“Never Done A Darn Thing”: 64 People Who Tried To Use Weaponized Incompetence To Get Their Way

My mom (46) talks like a baby when she wants you to do things, only does it when she wants something done and then says “she can’t figure it out” or she doesn’t know how to do it, throws a fit or goes silent when you refuse to do it for her til someone feels sorry for her and does it for her.

I work in an IT call center. We have one kid on the team who genuinely walks the line between weaponized incompetence and just being a moron.

Guy spent 5 hours of his shift with his headset mic being messed up. He would answer every call, the callers would be unable to hear him and hang up, and he'd continue on like nothing was wrong.

Whenever he'd get a complicated issue, he'd talk staff into rebooting server stacks (the phones at the sites we support are VOIP) so the calls would drop and someone else would get his mess.

The first week, in our first place together, my spouse tried to play it like he didn't know how to sweep the floor properly. I told him he wasn't going to play that role and he never did it again - 30+ years married now. The big dummy.

My ex told me he didn’t clean because I didn’t praise him enough.

My coworker would conveniently forget meeting times, what his responsibilities were, when something important needed to be done, all so he could shove his work off on to me.

A female co-worker was asked to spearhead the PC refresh for the team. A few months later, my boss was asked why nothing was submitted for the refresh. That's when she said she didn't know how to use Excel.

Keep in mind, we're an IT team that deals mostly with Spreadsheet, APIs, and so on.

She was then asked, as a result of incompetence, to ask people what office supplies people needed and that went as well as expected.

To this day, I still don't know how she was hired. Worse thing was she was supposed to be the main point of contact for a couple of systems we had.

Flash forward, she got fired as a result of her saying she was being targeted for being a woman. She actually touched a male colleague and he filed a complaint. But her defense was, "because I am a woman."

My aunt lives in Quebec, and has long since retired from her lifer career at an airport.

She does not, cannot, and will not speak a lick of French.

I’m in awe of her, really.

I see people “playing dumb” at work to get out of work - acting like they were never trained, and can’t learn how to do things that are requirements of the job in healthcare setting especially.

I work at a public library. One day a patron came in and used an assistive device to type a conversation with me about how he had just gotten out of prison, was disabled and very bad with technology, and needed help in the form of a staff member basically typing up his whole manuscript for him. I found it very strange because the device he was using required typing, which he was doing with proficiency. I explained to him that I could help him get signed on to a computer, but staff would not be able to sit with him and give him one-on-one assistance the way he insisted he needed. We went back and forth (again, entirely via typed messages) before he finally sat down at a computer on his own and used it with absolutely no trouble. I told my coworker about the interaction and she said he'd done this to several other people over the course of a couple years.

Needing detailed instructions for chores they somehow manage perfectly when nobody else is available.

My 5 year old forgets how to use his legs when it's time to walk to school.

Working with twenty year olds feels like that, but I don't think it's intentional so I don't know if that counts as weaponized. One couldn't cut cardboard because it was wet. One didn't know if the first piece meant the starting piece or finishing piece. One declared it impossible to find the volume of a cylinder that has the volume written on it. I want to be supportive of young adults entering the workforce but half are incompetent at everything.

Pretending to not know what the theme of the play was when it was time to write it down after I clearly HEARD HER talking about it to her friends during group work (same assignment btw).

Brother had my mom convinced he couldn’t load the dishwasher. So he got to unload while I had to load. I’ll never get over it.

My mom, we live in the Midwest and she refuses to learn how to use the snowblower. If I don’t know how to use it I’ll never be called in to do it.

My uncle on my mams side once convinced my dad to join his job as a night gate guard as it was and I quote "A dream job! Nobody bothers you, you basically do whatever you want for 8 hours!"
So my dad, having had me at too young an age needed this money bad so he took the opportunity.

It turns out that my uncle is so unpleasant and viscerally incompetent that everyone from truckers coming for fuel to regular staff avoided him like the plague, meaning my dad would be absolutely inundated with work every shift.

Knowing my uncle now, hes a feckless, exist, racist, moneygrubbing and so idiotic he seems more like lesser man than a modern human so this all tracks.
Edit: sexist, not exist.

Not the worst, but something I see a lot at work.

A lot of women will outright refuse to do anything 'manual' because 'it needs a man'

All I do is drop the pallets off. Its your problem what happens after that.

Pretending you cant life a few kilo is just stupid af. Ive worked in a warehouse with women, and many of them, even tiny women, threw cages and stock around often better than the men.

This happened 1 hour ago.
A colleague (7 years seniority) asked me how to open a ticket for faulty material for one of his team members. I opened the link and gave him a quick tutorial.
He then said "well! You already have it open, and I'll probably forget all that"

I closed the tab and told him that I don't have it open now. (I did not, I opened that ticket, like the idiot I am).

i used to work in production control for a manufacturing firm that had a habit of moving people who made mistakes on the shop floor into management or design so as to prevent mistakes. thus ensuring any mistakes were repeated constantly. or better yet, designs ignored by machinists who knew better.

the guy who ran the floor got his job that way.

it was always a pain to get custom work through because the floor had targets. targets that the targets had no basis in requirements. sure, they could spend an hour breaking down and setting up for the high value priority work, but then they'd get shouted at for missing an arbitrary target when instead they could spend all day spinning screws nobody needs to add to a big bucket in the warehouse.

in what i already knew was a futile gesture i stormed the floor managers office and explained that he was actively working against the company. he gave me a grin and told me he knew. he didn't set the targets. they'd be set by enthusiastic an middle manager who'd read a book on productivity and he'd given up arguing long ago. he was waiting for someone like me to go tell them what i'd told him.

I've been working hospitality for half my life and I've seen so many people take part time roles while they've been in college, sometimes doing a masters or PhD that can't follow basic instructions. I know you can't teach common sense or work ethic, but some of the stuff I've seen out of what should be intelligent people has to have been an example of this.