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!".

I think the difference between now and when I left school early 80s, is that I learned all these tasks in actual office practice lessons and people were employed specifically as secretaries or clerks - whereas now the expectation is that everyone is competent in basic Office/ IT systems . And what is used commonly in one company/sector is different to another - i.e. the discussion in this thread around track changes and specific functions in excel .

Ha, no, name began with a K - and oh Lord, there's clearly more than one of them!!

That is so sad, being dependent on a man. What if you have to enter the workforce in your 50,s!

The last teacher I worked with. Nothing extra in any lesson- plans straight from the internet, and woe betide any child who asked a question that wasn’t on that plan. Kids who got upset were an annoyance to her (we have ages 3-7 in our class). Rarely spoke to support staff, but complained to the head that they were ‘difficult’. Often said to both children and staff, ‘This is MY classroom- I’m the teacher’…
Outdoor provision was stopped, and the Forest School sessions were cut in half.

She was with us on supply, and caused irreparable damage. Four members of staff handed in their notice.

I hope I’m never unlucky enough to meet her again. I rarely feel hatred, but she is a fucking arse.

I believe it was Gove who scrapped IT lessons from the secondary curriculum. That subject used to teach the children MS Office and some other popular programs like photoshop or animation. I believe Gove though that "digital natives" would somehow magically just know this stuff.

I am not at all surprised that school/uni leavers don't know MS Office, or much about laptops at all. Many don't have laptops at home, as they only use smartphones these days.
They would not have had much/any experience of Office at school. Some Uni courses may not have need most Office programs, except perhaps for basic typing up of assignments, which some students pay someone else to do.

So don't expect your employee new-out-of-school/college/uni to know Office without training!

As for not knowing the alphabet - we had one of those. Totally wrecked the filing system (going back a few decades - who has paper filing these days?)
If you didn't learn the alphabet as a pre-schooler, when do you ever get the chance to catch up? Is it explicitly taught in primary? How would you learn except for the song?

Saw this one as my notifications flagged it: yes yes yes to Track Changes. I swear by this in my writing and editing work.

But the Word feature I really couldn't live without is the outline one. I've been surprised what a game-changer this is and how much is speeds up the process of writing long drafts.

Good luck with your jobsearch!

I had a really wonderful colleague once who had more or less limitless patience. Even she, though, occasionally put the phone down after a tricky conversation where she'd been struggling to get a clear or satisfactory response, and said resignedly 'How do some people get jobs?'

I think the difference between now and when I left school early 80s, is that I learned all these tasks in actual office practice lessons and people were employed specifically as secretaries or clerks - whereas now the expectation is that everyone is competent in basic Office/ IT systems . And what is used commonly in one company/sector is different to another - i.e. the discussion in this thread around track changes and specific functions in excel .

This. When I started out, we were given training sessions on applications. Nothing fancy but enough to get going with. It was enough to know how to find out more for oneself.

I’m sure my last legal sec role which was in house, I was thought incompetent. However the induction and training was mostly done online and I had a colleague who was training me but she didn’t really want to do this by her manner towards me, she was almost like a robot and not friendly. I was given a really horrible female lawyer to work for who threw things and screamed at me, she broke her desk after I started…. I was doing things I hadn’t done before like working on a long complex document in 2 languages.

The person I’d replaced had moved sidewards into another department but told me she’d been off sick but no one was sympathetic. My new boss and colleagues went from being lovely at the interview to be far less so when I started.

I left after a month. I was competent (but also perimenopausal) but I really couldn’t hack my colleagues and I’d worked well for lawyers in previous 2 jobs.

About 20 years ago I worked in a pub over the weekends to earn a bit more cash. The tills did not add up for you, you had to add up as you went along. However, the pub owners made the prices round up easily, so things were 3.60 or 3.10 (instead of 3.56 or 3.12 for example) so it was actually relatively easy. We had a young lady start who just could not add up so say to a customer "that's £2.80 twice please" for two pints of lager. I just shouted over £5.60 please!

Another time a gentleman came in and asked for a table for one in the restaurant. She said, "I'm sorry we don't have any tables for one". I just walked the guy to a table for two and took away the second place setting with a wry smile. She was home from uni at the time - how on earth do they cope in the real world?!

Only in your rather pompous and thread policing opinion of course. I was quite enjoying it.

It doesn't always work, but often you can write on top of permanent marker with dry erase marker (tracing it) and then it will erase. I've saved many white boards in classrooms this way.

I can't stuff envelopes even cards can outfox me. I have dyspraxia. I wouldn take a job that involved putting anything in envelopes though

An effective selection process can identify incompetent candidates but it can't unfortunately weed out candidates with a bad attitude; they are effectively incompetent as they have no intention of doing the work they are being paid for.

One ex-employer hired an overnight security guard. It came to light that instead of guarding the workplace as he was paid to do, he was just bedding down for the night on the couch in the sick room; even brought a duvet and pillow from home which he kept tucked away in the office.

Anyway, nothing can apparently be done because her ethnicity is a protected characteristic and we must “tread carefully”

We have one of those. She's paid a ton and is utterly useless, making massive mistakes, plus generally a toxic and unpleasant colleague. But has told the GM directly that she'll go straight to press with discrimination allegations if anything is done..

It's difficult to assess your own abilities somehow. We recently hired a graduate who thought he was good at Excel, and by some people's standards, yes he probably was, in that he could set up basic formulae. After sitting next to me for a morning as I assembled a model at speed using a fair range of functions and all the keyboard shortcuts he said "ah, I realise that there exists a spectrum of "good at Excel" which somewhat exceeds my previous frame of reference." I said "just you wait until you spend a morning with my colleague who is properly good at Excel. Your head will explode"

There's a great quote "mediocrity knows nothing better than itself, but talent instantly recognises genius". I find it widely applicable in the workspace although it was probably not originally written about MS Office use though.

Despite all of this, I'm shit at Word, mostly through lack of practice. I know that I should use track changes, and am familiar with the basic concepts but it never comes naturally.

It should be taught in upper KS2 as part of library skills, so some kids might miss it if their school prefers to concentrate on SATs to the exclusion of anything not expected on that year's papers.

I used to work with one as well. 20 odd years ago. She was given a warning due to her laziness, immediately claimed discrimination, our boss was hung up to dry and had a nervous breakdown during the process and as far as I am aware was never able to work again in the sector. Meanwhile she failed upwards, was a nasty bully and was finally got rid off by a whopping great golden handshake.

A manager writing a phone number on an office wall as she couldn't find any paper, and when pulled up about it said sure it's only a fucking wall!

I was useless in my first job as a department store assistant. I was really shy when I was young so didn't want to engage with customers, tried to stick to tidying & stacking shelves and hoped I wouldn't be noticed by anyone.

One customer said to me 'This job isn't your forte is it?'

Once another customer approached me & said she had spotted someone shoplifting. I freaked & didn't know what to do, far too scared to tell my supervisor. I think the thief escaped.

Horrible knowing that you are doing a rubbish job and being desperate to avoid being disapproved of or sacked.

I quite like the sound of her actually!

Hearing about all of these people who don’t know the alphabet and can’t file, makes me feel newly very bitter about the time I temped for a company and spent 5 full days straight filing hundreds of documents. I made one minor error (something like I filed an Li before an Le, complete oversight and human error) and the woman in charge spoke to me like I was a fucking moron and incompetent idiot because of it. For one misfile out of hundreds. I was very young and new to the professional world and she made me feel like shit.

So I suppose this fits this thread, as she was totally incompetent at managing people!

Years ago there was a man who did the rounds in my sector, moving from one place to another very quickly and often managing a promotion as he moved. He seemed to pop up everywhere. He was very much a public schoolboy type. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about but there was no substance to it. He was absolutely incompetent and totally relied on those around him to do the actual work before eventually coming unstuck when they complained about him.

I think employers were reluctant to admit they had been fooled by him so happily let him move on without raising a flag that he was useless. He likely managed to sweet talk them too. That was probably one thing he was good at.

He now has a very senior role in the US where I'm sure his accent and background have even more of an impact and he doesn't have to do much actual work.

"Mediocrity knows nothing better than itself" is the perfect definition of my workplace. I've worked with some truly inspirational, talented, innovative and effective people during my career but don't really see it where I'm working now and I miss it.

I've had a few twats as bosses, but my boss when I was 20-21 was the most irritating because he was useless but also super arrogant and egotistical.
Everyone hated him. The site staff, the admin, other management. He did the minimum he possibly could handing loads off to me which he then took credit for. I remember once I was on the phone to a client and he was having a loud panic in the background because he didn't know the answer to something (which he would have if he actually did anything) and he interrupted my call. I asked him to wait a minute so I could finish my call and he EXPLODED. He did later apologise but the arrogance was outrageous -even then he blamed me for his anger.
Once he called a group of contractors "illiterate neanderthals" which got back to them. They were nothing of the sort and ran a hugely successful business and were a fantastic group of guys who we all loved working with. The contractor boss was furious and phoned my boss saying he was coming in now to have a word. Boss absolutely shit himself and left immediately, leaving me on my own, to deal with the situation. I remember him saying 'calm him down' and legging it to his car!
He eventually retired thankfully and none of us were sad to see him go. I can't recall one useful thing he did. I was, at 21, quoting major engineering jobs while he sat on his arse talking about his many holidays and how he was much better at doing everything than any of us. If you had done it he had done it better. I assume he got away with it because he had been there forever and wasn't long off retirement but god he was an utter cunt.