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 worked in a small office many, many years ago and we had a new junior start. One of his jobs was to brew up. The place was so small we didn't have any kitchen facilities and only had one toilet (which probably wouldn't be allowed these days for health and safety reasons). When he asked where he should get the water from to fill the kettle, he was told "We've no kitchen sink, so you'll have to fill it up in the toilet". Unfortunately, he took this quite literally as, after a few seconds he came out carrying the empty kettle, looking very confused and asked how he should fill it from the toilet, should he try and catch water in the kettle from flushing or should he take the cistern lid off and try and scoop water into it? Apparently, it never occurred to him to fill it from the tap in the sink next to the toilet!

I don't think they grasp the miraculous concepts of language, time or work. It can't get worse than that, can it?

I've worked with a few, the one that sticks in my mind is the one would fiddled around with patient's prescriptions. So say they were -2.00 in one eye and -3.00 in the other, he'd just give them -2.50 in both, making one eye blurred and the other over powered.

A chat didn't help even after pointing out that we were doing endless rechecks. We also had lots of patients at the time who were still on hard (RGP) lenses as the options for soft lenses were fewer and they didn't allow as much oxygen into the eyes as the current lenses do. He "didn't do them" and either refused to see people or refitted them with soft lenses.
Oh and he believed in iridology!

He lasted about 3 months and then thankfully decided to re-train as an osteopath.

He lasted about 3 months and then thankfully decided to re-train as an osteopath

That sounds quite terrifying actually. "You have knee pain? Let's try giving your neck a crack"

One that was so bad I had to check all her work, so it was basically done twice. She eventually left to another department. What was worse was she always had drama in her personal life which she shared with the entire office, loudly. Including about her sex life.

My ex colleague in a small solicitors, we were both legal secretaries. She wasn’t incompetent as such but sloped off with my boss to the pub at lunch for most of the afternoon. She was basically lazy and didn’t like doing any more than the bare minimum.

If you asked her to do something simple like ring the management company and chase up their responses, she hated doing this but I managed it. When Land Registry searches went from phone to an online portal I had to train her on this (she was there a few years before me) and even then she found it hard. Didn’t like speaking to clients/estate agents etc but had to do this as phone on overflow. When it came to implementing an archiving system for files that were in a spare office room, I did this.

I’ve had to calculate the whole of and work out VAT for completion statements even though maths isn’t my strong point. I’ve also had to learn to like tracked changes which I don’t like in general. Both the latter I was never trained properly on to start with though.

I'd be making a complaint!

Nope. Deffo not x

I’m amazed now when people DO know how to do this. I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve replied when I’ve emailed them a document saying “Please can you send again without all the red lines” or similar 😄

To put the other side from an employee perspective, where a lot of it goes wrong is that an employer sets out massively excessive and unrealistic demands in a job description in relation to the salary offered, so anyone who actually posses those qualities goes for much better paid positions, leaving chancers who think they can wing it. And many bosses are really appalling at training and giving proper, honest feedback and talking to those they have hired face to face when it starts going wrong.

Well if their job was stacking shelves in a supermarket they wouldn't need to...

I hired a lovely girl, who rapidly descended into uselessness as her boyfriend became more obviously a player. She put a tracker on his phone and used to take herself off to the toilets for 40 minutes at a time to track him and cry about where he might be.

They're married now...

I have worked with a client who adds comments and uses the strikethrough feature in red font. It's like, you know there is a one click feature for this?

I totally get this ❤️

Not a hyperbolic statement but an entire department within an LA. I work in an intermediary role between them and the ‘customer’ but they are hopeless. Fail to communicate, fail to meet legal deadlines, regularly ignore/forget/lose/eat documents required for decisions resulting in legal consequences being taken. When they do get in touch, it’s all promises and no action. Complaints not being recorded despite going to heads of departments because the complaints manager wasn’t copied in. An absolute disgrace and yes, most are contractors so there’s no accountability, just move to another LA. I am looking for a new role as it is soul-destroying supporting these ‘customers’.

I often have naps in the middle of the day! When you are feeling unproductive it's exactly the right thing to do. I would encourage anyone I worked with to do the same

You'd have thought that would be standard practice. If people were told when invited for interview that the interview would be conducted in both required languages, that would probably filter out people with a GCSE from ten years ago who'd been planning to bluff with Google translate.

You do know you can change the type of English in Review-language options?

Edited to correct info

Not actual work but I volunteered for many years at the food bank. Sometimes I was interviewing clients but sometimes I helped sorting food in the warehouse.

Large crates would arrive with mixed donations to one side of the warehouse and we'd have to sort it onto warehouse shelves ie tins of beans here, bags of rice there. I'd go with a tray, fill it with a category of thing eg 12 tins of beans and take it all to the shelf. 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. Etc.

I offered her a tray and she very snippily responded "I like doing it my way, you do it your way". Baffling! I'd have gone potty being that inefficient!

We hired a graduate as an assistant in a small company. He didn’t understand why he had to run emails to clients in front of his manager so sent incorrect emails because he thought he knew it all. Accepted teas/coffees but never made any (the rest of the company were women). One of his jobs was to book meetings at a conference. We ended up “agreeing to part ways” after 3 weeks so he left before the conference but we had clients turning up all over the place, not at the times he had noted on the timetable. It was a total nightmare and we just had to wing it and junior staff were taking meetings with really important clients because the meeting slots were double or triple booked. He was clearly intelligent but I think he thought the work was beneath him despite it all being a leg up into a competitive industry. The rest of us who started as assistants had sucked it up and done a decent job of the grunt work. I think his work experience place had his number as he was saying he’d go and work there but didn’t get the job.

I also used to take students with me sometimes as part of their community service, usually year 9. They loved finding efficient ways of stacking the shelves, including self-organising into teams eg the tinned meat team. For no other reason than taking pride in being as efficient as possible. I work in selective schools and I do think that kind of thing correlates with academic ability. They just don't like wasting their own time

My husband went into our local library once, well over 30 years ago. They were selling off old books, 10p each. He picked out a few and took them to the counter. The library assistant counted up how many he had - let's say it was 8. Then she got a piece of paper and wrote down:

10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
__

and laboriously went through adding up 10 + 10 is 20, add 10 is 30 and so on until she got to 80. My husband was transfixed. Surely basic money handling would have been an essential skill on the job description?

I hear horror stories from
family members who are nurses about some of the nurses that they work with - there are some truly wonderful nurses but some who are totally incompetent and a danger to patients - simple things like not checking notes before drug administration and giving wrong medication 😭

Someone I was training literally fell asleep at his desk every time I was showing him how to do our job😂 safe to say he got fired after giving him a few chances.