Most incompetent person you ever worked with/hired

[Medsy]

I've got a new colleague, he has been here for 2 months and I 100% understand it takes time to be eased/trained into a new role, but this is next level. It's actually making me wonder whether he lied on his CV or at interview. There are really, really basic aspects to the industry he doesn't seem to have heard of, the other day he was struggling to use a simple Word feature, and one of the requirements was a foreign language which he said he was proficient in.
Ultimately I am going to have to work with him as a pair and I am trying to be as helpful and generous as I can but a part of me thinks why have they hired him?@
Opening the floor....Have you ever worked with or hired someone where it went beyond just incompetence and you thought "WTF is going on!".

Not me (genuinely!) but our local smll convenience supermarket...

Hired a guy who would give you the total back rather than the change. I dont even know how E.g. if you spent £17.50 and paid with a £20 note, after ringing it through the till (and I'm talking a proper supermarket, it was either a tesco express or a sainsburys local, can't remember which, not a little corner shop with a basic system), instead of giving you £2.50 change, he'd give you £17.50 back. And it wasn't even a one off, it happened to me several times over about a 2 week period, so God knows how many people he did it to.

He wasn't there for very long 😂

@Depressedhusbandbringingmedown - I’ve been teaching for nearly 30 years and think learning objectives every lesson are daft.

Long time ago, I'm sure systems set up to stop this getting through but two men I managed in my team, I caught both of them looking at porn!

I work with a lady who is 7 years older than me….I’m 60 this year.
We are Admin support roles. Slightly different responsibilities but part of the same overall team.
When she started (over 15 years ago), a lot of the job (she still does) involved paper, paper files etc. Times have changed, our customers have changed, the business has changed. For example, even as recently as 2018 many of our customers would post us documents - now they upload them. Which then need opened, saved and named on their online record.

Despite many, many attempts to train (over at least a four year period) her she cannot (this means will not) do the following.

Use Teams. She is literally offline on Teams all day, despite us using it as a big part of communicating during the working day. We have to open it for her. When there is a Teams meeting she ignores it or moves to try and listen (lip read) at another desk or will ask to plug her headphones in to their lap top.

Cannot transfer a call on the phone system. Will tell the caller that she’ll pass the message on and then walks two floors up to verbally inform the person.

Cannot upload documents to the Onedrive.

Cannot rename a folder. Just keeps clicking on it in an exaggerated way so it opens instead of once so she can change the name of it.

Cannot compose a simple email properly, for example it is either sent without a subject heading or the message is in the subject heading. Never signs it off.

Cannot set an out of office.

Cannot order anything online, so will not use our work account to order stationery etc from our supplier (very simple website).

Won't use Excel at all, even open it and update a very basic spreadsheet. She does not need to create formulas, just add some figures and date.

There are more examples I could give, like not being able to book her annual leave using our in-house system. I do it for her.

Her argument is she was originally employed to only deal with incoming/outgoing post and do filing, not all this ‘computer stuff’.

It’s exhausting. Unfortunately she has said she doesn’t want to retire yet either as she lives alone and we’re her only company.

Gosh, I used to help my Dad in the summer holidays from about age 8 doing this sort of thing. I soon fathomed the easiest way was to get a stack of envelopes, turn back side up and flip out all the flaps. Then stuff the lot into another pile, then fan them out 10 or so at a time so all the gum sides were showing use a sponge to dampen all of the flaps, then quickly seal each one before the gum dried and stack in a different pile.

Oh and the lady who's favourite phrase was 'that's not in my job description'

I work the kind of job,that if its in front of you,then just deal with it

She did the same job as me,and she refused to actually do it-she refused to do table service,cleaning,checking the loos,dealing with teenagers or grotty customers-you name it,she refused to do it

She did a lot of standing around and chatting though and would do the till if forced

The last straw was when a young lad fell off his bike just outside the store and hit his head-she refused to go get a manager or stay with him while i went as 'that's not in my job description'

I have a phobia of blood so that was fun,trying to stem the blood gushing out of his face while shouting to get someone,anyone to notice us and get a manager themselves for me

I complained about her-all she had to do was walk ten yards and alert someone,so they promoted her and gave me a bollocking for staying with an unconscious teenager who was laid,spark out in the middle of a busy road-I should have got a manager myself apparently

Thankfully she left not long after but I never want to hear those bloody words ever again

I do wonder what was in her bloody job description though

There can't be many teachers still in the profession who qualified before the National Curriculum and associated changes came in. I had children at primary school in the 1990s and I was a school governor. Also, my mother was a primary school teacher who qualified in the early 1950s and took redundancy/early retirement in the late 1980s. She kept in touch with former colleagues for many years. From what I learned from all of this, I would say that it took a long time for changes to bed down. Many older teachers absolutely loathed having to teach the National Curriculum, accept having members of senior and middle management observe their lessons, go through Ofsted, prepare children for SATs, endure performance management/appraisals, and deal with the endless paperwork that now seems such a feature of teaching. None of this was standard before that time. When my mother was teaching, a teacher's classrom was her castle. Many teacher went through their entire career with nobody else observing or assessing what they were doing. There were obvious risks to this, but the autonomy was marvellous for a good teacher, and many of us who were at school in the old days probably have fond memories of lessons that nowadays would be rated as substandard where the teacher went off piste but taught us things that weren't on the curriculum but were really interesting.

I am a teacher. We end up responsible for training trainees (who pay the uni a significant fee, of which we individuals see not a jot).

I have one who is incapable of explaining basic vocabulary. Wants paperwork read to them. Confuses key plot elements of GCSE texts which they claim they studied at uni. Cannot meet deadlines in any way, shape or form. Expects resources to be brought to them.

And is CONVINCED they are doing well.

A guy who was obsessed with status (he was in an admin job on the bottom rung). Absolutely drove everyone nuts because he was incapable of following teh simplest instructions. In an open plan office, we once all listened to his manager telling him very very carefully what he had to do. Twice. She then went off to a meeting. Within three minutes, he'd come over and asked someone else what he should be doing. On another occasion he was working on something with a different manager and asked her 'Are you helping me with this, or am I helping you?' She replied 'We're working TOGETHER, A.'

Many moons ago I was PA to a director and also helped out her direct reports. One of them was just hopeless. Forgot everything, couldn’t even book holiday in SAP, work out his expenses, needed constant reminders for deadlines etc. At the time his salary was huge and I used to wonder why he was doing the job he was doing.

I work in a nursery and have worked as bank staff so have seen many terrible things!
The sheer amount of staff who seem to not like children always gets me. When we do interviews we ask them to go into the room with the children before the sit down chat with the boss bit. So many so them just sit there refusing to interact with the kids. They often get jobs anyway because nurseries are so desperate for staff they'll take anyone.

Name changing in case someone recognises the company.

I worked in a big company that changed the way they hired for two key roles in the company, including mine. Most of us came from creative backgrounds, but they started pushing more and more for people with backgrounds in analytics. Now I’m not saying those skills weren’t important for the job, but they went to the extreme with it.

They'd hired this woman who was all about the analytics; they had really high hopes for her. Unfortunately, she was SO obsessed by analytics that she couldn’t apply any common sense. We had regular promotional campaigns that would run for an initial two weeks, which would then be extended if they worked and the promo was still valid. I was trying to explain to her that, in some cases, they could be extended indefinitely, as there were always new customers who’d meet the criteria.

She just kept looking confused and asking “But where’s your window? Your window for analysis? How can you ever compare two campaigns if they all run for different lengths of time?” I pointed out that we could compare the initial two week period if we wanted to do that, but she kept saying “But how would you ever assess whether a campaign was really effective compared to another one, there would be too many variables, how can you get any clear results?…” I snapped in the end and asked her whether she thought it would be a better idea to stop successful campaigns just because they’d reached an arbitrary date for analysis purposes.

They began filling the other role almost exclusively with people who came through the MBA graduate recruitment scheme. They were obsessed with MBAs - you could pretty much walk into any job in that company if you had one. Someone who got the role of Vendor Manager through the programme, with minimal experience, was floundering in his first few days and one of his colleagues (who didn’t have an MBA, but did have years of experience, and who wasn’t too thrilled at candidates with no background getting plum jobs) asked him if he’d actually spent much time working with vendors before. His reply? “What’s a vendor?”

@cloudsdrifting write over the permanent market with non permanent. Wipe off, should take both off. Or just use acetone to clean it off.

Not exactly a colleague, but very close to entering the teaching profession.
Our school regularly participated in the PCGE course run by a local college, so the students we had were graduates on a one-year course. By the time they came to us for their teaching practice, they were a few short months away from being in charge of their own (primary) class. Mostly, they fitted in quickly, with the support of their tutors, but this student seemed unable to take advice or instruction on board. I wasn't her supervising tutor, but I showed how I personally tackled planning and organising as she seemed so hapless, but......
Having left her with the class, I retreated to the staff room to do some marking, only to realise that I'd forgotten the marking key. Cursing myself quietly, I tried to slip back into the classroom discreetly, apologise for distracting if detected, retrieve the book and slip out again. I needn't have worried. She was so preoccupied with talking to one child that a punch-up had escaped her attention; just about understandable, except that the protagonists had climbed up on a table to get better space for fist-swinging, and had attracted an interested audience.
A few days later, I once again retreated, leaving her in charge, while I, at the headteacher's request, busied myself preparing for a school event with the stalwarts of the PTA. Basically just over an hour, end of morning break up to lunchtime. After half an hour, a message reached me, "Could you come back and take over? I've run out of things for them to do!" Once again, I tried to talk to her about planning, but it wasn't really my place to do so.
We were not that far apart in age; I'd gone straight to teacher training college from school, she had taken a gap year before gaining a Double First from Oxford, so I almost felt as if I were snitching, but it would not have been a kindness to her or any potential class to let her through.

Sure. This person was on the graduate scheme in around 2009. So early 20s and openly admitted they had no interest in computers as they hadn't had one in the house growing up. Hadn't made full use of the computer suite at uni. Just didn't really engage with computers. They now do a job that doesn't particularly require more than basic working knowledge of computers (I did a reference for them and highlighted if computer skills were required then this may not be the best candidate. The person got the job and got in touch to say I was absolutely right with my reference and thank goodness their new job didn't really need it!)

she had taken a gap year before gaining a Double First from Oxford

She must have been quite dedicated to the idea of teaching to choose a relatively low-paid profession when her qualifications could have opened so many more lucrative doors.

Ooh yes when a lady was hired to cover my maternity leave, in a company with many legacy systems which didn't talk to each other but instead required multiple excel spreadsheets to be used as interfaces. So excel skills were really key and were tested at interview.
Day 1, I show her a spreadsheet and ask her to type a product name into a cell. What's a cell? How do I type? What do you mean click in the cell?
Turns out she was friends with one of the senior managers...

@BMW6 I took @Wetandhorrible to be referring to your trainee you posted about.

We have a temporary TA, a lovely lady, but it's usually easier and quicker to do something yourself rather than ask, explain, check etc. Example: discussing a Science lesson for the following day, in which they would need melted chocolate, the teacher said, "Can you go and melt the chocolate while I do the lesson input?"
TA replied, "It's ok, I'll take the chocolate home and melt it the night before so it's ready...."

I've name changed 😂

Rocked in 20 mins late.
We went to the training room....
Trainee "I can't understand why we have to do this, I mean, it's obvious noone wants to do it"
Myself "you need to learn how to do your job"
Trainee "it's silly though really, isn't it. Most people don't want it"
Myself "I quite like being taught how to do things right"
Trainee "oh, weird"

Hmmmm.

Colleague with substantial experience, in a professional role (ie had done a degree to get there) Young enough that it would all have been using computer systems rather than paper

He kept getting complaints that he never responded to people. Was adamant these were all malicious. Wasn't pulling his weight with joint work, claimed he wasn't aware when pulled about it.

Turned out that at some point he had accidentally changed his emails to filter by 'from' rather than 'date received'. Didn't question why there was a little number next to 'unread' that kept going up, or why he hadn't received an email in weeks when receiving 50-100 a day wasn't unusual. When shown how to change his emails back to display the hundreds of unread emails he complained that we used such a complicated system (it was Microsoft outlook) and asked for the rest of us to pick up some of his work because he had 'so many emails to get through'.

Hired a new courier, out on training days they were fine, first day alone got a call after 4 hours crying saying they'd only done 9 deliveries (should have done about 80) saying they couldn't understand odds and evens for street numbers ie one side is odd one is even!!! Yes, english speaking and in their 30s.

@AbsoluteMoronsEverywhere I know you created it for the thread, but that's an excellent username!

When I was a sabbatical officer at uni, one of my fellow officers was completely incompetent and unfit for the role. He was an elected rep of a certain identity group (think disabled, mature etc) and during the election I remember so many people claiming he was fraudulently buying votes, cornering people, taking peoples voting devices off them to vote for himself, etc. Obviously I was also a candidate so I never confirmed, but he was definitely problematic. Post elections in our training, he either didn’t show up, or was very late and would just fall asleep, or would be on his phone. Lots of students that he represented complained and he was put on some kind of probation, but because he was elected it was different to a normal HR procedure I think. He made awful comments about his rep group, openly didn’t care about other identities, and would refuse to speak or even acknowledge women (be it staff or other officers). He was ‘removed’ from post after about 6 months, after he made a comment in a student space about not ”giving a shit” about black or Chinese students. He was genuinely a terrible person, and the most incompetent person I’ve met in my working or student life. He didn’t even know how to send an email.

Only if the language is set to US English…