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!".

A ‘lucrative marriage’ @Patrickiscrazy … how very shrewd of you.

I interviewed a young lady for a fairly basic admin job, school exam office; email, word, excel, telephone. Willingness to get hands dirty, to make it work, to get the job done, reasonable pay, nothing too onerous, shortlisted in five from over twenty five applicants.

She was private school, GCSEs 6-7-8, A Level B-C-D, a 2-1 degree in Business Studies from a reasonable University (not Russell but certainly in the second tier).

I set up a fairly basic practical exercise to use Excel to draw up a hypothetical seating plan. First task was to arrange the candidates in alphabetical order, she faffed about for five minutes, then cried, she said her Excel skills needed more work and walked out.

Narrow escape, the person I hired was great. 2-1 in Business Studies and couldn't use Excel?

That reminds me of *another" incompetent person I worked with.

Got in early to 'beat the traffic' but was never at their desk when I got in early. Found out after a while from office gossip they had been in a bank of computers used by a set of contractors in another part of the building, but the computers were never needed till much later in the day. I think they must have accidentally left one logged in on porn and one of the contractors found it (this is before home internet/broadband.) But the incompetent person kept their job.

They were also incapable of making decaffeinated tea with clearly marked decaffeinated teabags. And so the poor colleague who asked for decaffeinated got the shakes when incompetent person made a round.

Incompetent person also screwed up a database on a project of mine and I'm embarrassed to say I shouted at them and made them cry. I've never done it again but I had got to the end of my tether with them screwing up my data. I learnt to write my own databases after that just to cut them out of the picture and save my blood pressure. They tried to add me on LinkedIn a while ago. Absolutely no way I want to be linked to that incompetence!!

Is this not just part of a normal negotiation process though before formally accepting a job role and signing contracts?

Worked for a family owned engineering company making very niche products. The owners decided to employ their unqualified children as directors. Their 25 year old daughter had been working behind a bar and they made her head of sales.

In our very first meeting she announced she was going to reduce the size of all products because it would save money on materials, oblivious to the fact that our customers had already designed the products these components would go into.

She then announced that she was the only person who was allowed to speak to customers.....some of the designers had been there twenty years and had excellent working relationships with them. She actually refused to take a call from one person because they had a funny name 😳

All but one of our team of seven left within a couple of months.

Fortunate that the worst colleagues I’ve worked with were merely mildly incompetent but did satisfactory/useful work when sidelined into less critical roles that were within their limited capabilities.

Although having said that I’ve got a new client who wants me to work alongside an independent consultant they’ve been employing for a while and to say I’m less than impressed would be an understatement. This work is going to be tricky to navigate (“your consultant is shit, ignore them and listen to us instead” won’t go down well with the client for a variety of reasons) but luckily my boss is of the same opinion so we can tag team the politics. I’m better at the work than managing tricky clients, I’m far too blunt.

The original comment seemed to imply that adults over 40 could not be expected to know how to ise computers.

Sorry, but that is a ridiculous interpretation of my comment that people older than their mid-40s wouldn't have grown up with modern-style (i.e. Windows) computers.

The posters keen to say they expertly used computers in the 70’s & 80’s are ruining this thread tbh.

I have to stand up for Track Changes. My editor can comment on and make changes to my manuscript - I can see what she's done, approve the changes and comment back again. It just simply wouldn't work to print out an entire 80,000 word novel manuscript and post it to one another!

(But they can still be bloody annoying)

Yes. Afaict, a poster said that her MS Office skills were limited due to lack of early exposure, but extrapolated that to all people of her age. It's been done to death now.

Judging by the number of times I (age 68, btw) am asked to volunteer for computer skills outreach projects, she isn't wrong to generalise but of course there are exceptions, whether literally or in principle. I didn't grow up with computers, but was an early adopter. It isn't worth nitpicking over.

I'm far more shocked that 21st-century school kids aren't being taught to use it! Why the hell not?

I will die on the hill of Track Changes....I'm actually surprised how few people use it, based on this thread - it's one of my most-used Word features, definitely.

On another note, @SerafinasGoose, I am 100% with you...I know there's clearly incompetency outside the HE and FE sectors but good grief there's some gormless people within it, and they never seem to get their comeuppance!

My manager cannot come up with anything relevant for us to do. We are a team of specialists but she has no clye about our roles. She tinkers with admin (and mucks that up!) and spends far too long on the phone. I have to make sure I am not undermining her, as she is very pally with a key member of the SLT who protects her. She tries to prevent any new work coming in and gets really stressed if she is forced to do anything out of her comfort zone. I have no idea why she is protected when she is so utterly shit. Nobody thinks she is any good. She has been in the job for about 20 years and seems completely unaware of her abysmal performance.

Assuming you're a lawyer OP.

This is one of my pet hates, when people use the strike through as opposed to tracked changes and then get pissy that you haven't updated the entire contract on the same day by rewriting it as opposed to just rejecting or accepting the tracked changes! It's not hard ffs

I am laughing that 'computers in the modern sense of the word' equals 'Microsoft Office' to certain people.

It really, really doesn't.

I sell fabric. My biggest customer, think m&s, cannot calculate m2 prices despite me showing them how to do it several timesdaily
EG, a skirt pattern may take 3m2 to make the item. The cost of fabric is £3.50m2. She cannot calculate the cost of this.
I answer 45 emails a day on prices from this customer. I lost my shit on Friday, I fear I have no job come Monday

Dad got his very first Apple computer a month or 2 before I was born in Oct 1977. The Macintosh computers came out a few years later and he had them in the home recording studio as well as at work. They were everywhere and I got them when they were replaced with the newer model. It was very normal to me very young and I was programming a ZX Spectrum by the age of about 6.

I still have a functioning Classic II in my loft.

I interviewed for my PA and offered the job to an impressive and experienced woman. She had 6 weeks notice so it was a while until she started. On her first day she teetered along the corridor in a nightclub ready sheer blouse and thick blue eyeshadow like a child might apply. She had no idea how to organise my diary or prepare for my meetings nor even how to answer the phone. I persevered trying to show her what I needed but it was hopeless. Every visitor to my office raised their eyebrows at me in surprise when the met her.

One day, in passing, she mentioned that she had an identical twin who was also a PA and I realised it had been the twin I had interviewed and they’d pulled a fast one. I put my PA on performance management and she resigned so I put her on gardening leave and never had to see her again.

@Idratherbepaddleboarding wouldn't it be rather delicious if she is sat at home browsing MN when she's meant to be working and reads your post

A functioning Classic II?! Wow! My first computer at home was a second hand Classic that I acquired in 1993. I loved it so much, but it eventually died in about 2008. Of course, by then it was mostly ornamental anyway.

I’m in my 50s and I used a computer for the first time when I was 19. I was quite keen to find out what all the fuss was about. Of course, they were still very expensive in the late 1980s. My office had one to share between six of us.

Sorry, that was off topic. But in my experience a person’s competence with computers is more about attitude than about age. My mother (in her 80s) is quite good with them. My SIL (younger than me) resents them and therefore struggles.

Oh god, this has given me flashbacks to the useless Sales Manager who never managed to make a single sale, and was highly indignant to be disciplined when he tried to claim the hotel porn channel on his expenses.

I've been that interviewer using exactly that technique. Im not HR or anything but was specially asked to sit on the 3 person panel for a new role in a project due to my knowledge of the language.

So the lead interviewer would do all the initial chat and technical questions in English first then hand over to me for conversational skills.

It was rather funny watching I'd say 75% of the candidates squirm when they realised they'd been caught out with lying on their CV about their supposed fluency.

My word! I feel there's so much more you could be telling us about this disaster.

I would love to read more if you have the time to write it please!

I worked with someone who didn't know how to file didn't understand what putting in alphabetical order meant he managed to bugger up entire filing system in a week despite me showing him repeatedly how to do it

You can set it to British English or pretty much any variant.

I'm really surprised at the people who hate track changes. You can set it to show no markup so you can simply very quickly check where somebody has changed something and then read it "clean", you can also make your changes "invisibly". It takes half the time it would dicking around with formatting.