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 couple of people have said that it should be possible to weed these people out at interview. The problem is (depending on the job), there really is a limit to how many interviews you can ask a candidate to go to. A initial interview, a technical interview and a “how well do you get on with the team” interview? Fine. But add in two or three extra interviews / tests and it starts looking a bit weird - particularly for someone who is supposedly well qualified. Chances are, the good candidate will take a job elsewhere halfway through the six stage interview process.

No one can be forced to retire nowadays. I suppose if an employee becomes unable to do their job because of something related to their age the employer would have to start proceedings to fire them on grounds of incompetence. I don't know how that meshes with protection under the Equality Act for people with chronic health problems and disabilities, though. Would the employer have to make all reasonable adjustments first?

@DimplesToadfoot How on earth did they win the tribunal?

I used to be a porter in a children's hospital.
Part of our job was delivering parcels to the wards/departments.
Before they we took them to the wards, they had to be accepted, processed and written up by the storeman.
One was employed (was the son of the supervisor), and he was lazy as fuck. Would let the parcels build up, have a panic, and wrote them up at the end of the day.

As a result of his laziness, I knew of several operations on ill children that were cancelled because an implant/instrument that was delivered in the morning was still sat in a huge pile in the loading bay of the hospital, with the storeman preffering to constantly smoke/read/sleep.

Interviewed a bloke for a retail role and he was great, intelligent, mature, great communication, seemed responsible and sounded like he'd have initiative and given his age and how he'd interviewed I was genuinely looking at him as someone that I could promote quickly.

Anyway he started and he was awful, aside from customer communication he couldn't do anything right even if you showed him every step, he never took initiative, he was badly organised and forgot his shifts and once turned up late to a shift after I'd called him to see if he was coming and he turned up utterly shitfaced.

Anyway, this has all gone on for a while, I'd given him enough chances and it wasn't working out for us and I was going to let him go but literally on the day I was going to give him notice he turned up and was the person from his interview and in the space of a few days became one of our most dependable excellent employees we've ever had.

Then shortly after that he died.

I wonder if it was the same person?

@ShadowoftheSentinels not me this time! Though it’s something I was more than capable of doing! God if I could go back to my early twenties again….

@OneTC Well that was an unexpected end to the tale. Did you ever find out what was going on with him?

I remember the PS for the District Inspector at one of my offices related that she caught her boss applying Tippex to her own computer screen.........it sounds unbelievable, but I can vouch that this woman was legendary for her batshittery...........then she took over our office and her reputation was entirely justified.

Worked with a chap who was a classic pen pusher, loved the sound of his own voice and would announce to everyone when he'd done some actual work.
Expected a pat on the back, but that was literally what was expected from him day to day.

He did come in once with his arm in a sling and declared he couldn't bear to be at home and have us carry his load.
He needed both hands to his job and was duly sent home.

Another one was always on banned sites, mostly to dip woth half naked ladies.
I was called in by the manager one day to be told off for not pulling my weight. The knob had lied and said he does all the work whilst I spend all day online.
How he thought he'd get aeay with it I don't know.
He once took a video of a colleague picking her nose and turned it into a meme with music and posted on YouTube.
New management saw him top of the list for redundancies.
Weird part was he had an identical twin who was in a different department, twin 2 was polite, considerate, respectful and hardworking.

That's sad. Wonder if it was meds he was taking that made him not his usual self.

@NannyOggsWhiskyStash

* How on earth did they win the tribunal?*

I don't know how, but I think it was down to timing, it was not long after some big disability bill, where disabled people were given more rights and protection.

The boss was that unhappy he threatened to close the company and move to Spain he had a yacht there I left not long after. The company is no more and lord knows where he is now.

I have found that the most number of functions you need to use in any program for 90% of the time is about 20 to 30. The rest you might need to use once in a while you look up on the help screen. Got me through 30 years of using a computer in an office and I never got to touch typist standard...

Word is so tricky because people hardly ever get trained in it. It's pretty routine for people to get a bit of Excel training, or to have someone show you how to do a specific piece of work which will include some ad hoc "now select that area and copy it over there: this is quicker if you use Control-Shift" And you learn a lot by seeing what formulae people have used on spreadsheets you've inherited.

But in Word its very simplicity tends to make people discount it as something you have to learn. Anyone over the age of 17 is just told "write X". The "in Word" is silent. It's no wonder there are so many terribly formatted documents out there, and so many of us make a hash of Track Changes.

It’s probably ironic that those of us who have been using Word in all its versions since the first days of Windows are much more proficient than younger colleagues who are assumed to just “get it” but can be quite derogatory about the older colleagues general capabilities. Word is actually a very powerful programme but there are so many people out there who still treat it as an electronic typewriter, even when writing long reports. I’m currently dealing with a 35 page document where the writer didn’t use the proscribed Styles and as a consequence there’s no headings and a blank navigation panel. It’s making review very difficult.

I’ve demonstrated functionality like the navigation panel or split screen and had reactions like it’s some kind of witchcraft. My personal bugbear is doing lots of carriage returns to force a heading to go on to the next page, or even a page break or worse a section break, because then when text is added up page it all goes wrong. I’ve shown people “keep with next” instead but apparently it’s too difficult.

i actually don’t mind being given a messy document to fix, i find it quite satisfying and I usually slip in a “next time did you know about this functionally”. Just don’t fuck the same document up a second time and expect me to fix it again.

I worked with a social worker once who sat and cried when a child was talking about their life- bad idea because it inhibits the child as they tend to feel guilty for upsetting you.

She would also start singing sarcastic songs at children if they were worked up- not in a distracting a toddler tantrum way, but with teenagers with trauma who were shouting etc- I asked her why she did it once (because clearly taking the piss out of them isn’t helpful or appropriate)… she said it was because she had a degree in preforming arts.

Also had a manager who was studying for a MA part time on the side… He rang me once in a rage to cancel a meeting because he had finished his masters thesis, was supposed to submit it by 12 that day, except his laptop had died and HE Didn’t HAVE A BACKUP COPY ANYWHERE! He hadn’t emailed it to himself, didn’t have it on a memory stick, nothing. He was hysterical with anger. I, having worked with him for a year, was not the least surprised by his incompetence.

Many years ago (in the 80s) in an admin role I gained a new colleague at the same level. We used to do filing, sort and frank post, bit of basic data entry, make tea, that sort of thing.
Colleague was shown filing system (hard copy documents in labelled cabinets). Sang the alphabet song every single time to try to work out what got filed where. Couldn't cope and shoved a load of stuff under x "because it means we don't know".
Colleague was shown franking machine and how to operate. Demonstration was given to them by taking an item of post, weighing it, setting machine to that item weight and producing a label for postage. They franked every single item of post that day at the same rate "because you weighed that one there and told me to set it at x price."
Made one cup of tea. For themselves. "Because I couldn't remember what anyone else said."
Went to post office to send stuff then went shopping."Because it was nearly lunchtime" (it was 10.30).

They weren't stupid, just used weaponised wilful incompetence.

About 30 years ago we had a trainee (big 4) who was so useless we couldn't use him. We gave him the job of wrapping the secretaries' Christmas gifts, 10 boxes of chocolates. He presented us with two parcels of 5 boxes each. He had a PhD! Recruitment processes have since been significantly improved.

Over 20 years ago we started using a new technology in IT.
Experience in the technology was thin on the ground.
We had one guy on site from the vendor doing all the work.

One Monday two contractors turned up apparently vetted by the vendor to help the guy out.

Both of them were gone a month later when the vendor’s guy said if they turned up on Monday he was walking out.

Turns out neither had any experience in the technology.
One begged to stay saying he’d work for free just to learn.
Both were binned.

That maybe a level beyond incompetence.

@nonumbersinthisname , that's pretty similar to my experience.
Font size and bold to create a heading, paragraph marks for spacing etc.

I love formatting documents.

What bugs me is if I am allocated an assistant to tidy up documents but they have no idea of things like how to use styles or anchor graphics. It's more work for me.

An annoyance is when someone insists that they have created a template when they have created an example document. That didn't take them long and they usually fail to grasp that creating an actual template takes me much longer.

With Excel, I think that 'Pivot Table' sounds a lot more complicated than it really is. A bit like when people say they just don't understand algebra or percentage but use it in daily life without realising.

I had some colleagues who were shit at this. I used to offer to work from home on a Friday when it was all written and spend the day sorting out the formatting. Very therapeutic when I knew it was going to be me doing it and I had set time aside to do it. I then got a template signed off by the project board so everyone had to do it a certain way. I gave training sessions and I would say most reports were 70-80% satisfactory formatting wise. Then I could do spot training with certain people on the certain functions they hadn't got to grips with.

Before I took this approach I would throw my hands up in the air at the casserole they'd make out of basic Word formatting. This new approach lowered my blood pressure considerably 🤣

We had somebody in a role where they had to be diplomatic and get the cooperation of people working for another organisation. First thing they did was completely piss off one of the people over there who we had always had a good relationship with.

They lied about where they were going and what work they were doing - and were caught out more than once. Always talked themselves out of it though.

Mmm... I am pretty slick at Word overall but I have always struggled with styles and consistency in formatting and I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. I had someone else set up my original template for me, but I don't think she did it quite right either and I realised when I got a new computer that the ONE thing that didn't transfer over was the old template. Oops.

It's on my list of things to figure out at some point! I work around it by creating templates but without the correct "styles" usage. Must Do Better.

@JadziaD , if you are struggling with styles and consistency in formatting then you probably aren't a slick user of Word, and goodness knows what your templates are like. The mind boggles.

Although knowing what Styles are and how they are used still puts you further ahead than the majority of users I help.

plenty of YouTube and other help guides out there (I prefer written instructions to video but ymmv.)