I witnessed the clash of two CKIAs at work a few years ago. The rest of us suspected that either the two of them would loathe each other, or fall in love. They loathed each other. Thing is, they were both the type who did
know stuff, but they either revealed it patronizingly/with shock that you
didn't know, or thought that their (perfectly reasonable) way was the only
If either was challenged they were also the type to spend hours looking up proof that they were correct and/or laying out in detail their entire logical thought process, so if you dared to have a different opinion you were bludgeoned into agreeing or at least deferring just to get them to stop talking about it. It was always about completely trivial things, too--they'd come back and be like, "See, Smith WAS the shortstop for the Cardinals in 1985!" and people would be like, "Dude, that conversation was three days ago, and it wasn't important to the story anyway."
And they liked to interrupt casual conversations to correct things--like someone's telling a story about a great baseball play they saw decades ago and they name Jones as the shortstop, who is completely incidental to the story, and CKIA has to interrupt and say, "No, you're wrong, it must have been Smith at that time." 1) Does it matter to the story? 2) Does it matter to the people listening? 3) Is it an appropriate place/time/relationship
for you to say something?
It's disheartening when you feel like they just want to poke holes in even casual comments, like they can't listen just for fun or to grasp the underlying meaning.
My dad likes to be CKIA about personal history--the other day he was telling stories about my mom's roommates in college, which were wrong. Drives my mom up the wall. It's not just the story, it's the tone of relating smirky, insidery knowledge... and getting it wrong
. Or at least, acting like it's way more important, interesting, and relevant to the audience than it really is.