Posting this in AIBU as I'm completely prepared to be told I am BU and need to get the fuck over myself:
I'm an IT consultant and the senior (and only woman, which may or may not matter) in my team -- minus my boss, obviously, but he doesn't do the exact same job, so I'm kind of on my own there.
A couple of the guys have recently resigned and we've replaced them. New guy #2 is great. I knew I wanted to have him the moment I conducted the phone interview and he's exceeded all my expectations so far.
New guy #1 (I'll call him Fred) is doing my head in! I had a bad feeling about him from the very start but was overruled re. the hiring decision due to his supposed qualifications and the fact that we needed to fill the vacancy immediately.
Fred's technically on the same seniority level as myself, but working with him feels rather like babysitting a toddler. That man simply refuses to think a coherent thought unaided. Or so I hope. The scarier alternative is that he may simply be incapable of doing so:
- He can't remember stuff that I know from skimming a document and he's had a 4 hour seminar about.
- He doesn't grasp relationships between things or any level of abstraction at all. If I spend 20 minutes explaining the relationship of A to B to him, I'll then spend another 20 repeating myself about C to D - even though these are completely analogous.
- Can't structure whichever thoughts he does have, which tends to result in messy, illegible documents that I then spend several hours reviewing and eventually correcting myself.
- Doesn't really seem to display any curiosity about anything at all. Never takes the initiative to find stuff out by himself. Doesn't actually seem to grasp that this is expected of him.
- Takes two days to write four pages about three of which are useless. Most of us can do that in two hours without the useless part.
And to top it off: he's socially awkward to the extreme. Talking about his wish to get promoted to the client awkward (never going to happen at this rate). Telling me I'm too thing and would be sexier if I exercised awkward. Informing senior manager of his attempts to impregnate his wife over working lunch awkward. (Wrongly) correcting my English even though I am English and he's working on his Cambridge First awkward. I have mild ASD and I'm better at this shit than he is FFS!
My problem is: I've started to feel a skin crawling, visceral kind of aversion towards the guy by now. And it's made worse by the fact that he can't seem to write a sentence in a report without walking over to my desk and asking whether he ought to be using single or double quotes.
I've spoken to my boss about the performance issues. What I can't exactly tell him is that I just want to be far, far away from the guy. Preferably on opposite sides of the planet.
I know this latter part is my issue and I need to deal with it. But he's making my skin crawl. WWYD?
