'Tude on Tape

My SME at work writes crappy, incomplete specs, doesn't update them when information changes, and makes lazy, vague comments (like "I'm not sure if this is true") when he reviews my work. He also gives me lots of attitude when I ask a question (even if he doesn't know the answer).

One time I sent him a list of questions, which he ignored for more than a month. (I could say more about that whole incident, but I'm already tired and pissed off.)

Anyway, I've encountered people like this before, but most of the people I've worked with have not been like that. Not everyone is great at writing specs, but they make up for it with thorough reviews. Or if they're not great reviewers, they're at least willing to answer questions about things I suspect might be wrong.

In any case, being rude to the writers is not the standard where I work.

More than a year ago SME conducted some training sessions, which were recorded for posterity. I'm not sure exactly who attended the training, but I know that it was a variety of people from different departments.

I was watching one of those sessions today, and got some puny benefit from it, although I was pretty annoyed by all the times when he said "well this is just like another screen in blah blah blah, so we can skip this." (Incorrectly assuming that people are familiar with blah blah blah.) And all the times he said "This is the Blah Blah Blah screen" without saying anything more about it. Some training.

At some point, someone asked what one of the acronyms stood for. SME didn't remember, and declined to look it up in the help, because (he said) "the help is useless."

He then spent more than three minutes of class time looking for the spec, which also did not explain what the acronym stood for.

Eventually, someone in the class revealed that the answer was indeed in the help. (This means that the writer got it right, no thanks to the spec.) Disbelieving, SME pulled up the help so that he could see it with his own eyes. There, he also found the answer to another question he had been unable to answer, but then noted that some other acronym wasn't defined. "At least they got one right," he grumbled.

Yeah, I know - I just grumbled about him in front of the entire world. But somehow I don't think it's the same thing as grumbling about him, or his department's work, in front of a large group of coworkers.

I'm not sure what to do. Should I:

1. Share this recording with my boss, who already knows that I'm dissatisfied with SME's specs, reviewing, and attitude.
   
   
2. Bring it to the attention of SME's boss, who already fields more questions about his crappy specs than anyone else's (which means he's also failing to answer questions from other people). She may have witnessed it when it happened, but that was a while back and she might care more if she knows a writer heard it.
   
   
3. Tell SME tomorrow that I heard his five minutes' worth of griping about the writers and ask if he's found out what that acronym means yet so that I can spell it out in the help. (Of course I'm going to fix it anyway.)
   
   
4. Sit on it and wait till he gives me some attitude, then blow up at him and throw the "evidence" in his face. Ahem, I mean "explain why his attitude strikes me as counterproductive."
   
   
5. Do nothing, but stew over it for many years. (My version of "letting it go.")

To complicate matters, we're doing employee reviews for the next several months (it's a complicated process), which means that anything I say to my boss and/or SME's boss might carry more weight than it usually would - or it could get swept under the rug to keep it off the record, in which case there was no point in saying anything.

I like #3 because SME never did let any of the writers know that the info about that acronym was missing. (Clearly he didn't notice that it was missing when he reviewed the original writer's work, either.)