Unfiltered Story #312532

Dave is always “busy” , but never gets anything done.
He picks the most stupid way of doing things, that take forever, which makes him late on the next task, which he will screw up or take too long, which means he rushes the next task. Which means another screw up, ultimately taking longer to put right , then if he did things the way he was trained.

Management didn’t know what to do with him, he did his job, but badly. Retraining didn’t seem to work and nowhere else in the company could make use of him. I think they where trying not to fire anyone and clutching at straws

I was still new at the company, but making a good impression. My manager gave some of my work to a coworker and asked me to spend a little time with Dave, help him out.

I get an hour free so go to see dave.

Me: hey dave, (boss) said you were busy and asked if there was anything I could could with.

Dave: (scoffs) you don’t know how to do anything, how would you help?

Me: I don’t know, I’m a pretty quick learner. Perhaps if you showed me….

Dave: I don’t have time!

Me: ..okay. Well I’ll just watch over your shoulder then..

Dave: no! That’s pointless. You won’t be able to do it!

Me: and the worse case would be if I tried?

(He didn’t answer, he ignored me as i watched him. It was pretty obvious why it took so long. Rather than copy and pasting. He was typing everything in, then slowly checking everything he typed. A two second task took 20 seconds and he had hundreds to do. He did thus sort of thing for every task, every report was painful to watch.
But he refused to let me help, kept telling me how busy he was.

Eventually I had to report back that he refused to even let me do anything. I agreed with the boss that he would send some of Daves reports directly to me without him knowing, so i could just get them done.

I ended up leaving a few years later, dave was still there still too busy to let anyone help him. )