48 Coworkers Who, For Lack Of A Better Word, Are Really Stupid

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. Everyone had to count by ones.

But then even Angela would 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 just forgot.

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 office
- 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 labradors who would have been a better PA.

Oh man, I have three of them but because they're a bit long, I will only bring up my favorite:

EUGENE

Eugene was possibly the dumbest human being I have ever met. He couldn't follow instructions. He couldn't remember directions. He could barely use a computer, and we were in an office job where everything was done via computer. I had to constantly help him with basic things like logging in because he found it so difficult to remember his username or password. Our usernames were our names, for example.

The boss for some reason wanted me to train Eugene on a particular process that involved changing some very basic data in our processing system. All the screens were identified by numbers, which you accessed by typing the number and hitting enter. Keep in mind we all used this system all day and everyone, Eugene included, went to lots of differently numbered screens constantly.

I told Eugene we needed to go to screen 77. He nodded and looked at his keyboard, and then spent several minutes looking for the 7 key. Once he found it he hit it triumphantly and then, THEN, he began anew, searching the whole keyboard again for the 7 key.

The one he literally just used.

Several minutes later, he found it and hit it again, triumphant in his victory while I tried not to let my face show that I was dying inside because now I got to watch him look for the enter key. I had to walk him through several more steps that involved finding other keys on the keyboard and when the process was done, he went on lunch and I had to report to my boss that Eugene was literally untrainable and related my attempt to him. He was not surprised and decided that maybe Eugene could stay doing whatever it was that he was doing.

Eugene was shocked when routine layoffs included him several months later and while we were all sad to no longer have his cheerful attitude around, our work got way more efficient when he was gone. I hope your next job was something better suited for you, Eugene!

My immediate supervisor and her boss (our division’s director) loved our intern Tracy because she never questioned anything they said. Even though Tracy was a complete moron, they hired her on as a regular employee over the objections of everyone else who had ever worked with her.

After several other mishaps, we foolishly believed that Tracy would be fired after she “accidentally” deleted all of the data from a critical database we’d been ordered to share with her. Our bosses chalked it up to “an honest mistake,” and essentially blamed us for not training her better. Fortunately, my colleague had anticipated this scenario and had only given Tracy a dummy copy of the db rather than granting her access to our production db, so we didn’t actually lose anything.

Fast forward to an important offsite meeting with key external stakeholders. Our director was speaking and made multiple references to an essential briefing document that she’d asked Tracy to photocopy and circulate to the attendees by snail mail as required pre-reading for the meeting.

At some point, one of the stakeholders interrupted our director and asked if she had an extra copy of the document because the copy he’d received in the mail only included the odd-numbered pages. As our director was checking for a spare copy, a bunch of other attendees spoke up and reported the exact same problem.

It turns out that Tracy had treated the original two-sided document as a one-sided document when she was making copies for everyone. Our director was furious about being embarrassed in front of her peers and demanded an explanation from Tracy upon our return to the office. Tracy’s famous last words were “You didn’t tell me it was two sided.”.

I did a brief stink in construction working for my Father-in-law. 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, 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 woah 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 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.

I have a coworker who routinely asks the same questions over and over again. Last time she did it, I just scrolled up one tick in our Teams chat to the last time she asked (a week or two prior) and sent her a screenshot. She marveled at my memory like I just performed some sort of wizardry.

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 houses 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 though baggage check.

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

She was new in the office. The desk printer was out of paper, just one left. She asked “where can i find more paper”. I said “you can use the ones in copy machine”

She took the last paper from printer and put it on the copier. Started making copies of it. Blank paper.

She told me “very smart idea” on her way back. And winked.

McDonald's.

One coworker didn't understand that refrigerator must be closed.

He had the quickest but the most unorganised style of work I have ever seen.

He also didn't want to understand that sauce must be on the bun - pretty often half of the sauce was on paper or table because he worked too quickly and too unorganised.

I used to work at a youth center that ran on a tiny budget. I was the only paid worker, and management otherwise relied on whatever volunteer labor they could find. They got an Americorps volunteer to run the “computer center” for the kids - a mismatched handful of ancient computers.

The first day I met her I knew we were in trouble. She was messing with the computers in the morning before the students showed up, and she asked me if I thought she should download the internet, or maybe web world was better. I almost didn’t even hear her because I was transfixed by the screenful of pop up ads for p***s enlargement pills and hot singles in her area on the computer she was using to check her aol email.

We were stuck with her for an entire year. This was a year of nonstop viruses on every single computer, none of which could be replaced as she ran them into the ground one by one.

Thankfully she was absent a lot. She refused to show up whenever it rained because she was concerned about getting into an accident during her commute. She lived across the hallway and her “commute” consisted of three steps across the carpeted hallway, indoors.

I worked with a guy that was semi-competent at his job, but not so much at real life. He once called in on his day off around 4pm asking for help driving from Baltimore to NYC as he had tickets to take his wife to a broadway show that evening. We were a little confused why he needed help as the directions are simple, hop on 95 north and stay there till you see signs for NYC. This was in the days of Smartphones and GPS, so it was really hard to understand why he was having trouble. We asked where he was. He responded West Virginia.

West f*****g Virginia.

He had somehow managed to get his GPS to tell him that he needed to drive due west to get to NYC from Baltimore. We did some digging and figured out he had set his GPS to highways only and no tolls. His GPS was trying to take him on something like a 15 hour, 1,000+ mile trip to get from Baltimore to NYC without leaving a highway or paying tolls.

Here is the real kicker. The actual route from baltimore to NYC without paying tolls does not go through West Virginia. It goes north into the middle of PA, then cuts east to NYC. It's only about a 5 hour drive. The toll route is like 3.5-4 hours depending on traffic.

Needless to say they did not make their 6pm show.

He later got divorced because he found out his wife had been using their shared bank account to pay for hotel rooms where she'd let strangers run trains on her. Multiple times a week. Apparently this had been going on for years before he finally figured it all out. She'd spent literally tens of thousands of dollars doing this.

One of my coworkers must've grown up in a backwoods homestead because she didn't understand basic technology and I would be asked to help her trouble shoot. Here's a sample what she asked from me every other day:

"They deleted my email" (she forgot her password and didn't write it down)

"I can't download Google" (Chrome is already installed and the icon is on her desktop)

"Google Drive isn't opening" (she was clicking on a JPEG of the Google Drive logo in Google Images, not the actual link)

"I'm still waiting on this Zoom call" (she missed a virtual doctor's appointment because she thought Zoom was a phone call and that the doctor would call her cell, not a video call in which she had to enter herself into)

"My computer is broken" (she didn't charge it)

If you're reading this and thinking "oh that would make sense if she was in her 80's" no, she's in her 30's. Despite it being annoying helping her so often she always had a good attitude and was appreciative.

I had a few.

One of them I somewhat affectionately referred to as "Fat Batman."

Fat Batman was a somewhat overweight man who would literally sneak up on you when you were just chatting with coworkers, and just as easily disappear when you looked away for a second.

Fat Batman always ate the exact same food everyday, in very large portions, and when it was his time for lunch he'd just get up and leave, not even saying a word to anyone. Same with when he was done eating, just get up and leave, even if we were at the table with him.

Fat Batman had the habit of going around and peeking over people's shoulders to read their computer monitors, even sometimes reading their personal messages.

But, most importantly, Fat Batman was unbelievably bad at his job. How bad? He interviewed for the company and got rejected, only managing to get in through a temp agency.

One time, a coworker reviewed his work and made some notes of things he needed to fix. Three days go by, she goes to check, and he simply... ignored everything she told him. She goes up to him, asks him about it, and he just blank stared her until she felt uncomfortable and left.

I once had to go in and make a change on something he had made (client request). Took me forever because he just did it the most incompetent way possible.

He would frequently hog work, but as soon as he was done with it, he could not care less; any feedback or issues that needed resolving were someone else's problem, he was all about doing the next thing.

Also, he was always on the phone and had the annoying habit pf answering it super loudly, to the point everyone not only heard it but laughed.

Unsurprisingly, he got sent on his way after not that long.

I used to work with this dude we'll call Frank. He was a friendly, earnest dude but completely clueless. Most of the time when you were speaking to him you just knew he had no idea what the conversation was about.

The one thing I remember most is occasionally working busy promotional giveways with him. Hundreds of people would show up to these things so it was very fast paced, you needed to constantly be unpacking boxes of whatever we were giving away. Frank was not fast at this so we put him on box cutting duty. This guy could not figure out how to break up a cardboard box. They were normal boxes, he had boxcutters, we demonstrated to him how to do it when it was obvious he wasn't getting it done and this guy acted like we were asking him to solve advanced math puzzles. He never figured it out and was quickly banned from box cutting duties.

To this day I can't break up a box without thinking of Frank.

I had an early boss like that. When I left, in the exit interview, I said, "Charlie, you are without hyperbole, the dumbest person I have ever met." He replied, with genuine feeling, "It was great working with you too."
I don't think he knew what hyperbole meant.

I used to work with a guy called Peter ... he died of alcohol poisoning in his mid 40's but how he ever got that old I'll never know.

I used to work with Peter in the earth moving industry and he was always given the most menial tasks so he didn't do any damage.
But one day one of our scraper operators didn't turn up and I was told to teach Peter how to operate it (my heart sank as I heard those words). What you had to realise is that the world, according to Peter, was either 'black or white', there was no in-between.
To operate a scraper you had to put your bucket about 3 inches underground and drag it along, scooping up the dirt along the way until the bucket was full. If done correctly it left a flat strip of land, ready for the next load. But Peter didn't' understand the concept of 'lightly, lightly', he just put the bucket into the ground as far as it could go, and if the machine couldn't move forward then he lifted the bucket out of the ground, the machine would shoot forward and he would jam the bucket into the ground again. To him the bucket either had to be UP or DOWN. After 15 minutes we gave up and I was to work solo for the day. Unfortunately the area that Peter had messed up took half a day to smooth out so we got far behind on that job.

Next time I ran into Peter he was the diesel mechanic (he was a good mechanic) at a place I was employed at. The thing was he was usually fired on a Wednesday, Thursday or Friday for doing something really stupid; the next Monday morning Peter would ring up and ask for his job back, and he got it back as the boss realised that what Peter had done was annoying at the time but funny looking back on it.
This all came to an end when the lead mechanic drove a $600k bulldozer into the shed for a quick maintenance. During this Peter decided to drain the diesel from the bulldozer into his car (which he did very often), but this time he emptied the tank of the bulldozer without telling anyone. So the lead mechanic finishes and gets back into the bulldozer, still thinking it has a quarter of a tank of diesel. He starts it up and it promptly runs out of diesel - for those who don't know about diesel engines you CAN'T run them dry, if you do there is a very small chance that it seizes the engine; and in this case that is exactly what happened.
After this Peter got banned by the company and never got his job back; lead mechanic was reprimanded but his embarrassment and humiliation was enough of a punishment.

Years later I'm working in a clay pit (dig the clay out to make bricks) and there is Peter on the water truck. His job is simple, drive around and spray water everywhere so dust isn't created. It's the easiest job on the site.
Things went well and even I thought he couldn't screw it up.
Anyway ... one day I'm waiting to be loaded and I watch Peter drive down a steep hill (every other time he had gone up the hill so the water was always behind him). Peter thinks it's a bit scary so he slows down, but he's still got the water sprayer going full blast; I watch in horror as the water starts to run down the track (remember that this is all clay) past him - I tell Peter to turn the water sprayer off but he refuses as he's 'concentrating on getting down this hill'.
The inevitable happens, the whole track is covered in water and finally the truck loses traction and starts to slid forward on the wet clay. This is one of the only times in my life where I physically cannot breath as I watch. Down the bottom of the hill is a large dam and I'm that certain that he's going in that I put my handbrake on and start to get out of my machine as I'll need to jump into the dam and rescue him.
Peter can't keep the truck straight and has no way on controlling it by now, the truck slides forward at speed. By the time he gets to the bottom of the hill the truck is sideways and when it hits the bottom it slides more, so when the truck stops Peter is looking up at the steep hill he just came down from; his wheel marks showed that he missed going into the dam by about a meter.
I finally started to breath; to Peter it was just another day.

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.

Had a guy who got his job from family connections. He regularly took 45 minute bathroom breaks, would fall asleep in his car and forget to set an alarm so we'd need to go out and get him to come to work. He would "Find" tools and pretend he had no idea they belonged to someone else(my f*****g name was engraved on it). When he finished the task he was assigned he would put his hands in his pockets and wander around the shop talking to people until someone noticed he wasnt working.

First person I was genuinely happy to see laid off.

Unfortunately I work with more than one person who don't believe in vaccinations. Refused to get the Covid vaccine and one of them refused to get the free flu vaccine our company was offering because 'you don't know what the government is putting in you'

A more specific example , I was upgrading my car and the trade in value was rubbish. The car was a rust heap tbf. Ended up getting a better deal selling it for scrap metal. When I mentioned that to my co-worker, she looked at me in all seriousness and asked me what I needed scrap metal for and what I was planning to do with it.

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.

Junior didn’t last long after that.