At several jobs I've had a colleague that I had to work with who liked to argue over pointless things. It can be very frustrating and time consuming and is never productive, and usually is only tangentially related to work (if at all). How do I talk to this type of individual? I have tried only speaking to them about work related mater but they seem to be experts at going on tangents (for example I ask them to sign a paper and they start talking about how they can't use the pen I hand them because it's the type that doesn't work well).
It can be quite challenging. For example I was warming lunch up on the griddle and he walks up and says "is there oil on that" and I reply "yes" and he says "there shouldn't be" and I ask "why not?" and he says "because it's Teflon".
Also on a virtual machine I occasionally used he over heard me say I have adware (in the sense my google searches get redirected) and now whenever I'm talking to someone else about it he brings up "I ask again, why would you connect to the servers using a compromised virtual machine?".
Should I just ignore these unsolicited remarks? It's hard to know what I can believe him saying, for example I've never heard you shouldn't put cooking oil on something made of Teflon.
