WIBTA for refusing to be a walking encyclopedia for a lazy coworker?
I have been at this firm for three years and I managed to document almost every single recurring issue we have with our legacy servers. It took me months of late nights to build a proper internal wiki so that people do not have to ping each other for every small thing. Enter this guy Dave. Dave has been with us for over six months now so the new guy excuse has long expired but he still acts like he has never seen a terminal in his life. Every day he messages me with stuff like hey what was the command to reset the cache or where do we keep the API keys for the dev environment.
At first I was helpful because I wanted to be a team player. I would type out the answers and even jump on a quick screen share to show him the ropes. But it became a habit. Dave realized that asking me is ten seconds faster than clicking a bookmark and searching the wiki. I noticed he never takes notes and he never actually learns the process. He just uses me as a human search engine while I am trying to focus on a massive cloud migration project that has been eating my soul for weeks. My own performance is tied to this migration and every interruption costs me twenty minutes of deep focus.
The breaking point was yesterday when he asked me a question about the staging environment for the fourth time this week. I was right in the middle of debugging a serious produciton outage and my stress levels were through the roof. Instead of giving him the answer I just copied the link to the exact page in our knowlege base that explains the whole setup and sent it with a message saying please check the docs first. He replied with a sad face emoji and then I heard from my manager that Dave feels intimidated and that I am creating a toxic environment by being unapproachable.
Apparently Dave went around telling people that I am a gatekeeper who refuses to help the team. Now the office socialites are giving me the cold shoulder because I did not want to spoon-feed a guy who gets paid eighty grand a year to be a professional engineer. My manager suggested I should be more patient but I think patience is for people who actually try to learn. If I keep answering his questions I am just enabling his laziness and making my own job harder. It feels like I am being punished for being efficient while he gets coddled for being incompetent. '
The funniest part is that his desk is literally ten feet away and I can see him scrolling through sports news every time I look up from my monitor. Am I really the asshole for expecting a colleage to use his eyes and read the manual?