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 am good with Excel but completely self taught. It is not hard to just google ‘how to do X’

A home carer who didn't follow basic health and safety procedures, was verbally abusive to difficult or more physically impaired clients and influenced new staff members they worked with to do the same so it became their way of doing things too. Management never did anything because this carer has been in the job a long time and was quick (you can be very "efficient" if you're rough with vulnerable clients and don't follow proper procedures even if it could cause harm) and would pick up extra shifts when they were short handed.
Reader, They were always short handed.

It didn't matter how many times they were reported by good staff, those staff would simply be paired with others instead and management would state that they were investigating the accusations. I always wonder if a family member ever caught them on video. I hope so.

Similar to this, the front of house staff of a Central London clinic are the most incompetent bunch of imbeciles I have ever come across. Like, a whole team, all as terrible as each other.

Got my date of birth wrong, lost my insurance authorisation on two separate occasions - “can you forward it again”, can’t speak English properly, get doctors mixed up and sent me to the wrong waiting area so that I almost missed my appointment, discuss sensitive matter out loud:

Me: are you going to email me the referral letter?
Them: “what is the referral letter for”
Me (whispering): um… therapist <name>
Them: OH, FOR THE SEX THERAPIST, WELL THEY MIGHT CONTACT YOU DIRECT

I kid you not

I feel so sorry for the doctors who work there, having their reputation eroded by these utter idiots. Luckily my doctor divides her time between clinics so I will definitely be going to her other clinic if I have to see her again.

My manager who was a board member/owner hired a friend of a friend's daughter as my intern. She was 6ft tall and French and he was very tall dark and twice her age. He and many guys in the office were falling over her (she'd wear suit jackets with matching shorts or mini skirts, and not tights in winter and dramatically declare "Why are all these men looking at me? Have they never seen long legs?" as if she was deeply offended. Every day was a show or a parade depending on your view.

She'd apparently gone to a top business school in France but I've never worked with anyone so needy or needing so much hand-holding. I'd leave every day feeling like I had way more work to do trying to get her to do anything useful. I wasn't a mum yet but I felt like it! My manager was constantly flirting with her (and yes of course he was married!). He wouldn't get me a better laptop - but got her one! Her English was awful so he paid out of his own pocket for Business English courses. And he paid out of his own pocket to get her online marketing courses. He was obsessed with asked her to 'tweet things'. Her social media posts were pointless/non-sensical/and grammatically-challenged. She frequently told us what her Maman thought we should do. She was a nice young lady in many ways but ... well my manager had a reputation of shagging everyone and shag her he did! He was angered that I was not buttering her up and that I disapproved of his lifestyle choices. I swear up until this point I thought the whole shagging your way up was a hollywood phenomenon. But no, apparently this is how incompetent people get the full attention and mentoring by senior people and the recommendations to keep moving up. And when most of us have imposter syndrome and look to improve ourselves, they just flip up their legs in the air?

You're a bit younger than I am, but I would suggest you are probably the exception rather than the rule. The cost of Mac computers alone would have ruled them out for most people back then, if they'd even heard of them.

@cremebrulait , Ah, Oui! I remember working with you. Maman said you were only jealous.

One of the managers at my current job. The person he replaced booked an average of 4 days a month to the very important but non-chargeable stuff and was very good at it, got everything necessary done without constantly offloading to his team.
The new one (well he's been there for 18 months) books an average of 18 days a month to this, refuses to do any of the chargeable work as its "not his job" (it absolutely is), constantly claims there's far too much work in the non-chargeable aspect so he has to offload it to his team who are buried trying to cover the work he refuses to do on top of their own work, let alone the extra he wants to give them. The output from the non-chargeable work is no more than when the original person was in the role either
Can't really work out why he's still here, but recruitment is tricky at the moment so I suspect someone thinks better to have someone than not... something his team would beg to differ on!

Law firm

I worked with an assistant who could not be trusted to put the correct (already addressed) client letter into the correct (already addressed) envelope.

She also once walked into a meeting I was having with a client (in my office with a closed door) and wandered up to me, shoved her phone in my face and said; 'Look at the picture of the frost I took this morning', then wandered out. I was literally in the middle of explaining to the client he was likely going to be jailed for child sex offences.

Senior management were too weak to do anything about it.

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

If he can't speak the language and is avoiding taking calls as you have mentioned in another post I think you should report this ASAP to HR or to your manager. If he has lied about his language ability (or exaggerated it) then unfortunately he is not suitable for the post, no matter how nice he is!

Have you tried asking him directly about it? Or reminding him that he needs to answer calls as that is part of his job and does he "require more training" to be able to do that?

That doesn't surprise me in the slightest. My Friends elderly father is Diabetic and has been on he Diabetes ward in hospital for months. One morning there was no Porridge for his breakfast so the nurse ( who had many times administered his Insulin) gave both him and the gentleman next to him jam on toast, when thy both said they couldn't eat that because it had full sugar jam on it her reply was it won't do you any harm !

In my profession the more senior management are notorious for failing upwards.

It seems a Vice Chancellor or College Principal can all-but bankrupt a university, or have highly dubious activities connected with their finances or personal behaviour, before moving on with a massive golden handshake, the next plush opportunity at another organisation (which given a few years they'll wreck just as spectacularly) and an elevation to the knighthood.

Sounds like hyperbole but I've seen it happen on more than one occasion.

@Medsy to be fair I’ve lost count of the number of people I have had to coach on tracked changes functionality. It’s like pivot tables in Excel a useful function but not one people routinely use.

Is the lady bring managed out? Or is there something else she can do within her limited skill set? 🌹

Most hiring managers have never been trained in interviewing and don't conduct effective interviews. You can never completely eliminate the chances of getting a dud, but good interviewing technique will minimise the risk.

My dad was a pioneer in the music industry. Couldn’t move for them!

My colleague and I were each given a large bundle of paperwork to photocopy. We had the same amount of copying to do and a photocopier each. I had problems with my photocopier jamming and still finished the task in well under an hour. My colleague had no photocopier issues, but it took her 4 hours to do the same job.

Another time, the colleague was sent to catch a train that was due to leave in 25 minutes. It was very important that she got on the train. The station was a 5-10 min slow walk away. She phoned the office an hour later to say she’d missed the train.

I have a job that doesn’t require any specific qualifications, but does ask for knowledge in certain areas and some previous experience of the job. They pay very well and we work from home.

We've had someone get sacked very recently not long after they took the job because they were literally not doing any work at all. None.

We also have a new started who seemingly just ain’t grasping it at all. More surprisingly we were told they have extensive knowledge in a specific field we work in.. yet this doesn’t quite seem to be true and when I quizzed their previous role it turns out their ‘knowledge’ stems from a third party source from their old job and they do not actually have the knowledge. It’s really really frustrating 😂

This will always rankle with me, as it got me made redundant

We were on a 'carousel' of training

Once we'd been signed off on a chemical procedure, we'd rotate and train up in another procedure, until we were signed off and so on until we were able to perform all the laboratory procedures

I ended up behind a guy who couldn't grasp what was required.

He could recite what needed to be done, as if he'd memorised the SOPs, but couldn't put it into practice.

He also resented female workers training him and I was stuck behind him for months as worker after worker tried to show him that if something required 9ml of distilled water, then 35ml wouldn't do

He was an absolute arsehole to the canteen staff who locked up at 2pm sharp and he'd roll in at 2.30pm shouting and swearing at them for locking up

I got the hang of a complicated procedure, but then failed to progress around the carousel, as he'd got stuck on one of the simplest

He was fired, claimed racism and I still couldn't get trained up, as everyone he'd claim was racist couldn't work in the same lab, while he appealed.

By the time redundancies came around, I was the first to be let go as drum roll please I hadn't fulfilled my training

Sticks in my craw every time

😱Oh dear ...

A manager who not only could not do his job, but had no insight into this. All of his projects went nowhere. He led a project and team and after a year of him being the leader, no one else on the project team had actually realised he was leading it ( his sole contribution was to turn up to one meeting, slag them all, and then never come back).
He would go to meetings and afterward ask me to write a precis of what had been discussed and agreed, essentially because he had not been able to follow the conversation.
He once told me the opposite of a decision that had been made in a meeting, again, as he had not been able to understand what was said.

I'd have felt sorry for him except he used to spend all his time criticising others and once tried to pin the blame on me for one of his failings.

A guy I worked with in the NHS for 10 years. Lazy, incompetent, misogynist, treated all of us female staff like serfs there to clean up after him. He was the same band as me so not a manager. Patients hated him.
No matter how many complaints we put into management with dates and times of dreadful things he had done nothing was ever done including incidents where he had actually harmed patients. Management inertia was incredible.
Anyway I got another job and was thankful to leave but have just heard in the last few days through a colleague who still works there that he has just committed suicide in the most appalling way.
Nobody knows why. I dont know what to think.

I once had a nanny whose mum used to call In sick and I remember once she said she wouldn’t be coming in to work today as she had the prom the next day and needed a fresh face for it…..

I dread to think what younger staff say about me. I have worked for 43 years and hold a senior role. In the last few weeks I have asked:

How to reinstate grid lines in excel
Why a table in word has shot off the page beyond the margins
How to migrate from my old to new i-phone
Where to find a responsibility allowance in the system
How to pull through a request to recruit form

and so my banal queries go on. I worked 55 hours last week and don't have time to look up this sh1t. Occasionally I catch an eyeroll.

OTH I regularly have to correct their grammar, review their drafting and help them with complex formulas in excel and can see the answer in a cell can't possibly be right and investigate the formula and make sure its components are correct. That's all notwithstanding constant coaching around complex cases to get them to think for themselves.

About six years ago we took on some entry level apprentices with good A'Levels. They were so far from work ready it was concerning, the methodology we can teach the cobby attitudes are harder to deal with.

Most skills, particularly admin ones can be captured through an in-tray exercise. There is little correlation, mostly, between the best interview performance and the practical performance of the test. I don't need people who can blag, I need them to do a job accurately and diligently.

What's wrong with sending emails from a phone? If thr contents is the same?

I had a staff member who put metal in the staff kitchen's microwave and almost burnt the building down.