I rarley talk down to other technicians regardless of experience. I always think it's worthwile to listen to what other techies and IT staff have to say since experiences vary and sharing knowlegde is important. And by that i mean giving just as well as taking. If I meet an older technician I greatly aprreciate every second he/she sacrifices in order to answer a question. I also feel obliged to treat pepole with less experience the same way that I myself appreciate to be treated.

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 :) )