People Open Up About The Biggest Morons They've Ever Worked With

Have you ever met someone who made you wonder how they survive day-to-day? Simple tasks seem beyond their ccapabilities.

Have you ever worked with someone whose skills are completely inadequate for sustainment of life—let alone the needs of the job?

Reddit user MySmellyRacoon asked:

"Have you ever worked with such a moron you wondered how they function in life? What were they like to work with?"

Safety Officer

"I've been working construction nearly my entire life. During those decades I've encountered one or two moron's, but the one who takes the cake I worked with 35 years ago."

"I was one of the foremen on this site, but not this gentleman's foreman. His foreman sent him to find what was taking the reach lift with their material so long."

"Moron heads off across the site and spots the lift idling in front of the port-a-potty with the missing material on the forks. Rather than walking back, he climbs on the lift, something he's never operated before. He finds out how to get it in gear and disengage the brakes and takes off."

"The first thing he does as he's leaving is drive over another worker's car. Not bumping into, but right over the top. This doesn't stop him. He's got a mission. It's a self imposed one, but it's his. He manages to get all the way across the site without any further mishaps. Unfortunately, this isn't the end of our story."

"Now, having triumphantly arrived with the material he began to raise it while extending the boom. He did a bit more extending than raising though and punctured the brand new wall with the forks. Realizing his mistake he stops for a moment and contemplates his situation."

"Having successfully assessed the damage he determines that those holes are going to require repairs regardless of his next step. He decides that he still needs to deliver the materials, so he gives the lift more throttle while lifting and extending the boom."

"Which raised the wall and pushed it back. This forced the back wall off the building and it fell. This wall was 120 feet long and had $10,000 worth of windows in it."

"Rather than firing him, they made him safety officer. We decided that was a good job for him. Because he wasn't doing anything more than walking around with a clipboard, the job was safer for everyone."

~ Dioscouri

Personal Assistant

"I sat next to her for four months. She would lock herself out of her computer by repeatedly getting her password wrong several times a week, every week. Sometimes more than once a day."

"She had been hired in as a temp PA six months before I met her, but I have no idea what she'd been doing in all that time because she didn't seem to know how to do anything."

"Every day she would ask me things like:

• How to open someone else's calendar
• Find the expenses system
• Print or scan things
• Search for flights on the travel system
• The names of the London airports
• The location of our London office1q
• How to cancel the flight she'd booked to the wrong airport
• The phone number for the travel desk
• How to book a meeting room in our office
• The four digit phone extension for our reception desk."

"She would nod and smile constantly as you explained something, but that seemed to be the only thing that her head was doing. After the first few days I started saying 'Do you want to write this down?' And she would nod and smile and get a notepad and pen... but just keep nodding and smiling."

"I started writing her Post-it notes."

"She lost them."

"I started saying 'OK, I'm going to email you instructions so you can find them again if you need them' but she would somehow lose or delete them or occasionally send me a blank reply to one of them from days earlier."

"I printed her off a list of useful numbers to stick next to her monitor and phone but I had to give her a new copy every week or so because she somehow constantly lost it or got coffee or her lunch all over it. I emailed her a copy of the file, but who knows where that ended up."

"She also ate EXTREMELY loudly, lots of lip smacking and showering of crumbs and debris, and she started eating her lunch around 11am and would somehow make it last for at least 2 hours. I am not exaggerating. Her keyboard was always crusted with dried, mushed up lunch and I had to type things into it horrifyingly often."

"She was a very nice lady. Chatted happily about her granddaughter and her husband."

"But I have no idea at all how she made it to the age of about 55 because I'm pretty sure she was capable of getting badly lost in a moderately sized bouncy castle."

"I'm fairly sure I've met Labrador Retrievers who would have been a better PA."

~ butwhatsmyname

Manager

"This is an example of a conversation I have with a manager at my company a couple of times a day:"

"Me: Hey, can you please make an effort to get me 'X' by this date, I need it to complete my work.

"Them: I'm really busy today.

"Me: That's fine, I just need it by this date.

"Them: OK, sounds good.

"Me: Just to confirm, you will get me 'X' by this date.

"Them: Oh, you need me to get 'X' for you?"

"Me: Yes, can you please get it to me by this date."

"Them: When do you need it by?"

"Me: This date."

"Them: OK, no problem."

~ PictureNegative12

Ice Cream Server

"Years ago, I worked at a soft-serve ice cream stand for a while, and we had a 16-year-old girl on what was her first job. She was weirdly sheltered and naive and had zero idea how to do ANYTHING."

"She was terrified of facing customers, scared of burning herself on the hot fudge dispenser, and couldn't tie up her apron."

"Among the other things she couldn't do, even after repeated training and patient demonstration: remember which machines were for chocolate, vanilla, or twist (they were labeled), remember which water taps at the sink were for hot and cold (they, too, were labeled), and make change at the register, by which I mean she didn't know which coins were worth how much."

"She also had no idea how to peel a banana."

"She was a dear, sweet soul who really wanted to do well and was excited about her first job, and we were kind and patient with her, but she just couldn't do it."

~ SterlingLevel

Construction Worker

"I did a brief stint in construction working for my father-in-law (FIL). We hired a new guy, supposedly a qualified welder. I'm an IT guy with no experience in construction at all, I'm basically there to do easy fabrication stuff and fetch and carry for the competent guys. I'm supposed to be this guy's helper."

"Day one: He's late for work. 'Some guy kept tailgating me, I thought he wanted to race. Then he turned his lights and sirens on, I almost got arrested for fleeing!'."

"Day two: We go to the site, and he needs to cut some metal. They'd just laid down brand new flooring. I told him, Hey, we should probably not cut right here, we're gonna damage that floor. He told me to shut up. He damaged the brand new flooring, he got into a huge verbal fight with my father-in-law, and was fired on the spot."

"...about three years later, he's rehired. My FIL invites him to the house for dinner, I said, " Whoa, this guy looks familiar. I said, isn't that the guy you fired? FIL goes, well, everyone deserves a second chance."

"The following day, he complains about this stupid, fat cow he met. It's my sister-in-law. Fired again."

"He gets re-hired after profusely apologizing (FIL is a big believer in second chances), he ends up working for several months after that before tripping over his dog carrying a pan of boiling water and ending up in the hospital for several weeks. He called my FIL first, asking what to do. FIL told him to call 911, not me!"

"No idea what happened to him after that, I know he came back to work for a while. I should ask FIL how he's doing."

~ zerbey

Scrub Tech

"I am a surgeon. At this one hospital we had this scrub tech named Angela who I was sure had absence seizures. She would just routinely stare off into the distance in the middle of a case and you would have to ask for something several times while snapping your fingers. This would happen 3 or 4 times every hour."

"She wasn’t, as it turns out, having seizures. She was just that vacant."

"We did a quick surgery to just replace a battery device. It’s literally just make incision. Remove battery. Connect new battery. Make sure it’s working and then close up."

"We make incision and disconnect the battery. Then I hand it to Angela. I take a second to stop some bleeding. And then ask for the new battery. I connect it and we check and it’s not working."

"We are trying to troubleshoot and then I realize she just wiped off the old battery and handed it back to me. She apparently had done this to other surgeons."

"The OR refused to get rid of her because she was super pleasant otherwise, never caused a fuss and was always there on time (just super incompetent). She was never blamed. We just called it a 'system error'."

"And a new OR policy was put in place where the circulating nurse had to check that the old battery was handed off to her before we put the new one in. And the surgeons had to specifically ask for the 'new battery that has not previously been in the patient'."

"She also could not count. Which is really bad for a scrub tech. Sutures often come in packs of 8, so most techs will just count their needles by counting pack of sutures. 8, 16, 24, 32, etc... We could not get Angela to count by 8’s. It was literally 8, 15, 22... 'No, Angela, 8, 16, 24, 32... 8, 16, 32'."

"So another OR policy gets created. Everyone had to count by ones."

"But then Angela would even mess that up. She had some number dyslexia or something. Whenever she got to 34, she would inevitably then say 43. It became a routine in the OR that once she got into the 30s everyone in the room would stop what they were doing and make sure she was counting correctly."

"She did win employee of the week once. She came in to work one day when she was not scheduled. We were particularly busy that day and it was helpful just to have an extra warm body. Turns out that she was supposed to go on vacation that day and she just forgot."

~ halfmanhalfrobot69

Government Employee

"I had an employee, and we'll call him Kev. We worked overseas, and the government gave us money to pay our rent and utilities. Kev rented an apartment from a local national coworker."

"Kevin had gone overseas without his wife, but he missed her, so he flew her over. He decided that he hadn't missed her that much, so he sent her back."

"About six months go by, and Kev has a meeting with the Commander. In all that time, Kev had not been paying the rent to his coworker. It turns out that he had 'met' a Russian woman online, and he had been sending the money to her."

"He told his wife that he had a business trip to Nevada. In truth, his Russian girlfriend was supposed to meet him in Las Vegas. But wouldn't you know, she had a car accident on the way to the airport! So then she needed more money for medical bills."

"When he got back, he told me his sad story. I spent less than a minute on Google and showed him the Russian dating scam. The script was word-for-word. He was sad."

"So Kev lost his security clearance and couldn't perform any work. So he was paid to surf the internet. Meanwhile, his wife was homeless and living in a storage unit."

"Each month l had to collect Kev's rent money with extra to catch him up. We couldn't fire him or send him home because then we could not ensure that he paid back his coworker."

"Time goes by, and Kev tells me that he's met a Malaysian woman online. He tells me that he has been sending her what little money he had to help her with legal problems. But when those problems were gone, they would both be rich!"

"She was even going to meet him in Seattle, but guess what? She had an accident on the way to the airport and now she needed money for medical bills."

"I got on Google and showed him the scam, almost word-for-word. He said no, this was different. This had only one lawyer, whereas his girlfriend had TWO lawyers."

"He eventually returned to his stateside job working on...the space program."

~ pappyvanwinkle1111

Gary

"Our company flew in a bunch of people from all over the country for a trade show. None of us had ever met each other before, but after grabbing dinner together, everyone was cool, except one guy, who we will call Gary."

"Gary was an older guy, maybe 50 or 60, but constantly talked about how his mom policed his behavior and how he wasn't allowed to do certain things because she said so."

"Instead of leaving his suitcase in his hotel room, he brought it to the restaurant with him, proceeded to open it at the table and pull out a massive bag of chocolate chip cookies and a half gallon of milk. He doesn't order anything at this nice steakhouse and instead just eats 39 cookies for dinner."

"Our company made us share hotel rooms and we were cool with Gary's roommate, so we're just hanging out in their hotel room when Gary starts acting real weird and secretive. He ends up telling us that he smokes, and that no one can find out, especially his mom. Of course, we assume he means weed, but this guy pulls out hand rolled cigarettes with regular tobacco in them."

"But one thing stood out way more than any of this odd behavior. At about 4 in the morning, I hear a knock at our hotel door. It's Gary's roommate and he's asking if he can sleep in our room. We say sure and ask him what's up. He says that Gary got up around 2 in the morning, turned on the hotel room lights, showered, ironed his clothes, got fully ready, and then left the hotel room."

"Gary returns to the hotel room around 330am, and has brought, what we suspect, are two ladies of the evening, with him."

"He turns on all the lights again, starts playing music, turns on the TV, and is trying to seduce these women on his bed. Gary's roommate is trying to sleep just 2 feet away while this goes on. Roommate puts up with it for 30 minutes before coming over to our room."

"The next day, it takes about 10 minutes before the story has spread like wildfire."

"Management finds out, and fires him on the spot. He is literally perplexed about it, saying he didn't do anything wrong."

"Anyways, the company gets him a flight back home, and apparently, he ends up getting arrested at the airport because he got into a fight with TSA because they wouldn't let him take an entire pizza through baggage check."

"Just a wildly weird dude that I think about once a year and wonder what he's up to nowadays."

~ CHUNKY_BLOODY_QUEE

Office Worker

"The hands down winner for me would be this one junior engineer I worked with about 20-25 years ago. Let’s just call him Junior."

"Junior had been on the job about six months when management decided he should travel to a client site on the other side of the country, to see how they used our product and get specs from them for a custom job."

"According to the senior coworker who was saddled with him, Junior showed up to the airport with only his wallet, containing ID and a bus pass for the last city the guy had lived in, and plane ticket. No cash, no credit cards, and no clothes for a four day trip."

"Senior guy claims he thought maybe there was a checked bag he somehow never saw, but I think he just wanted to see where this was going."

"OK, so the hotel was OK, it was on the corporate account. Car was OK-ish, though since Junior showed up with no insurance card, only the senior guy could drive. Food was…. OK. Junior balked at only being able to eat at the hotel or when the senior guy wanted to break for a meal."

"But the clothing I’m still laughing about. Junior seriously thought he could borrow senior guy’s clothes! That would have been ridiculous on its own, but Junior was an absolute beanpole, while the senior guy was of entirely average height and build. Junior ended up wearing the same clothes the whole trip."

"I mean, it’s possible that he somehow thought it was a single-day trip. But he’d have been thinking that against all evidence, since he definitely had his tickets that showed very different days on the flights."

"It was also quite a long distance, so even the very earliest and latest flights in a single day wouldn’t have left more than a few hours for a facility tour and several meetings. They also almost certainly flew out on a Sunday, though it’s been so long I can’t say for sure."

"There was a lot of break room talk about how on earth he thought the no extra clothes thing was going to work out for him. He even had to get a toothbrush and comb and other toiletries from the hotel."

"Actually, maybe he thought hotels always provide that stuff? Plus pajamas, and have an in room washer and dryer, or fast turnaround free laundry? That never occurred to me before, but it’s possible."

"Junior didn’t last long at the company after that."

~ ServoCrab

What's your workplace story?