It just seems that most people I've met in IT come off as very condescending, I have even been known to come off this way and I'm trying to be more aware of this.
Add to that the issue that IT workers rarely get to deal with their users when things work well or perfectly. When IT systems work, they're invisible to the users, and no one thinks to go say thank you. Again this isn't just in IT- things that just work become invisible, and we don't tend to appreciate them until they fail and then are quickly restored. Then we go back to ignoring that the system exists.
If the strong majority of your experience in automobiles were crashes, or the only time you saw your parents were when they were angry, your opinions around automobiles, their operators, and parenting would be drastically different than others.
There's also just the simple fact that people who tend to deal with machines more often than people may not end up perfectly socialized and end up reacting in a way that feels natural but might be seen as 'different' to those who would work in (say) a daycare all day, unintentionally coming off poorly. A company's Social Club planner is going to have a very different view of what "fun" in the office is compared to most people, I think it just comes down to expressing appreciation and trying to remember that everyone is trying to do their best.
I do hope none of this was read as being condescending, I don't intend for it to be.
When it comes to pepole outside of IT however i rarley bother with being polite. here's some of the reasons:
Pepole generally treat IT staff badly. Things should "just work" and if they don't we're the ones left witht the noose around our necks. No bad descisions made by HR,Economy or senior management could ever have any effect in the outcome of a project or the quality of service. Most pepole in the forementioned departments know little or nothing about what IT is actually doing yet they often play a big part in important desicions concerning the IT enviroment in a company. If something goes to hell its always "the servers aren't managed properly" and never "it's because we denied you the budget needed for new hardware so we could show off a .1% better margin this quarter". It's never "My god we should have listened when you told us you needed a new programmer since the workload has skyrocketed latley" and so on and so forth.
Making a change in how IT is managed is rarley done based upon logical conclusions and reasoning and very often done based upon numbers in a spreadsheet. It's the first thing companies cut back on in bad times and it's the last thing companies spend money on in good times. This often results in a "They don't understand us and they don't care about us" attitude amongst the IT staff. Most of us love what we do and care just as much about the company we work for as any other person. how do you expect us to treat pepole who constantly tread on our toes and then hangs us when we can't run the mile fast enough?
here's a real life example for you: a person with a position quite high up in the hierarchy walks into the room where the 1st line technicians reside and want's an extra screen. The reply he/she get's is "I'm sorry we only have a few spares left and we want to reserve those for pepole whose primary screens break." he then replies "Yeah yeah, but you can buy new ones." this is when it turns ironic. the technician replies "No sir i'm sorry but we can't do that, you see we have a very tight budget as costs are rising so we don't have much of our budget left and we have to manage that carefully in order not to run out". The manager is clearly annoyed and walks of in a huff after clearly stating that "In that case the IT budget has been very badly managed, i think that it's a shame you can't do your jobs properly". This could have been true. If it hadn't been for the fact that they recently merged with another company and this was not given a separate project budget at all. resulting in the IT department having to spend almost all of their budget mergin the networks,ad's,financial systems etc of the two companies. This was not planned for at the beginning of the year when budgets were set. In this case an IT employee got a verbal beating for a desicion made by higher ups and it clearly shows a lack of understanding from senior management and economy in how IT works and what's needed budget wise to make things work. And you know what, it's not the first and most definatley not the last time similiar situations will occur.
*Edit to format the post a bit it was a huge wall of text and not very readable(first post here so i'm not quite familiar with how things work yet :) )
When a non-IT person has correspondence with an IT person about IT stuff it could come off as condescending because more often than not, the shared common knowledge is not there.
You probably could come off less condescending if you teach your users in terms of "Best Practices" instead of "Things to Avoid".
It's the remainder - the Idontfuckingcarejustgetitfixed crowd - that ends up with my disdain and condescending feelings after a time. You know they'll never learn, they'll never care to learn, and you're just an obstacle to whatever is waiting on the other end of that Powerpoint or Farmville run.
Folks who are reasonably bright are often given hell in school and become social outcasts because of stuff teachers, society and other kids do (teachers are really bad about holding up the smart kids as examples to follow even though no amount of studying will make the other kids that smart and, no, it really isn't anything the teacher did though they are trying to take credit for it). Condescension can be a form of ego defense -- ie "I have few if any friends and I know you hate me on sight just for being me, but I'm better than you and probably make more money".
You can often get past something like that by overlooking it and being genuinely nice to them and sincerely respecting their brains/ability/contribution instead of resenting it and trying to fight for the limelight with them. Only the occasional hardcore asshole will persist for long with consistently asinine behavior in the face of genuine, sincere niceness and respect/appreciation.
(Though, really, all the folks from IT at my company that I can recall interacting with have been just genuinely nice to me from the get go.)