviously still steaming from the confrontation, he started complaining to me, “Back there he just blew through a stop sign, almost hit me. If I hadn’t been paying attention it would have been bad. Did you see that?”

I’ve been there myself so many times. You have a confrontation with someone and it gets heated and intense. Then it ends, often in draw, with neither combatant able to feel satisfied with a win. It’s anti-climactic and not at all satisfying. You’re still pumped up, your blood is flowing hot and fast and you still want satisfaction.

But regardless of who did what in this situation, it was stupid and needless. So I looked at the middle-aged guy and tried to look calm and empathic while making several downward motions with my hand, trying to signal that it was time to chill. He paused a moment and I said, “It’s over now.”

The middle-aged guy broke a smile and said, “Thanks buddy.” The light turned green and we both went our separate ways.

I don’t know if he thanked me for assuring him things were over, or because he thought that was an indication that I was siding with him. It doesn’t matter, because he seemed to get at least some hint that there was no win to be had.  I wasn’t siding with either party. Certainly someone honking at you is no reason to threaten violence. But the middle-aged guy was  escalating the situation by continuing to honk and yell after the near-collision was over.

It’s kind of amazing to realize how both person’s emotions took over in this situation where the near-accident had already been averted. Nobody got hurt, no cars collided. Yet with that good outcome both men were nearly ready to come to blows and create a new collision over their reactions.

What was the point, for either guy’s action and reaction? What were they hoping to accomplish?

I can guess at their motivations, but I’m not sure even they knew why they were doing what they were. They probably were able come up with explanations after the fact, feeling perfectly justified in their course of action. But in the moment, it’s visceral, emotional reaction.

We choose to fight, physically or verbally, for all sorts of reasons. Increasingly, to me it seems what’s less important is why we fight  and what’s more important is how we can choose not to fight.

One of the personality archetypes that I think most of us dealt with as children is the bully. While as adults we may not often encounter the school-yard type bully, who uses fists, physical threats and intimidation as his primary tools of manipulation, there are still bullies all over the place, in all stations and walks of life. And sooner or later you’ll have to deal with one. The problem with the adult bully is that because she or he doesn’t necessarily use physical intimidation, many of us do not easily identify that person as a bully, making that bully much harder to deal with.

I could write hundreds more paragraphs about bullies, because I’ve dealt with, and managed to circumvent so many of them over the last two decades. But this blog post today by Seth Godin makes lighter work of it:

Bullies can’t be bullies when they are alone.

If you work with a bully, this is all you need to know. They need you.

A bully is someone who uses physical or psychological force to demean and demoralize someone else. A bully isn’t challenging your ideas, or working with you to find a better outcome. A bully is playing a game, one that he or she enjoys and needs. You’re welcome to play this game if it makes you happy, but for most people, it will make you miserable. So don’t. …

Also today, Dustin Wax at Lifehacker posts “7 Ways to Deal with Annoying People and Still Get Things Done.” Each of the tactics is a good one, and Dustin provides just enough description to give us an idea of why and how it works.

The thread that runs through all of the “7 Ways” is the same basic advice as Seth Godin’s: Don’t engage, take your ball and go home.

The problem with this advice isn’t its simplicity, but rather how hard it is for most of us to enact. I think most people know this intellectually and can see the value when they think about it isolation. The problem comes when you’re face to face with that bully or difficult person. The best bully or difficult person is also a brilliant fisherman and seducer. She knows how to entice you into an engagement that turns into a conflict that she is better at controlling than you.

Why is the difficult bully better than you at controlling this conflict? Because she’s counting on the fact that you’re going to act according to rules that she has no intention on following. She expects you to be polite, to give the benefit of the doubt and then to either be conflict averse or ready to rumble. When threatened she expects you either to cave or defend yourself vigorously. No matter how the cards are dealt, the difficult person is the dealer, and the house always wins.

So much of the problem of dealing with the difficult bully is that you often don’t realize you’re sucked in and dealing with her until you’re already there, knee deep in fight or the dance. While the tactic of disengagement still works at this moment, it’s much harder to pull out mid-conflict, than being able to sidestep it from the get go.

The simplicity of the concept and the difficulty of its execution fascinates me, and yet I’ve learned quite a lot over my years of dealing with people. I think I’ve actually gotten pretty good at not getting suckered into needless, useless conflicts. It’s a subject that one very good friend of mine has been bugging me to share more publicly for many years now. I figure this blog is as a good a place as any to test it out.