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!".

You have a good point 🙂

@lieselotte , thanks.
If I am a twat because I read the OP and justified that someone can use an application extensively and not enjoy using one feature of that application, then so be it.

Conversations meander. Even online. I already apologised for the derail but I don't feel that bad - it's not like op was baring her soul and looking for support.

And I definitely learnt something! Maybe i will start a Word Tips and Tricks thread!

I agree. I now feel it's time to brush up my Word skills, as this thread has enlightened me about lots of shit that I didn't realise I didn't know! But would like to find out more...

Same field but in a care home not clients homes. New Carers will come to work and think it's just sitting with the old dears drinking tea and eating shortbread when it's actually more akin to an extremely busy and highly understaffed hospital ward. As soon as one person is taken care of, you need to quickly but thoroughly record every single thing you have done and bolt to the next person. When you finish with everyone, the first one is due again. And in between these times we're moving up to 20 people, many who need have heavy equipment to safely transfer them to wheelchairs, take to the dining room and hand feeding two people each at once. Once meals are done it's recorded exactly how much each ate and how many millilitres they drank. Shifts are hard and intense.

New workers will come in and I'll see them constantly finding opportunities to be sitting down with a coffee. Some will look confused when I ask if they did xx job or YY job and give me excuses saying they didn't know the next job needed done, or that the resident smelling of a bowel movement in the next chair might need changed, or they'll say that they were just waiting for the hoist to be free when there's 6 other people they can choose to do. Worst one was her telling me she was waiting for the tumble dryer to finish instead of getting the required item (socks) out of the baskets already waiting.

Or there's the "super efficient" worker who magically manages to get everyone ready in a morning in a very, very short time and be standing round hiding in a bathroom playing on their mobiles (which are currently banned on site due to serious and illegal misuse in the past by a staff member.) and upon checking, the resident's washbasins are dry. Towels haven't been used. The resident's toothbrush hasn't been used. And worst of all, the resident will be in their chair but they were somehow moved without the assistance of another carer and the required safety equipment not used. In other words, the resident has been moved with a drag lift, hauling them up using their underarms and getting them into their chair. New carers and a few old ones will do this so they can skip the real work so they have time to stand around and chat or sit and duck into a non verbal resident's room vaping. (Yes I've seen this!)

Sadly the job is shit pay. We're on 38p above minimum wage. We're expected to do all our training outwith work hours, unpaid. (Well over 50 hours a year, even for part timers taking them well under NMW) We've to buy our own logo'd uniforms. No Christmas bonus or higher rate for working Christmas Day.
It's no wonder caring attracts the worst and most incompetent workers I guess.

Please do, I think it would be really useful!

Interesting . I worked with a guy who had an identical twin . Some days he couldn't remember stuff I had told him the day before. I jokingly said one day I bet you swapped with your twin . Instead of laughing it off he got really ratty . I think I actually hit the nail on the head .

@Zonic @ShinyBandana wow. I once employed a casual and I ended up dismissing them with one weeks PILON as I was convinced they had a twin who did the interview.

We had students from.catering college doing a couple of days a week. Chef asked one girl to prep some veg, found her in the yard crying, why? Be side she didn't like knives lol
Why choose catering?

Years ago I worked for an online/catalogue retailer. Someone had called the sales office asking if we did bulk order discounts for trade. The customer service rep asked our buying manager, who said yes - 30% for 200 or more units.

CS rep replied, “Is that 30% off the total or 30% per unit?”

I once worked with a women who was so incompetent and lazy that it occasionally defied belief. She was the receptionist and if she did not feel like answering the phones she just wouldn't. There were so many things that if i listed them all it would sound unbelievable.

But one time I was talking about the trip I had made to Australia to see family when Ds1 was 3 months old. She commented it must be hard to go all the way to Oz with a baby on your lap. i said I had booked a bassinet seat for him. She asked me what that was and I explained. Then SHE explained that she used to be a travel agent and some people had booked flights to Australia with their baby and had asked her to also book a bassinet seat for the baby. But she didn't know what it was (and apparently did not think to ask anybody - the client or a colleague) so she 'just ignored it'.

It really fit with how she was at work as well. The simplest tasks were beyond her. One of her tasks was to take the office mail to the mailbox each day but she could not actually be trusted to do that reliably (once another staff member found the mail dumped in the recycling downstairs because 'it was raining' so she did not want to walk to the mailbox) so the CEO would collect all the mail and do it at the end of the day while she sat at reception playing on her phone. I have no idea why they did not give her warnings or just sack her tbh. She was sitting there earning a relatively decent wage for fuck all.

What a scary and depressing post HaggisHuntress but thank heavens you are there supervising as you sound really conscientious and caring.

It's not only cream that rises to the top, unfortunately - scum does, too,

I worked in a very small company that had a handful of clients so we didn't deal with the public as such. Our name was similar to a large insurance brokers and unfortunately we got a lot of incorrect calls. We got a new receptionist and it was the first thing she was told, but she couldn't grasp it. We constantly were getting notes left on our desk or emails saying Paul X is looking for a motor quote, Mary Y wants to known if she has windscreen cover etc. On and on and on for weeks, being told constantly that we were not an insurance broker. Someone eventually spelled it out to her what to say if she heard the word 'quote', something like 'I'm sorry I think you may be looking for... etc. So she had this line written in front of her but she would read it each time like a school kid who is bad at reading pausing between each word.

I'm about to turn 46 and was taught all of the above at school. At my sixth form we were obliged to take IT training lessons during some free periods. At university a few years later we were expected to use computers.

Exactly. I'm 45 and it was mandatory at university to submit essays that had been typed.

Universities in the late 90s had better access to the internet than most homes and workplaces and it was free! So anyone who went to university from the mid nineties onwards was used to regular email and use of the internet from 18 years old.

This other volunteer would pick up one tin. One. Then walk the 20-30m across the large warehouse room to the shelf where it belonged. Then walk back. Pick up another single tin, perhaps a different one.

Obviously trained by Margo Leadbetter.

@TheLogicalSong i used a computer at uni in the early 90s and never had a job without one. All essays had to be typed to hand in. I think you might be a decade out.

Mac's were cheaper than PCs in the 90s too. That's why I got one.

When I worked in a care home now and again senior management did a 2 am inspection. Caught loads of people sleeping when they should have been awake . Caught one caregiver in a spare bed fast asleep 😴. He was sacked on the spot .

But surely if she is not doing her job how can she not be sacked despite her protected characteristic? Any tribunal would surely see through her .

After I'd got rid of someone well before the end of their probation for being useless, the stories from other team members came tumbling out - like asking what was google, and how to find the internet.
(JD had required a high degree of IT literacy and excel expertise)

Another was a finance assistant that thought it was acceptable to wait three months before entering anything on the accounting system - initially claimed it was 'because she could get away with it', but got even slower once told it wasn't acceptable.

And there was the purchase ledger clerk that told me it was my job to post all the invoices for the month because I was "the temp". I was the interim Finance Director; my predecessor had left with stress, I think probably because he personally did the workload of the entire team of six, while they expected to play tetris much of the time. He really had posted most of the purchase invoices in the past.

In the days when common sense prevailed, yes, a Tribunal would see through her. Unfortunately, the madness of our brave new world means unsatisfactory employees have the protection of "the Blob".

My mate’s boilerman installed the carbon monoxide vent above the baby’s cot.

To steal from Jarvis Cocker- shit floats.

I can just hear him ringing his mother:

"The new job's great, mum - I'm doing really well! I had 50 scripts to go through and 6 weeks to do it, and I got them ALL done in less than half an hour!"
<mother's proud exclamations>
"I know! The rest of them must be as thick as pig-poo, mum. I expect I'll get promoted in a few weeks."