Or, since I don't yell (at least at work; I yell plenty outside of the hospital), "when you're snippy, you're wrong."
I was snippy to a coworker the other day. What I was snippy about isn't important (it was patient placement in rooms, which turns into the three geese and the fox and the rowboat and the deaf boatman if you let it), and it wasn't an emergency (except that we had four patients to put into three beds and one of them was male and one was female and the third I don't remember except that it was a sex that made everything much more difficult) and, well, I was snippy.
Which ought to have been my clue: When Jo Is Snippy, Jo Is Wrong.
Except for last week. When the weird guy showed up on the unit, without an ID, and leading a crowd of residents.
He asked me a reasonable question, which I answered in a reasonable fashion. And then The Weird Guy said this:
"That's just the sort of response I would expect....from a nurse."
And I, God help me, said, "Oh! That's the sort of comment I would expect....from an ASSHOLE."
The Weird Guy? With no ID?
Was the new chairman of the neurology department.
Yeah.
Never mind that he was a thundering, galloping dick who deserved what he got; I mouthed off to the new chairman of the department.
However, he's been quite nice to me since then, even asking my opinion of a particularly difficult case.
The Other Nurse Who Works With The Chairman is of the opinion that he's an Asperger's Bully--you know, the sort that uses their lack of human connection as an excuse to be a jerk. I'm of the opinion that he's just an ass. Der Alter Jo supports me in this, and I've found that, as Aspergery as she and I can both be at times, she's a better judge of people than I am.
So, the lesson stands as this: If I'm snippy, then I'm wrong. In other words, if something has pushed me so far over the edge that I'm a careful, cutting bitch, I'm certainly not making the right choice in my response.
However: if I fail to cut you, and instead roll over you like an enormous, pissed-off, subtlety-lacking steamroller, the fault is yours.