Working with stupid people.

Scanlas The 2nd

Ficheall wrote: »

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

0-49 below average.
50 average.
51-100 above average.

Suppose you have four individuals, listed in order of decreasing "intelligence": A,B,C,D whose intelligence placings, shall we say, are A_i,B_j,C_k,D_l respectively.
Their average position then is (A_i+B_j+C_k+D_l)/4.
A_i and B_j are above this placing and C_k and D_l are below it. 50% and 50% respectively.
That's the clear-cut case where one has an even number of individuals.

If one has an odd number:
Individuals are A,B,C,D,E; "intelligences" are A_i,B_j,C_k,D_l,E_m as before.
The average placing then is (A_i+B_j+C_k+D_l+E_m)/5.
C_k, here, we assume is the average placing.
Thus 40% are below the average placing, 40% are above and 20% are equal to the average placing.
(If there somehow exists some epsilon greater than 0 such that C_k +/- epsilon equals the average placing, then the division is into 60% and 40%).

When the size of this population increases to that of the world's population, if there is some single individual in the middle, they are negligibly small.

Epsilon. First year analysis? Continuity of a function?

Ash.J.Williams

dulpit wrote: »

My manager is properly stupid, she doesn't follow the processes she sets out but murders everyone else for not following them (she "forgets"). Oh and she can't spell, but sends out emails to important clients without using a spellchecker.

I have no idea how she got her job, I should probably ask her brother, the managing director, to see if he knows...

Once or twice I've neglected to turn spell checker back on, on other people pc's, after an upgrade or whatever....they were very angry, it seemed they were so dependent on it that they were actually spelling everything arseways assuming they had the comfort of auto-spellchecker. Some clients got some weird emails that day.

Ficheall

Scanlas The 2nd wrote: »

Epsilon. First year analysis? Continuity of a function?

Ha :pac:
Shouldn't really have used epsilon. My bad.
It's still correct as it's used for any arbitrarily small quantity in many areas of maths, but yeah... I'll go change it to an e or something less confusing...

tricky D

Potential-Monke wrote: »

Again, to echo others, how some people get the jobs they are in is beyond me.

It beggars belief sometimes. Had to get a birth cert a while back and the person behind the counter took over 1 minute to key in my name, restarting a few times. It's only 13 characters and common enough with no complicated Polish type spelling. Took a while for me to get my jaw off the ground after that.

mark renton

lazygal wrote: »

Here's a short list:
The retail manager who couldn't use a printer to print off information signs, she left it all up to me 'because you're a whizz on computers'.

To be fair though, nobody likes printers

rainbowdrop

Susie_Q wrote: »

This is the communications system in the office where my friend works:

Emails come in for the director. Each email is printed off by the secretary and left on his desk. Director reads the emails and HAND WRITES a reply to each one. Secretary collects papers back, types emails and sends replies.

This usually takes a full day, if not more, depending on the volume of email.

Where does your friend's boss work? The 1970s?

murraykil

Gee Bag wrote: »

50% of the worlds population are below average intelligence. Try as you might one of them is going to cross your path at some point

50% (of the worlds population) - 1.

mcmoustache

mikemac1 wrote: »

I must be stupid also
What is RSA?

edit, I'll find out, not requesting a technical explanation of RSA here

But I don't think that's so stupid,
If you're not in a technical role then you expect things to work, it's not for you to understand how they work

It doesn't really matter what RSA is. The point of the anecdote was that this person didn't think she needed an internet connection to connect to the internet.

Deus Ex Machina

I am as stupid as fuck and I doubt I'm that much of a chore to work with. As long as a workmate is polite and not egregiously incompetent you should be able to get by working alongside them.

D1stant

Susie_Q wrote: »

This is the communications system in the office where my friend works:

Emails come in for the director. Each email is printed off by the secretary and left on his desk. Director reads the emails and HAND WRITES a reply to each one. Secretary collects papers back, types emails and sends replies.

This usually takes a full day, if not more, depending on the volume of email.

Which Government dept does your friend work for?

murraykil

mcmoustache wrote: »

It doesn't really matter what RSA is. The point of the anecdote was that this person didn't think she needed an internet connection to connect to the internet.

In the world of miniaturisation and wireless communication it's a bit harsh to call this stupid; it's more a lack of understanding or knowledge.

D1stant

murraykil wrote: »

In the world of miniaturisation and wireless communication it's a bit harsh to call this stupid; it's more a lack of understanding or knowledge.

Got to disagree. If you have no signal on your phone, most people understand you cant make calls. This is the same

Kaner2004

I work with several stupid people.
And the hilarious thing is that they spend the whole day going on about how inefficient the public sector are or how useless someone else is.

So in a 7.5 hour day we have.
- 1 hour of actual work.
- 2 hours of lunch and breaks.
- 4 hours bashing others and public sector bashing with no actual work going on.
- 1 hour talking about how hard they work themselves.

Icepick

Gee Bag wrote: »

50% of the worlds population are below average intelligence. Try as you might one of them is going to cross your path at some point

That would be under median.

Ouchette

Icepick wrote: »

That would be under median.

Which is a type of average.

(But yeah, 50% or 50%-1 will always be below the median, but the % below the mean would depend on the distribution.)

Pottler

Anyone see that episode of the simpsons where Homer gets a really hardworking, intelligent assistant who has a crap apartment, a crap car and gets crap pay and can't figure out how Homer has a house, car etc being that he is an incompetent slacker?
I think the world of work is a lot like that - I see an awful lot of very bright people working their nuts off, long hours, complicated, skilled jobs, crap pay and masses of pressure.
On the flip side, I see an awful lot of window lickers who have an inflated ego and self worth who get paid a fortune seemingly despite their total incompetence and sheer laziness. It beats me as to why things are like this, but it's almost as if the arrogant, lazy thickies get a kind of "pass" for life. Pay and what's asked off you in return seems to bear more to do with how up your own hole you are and how full of your own unquestionable self worth - wtf is with that?

Its a fact that people are promoted to a level of incompetence and then remain there. that's not just the public sector either.

Cantona's Collars

Worked with one guy who didn't know how to use a shovel,he was given a yard brush to sweep up along the side of the trench we were filling-he couldn't use that either.To keep him out of harms way we gave him a stop/go sign,cue scores of irate motorists who narrowly avoided head-on collisions.

Another guy parked up his JCB on Friday and couldn't find it on Monday morning,I lost the plot with him one day and threatened to bury him in a field.

IrishEyes19

you sound so helpful OP, Id love to be the new kid in your office asking for advice :rolleyes:

Teyla Emmagan

zerks wrote: »

Worked with one guy who didn't know how to use a shovel,he was given a yard brush to sweep up along the side of the trench we were filling-he couldn't use that either.To keep him out of harms way we gave him a stop/go sign,cue scores of irate motorists who narrowly avoided head-on collisions.

Another guy parked up his JCB on Friday and couldn't find it on Monday morning,I lost the plot with him one day and threatened to bury him in a field.

Not a work story, but I remember some builders furnishing an apartment and my brother and cousin were sent along to carry mattresses upstairs. Anyway, after about five minutes the cousin was sent out to 'watch for guards' because he was getting in the way he was so useless. Not being smart enough to carry a mattress through a door has to be up there with not being able to use a shovel...

flanders1979

Deleted User wrote: »

Its a fact that people are promoted to a level of incompetence and then remain there. that's not just the public sector either.

Its not what you know, its who you know. A well connected Daddy is better than any qualification in this crooked country.

ResearchWill

Teyla Emmagan wrote: »

Not a work story, but I remember some builders furnishing an apartment and my brother and cousin were sent along to carry mattresses upstairs. Anyway, after about five minutes the cousin was sent out to 'watch for guards' because he was getting in the way he was so useless. Not being smart enough to carry a mattress through a door has to be up there with not being able to use a shovel...

So more than likely he was outside smoking, and still got paid, even though ye did all the work. I know lots of people like that they are not stupid just lazy, and because most people don't like an argument they get away with it.

Knasher

Never experienced it myself, but my coworkers complain about it all the time.

:P

murraykil

D1stant wrote: »

Got to disagree. If you have no signal on your phone, most people understand you cant make calls. This is the same

You disagree but you essentially repeat what I said! Most people will understand and some won't; that does not equate to them being stupid. I would think stupid would be if she expected it to give her the lotto numbers! :pac:

Much less people will understand how an RSA secureID works or what it does. I think it's a bit harsh to call someone with little technical knowledge stupid for expecting the authenticator to give them internet access! The poor woman was probably told that she needs this to connect to the office network from home so I can see how she misunderstood.

lazygal

Pottler wrote: »

Anyone see that episode of the simpsons where Homer gets a really hardworking, intelligent assistant who has a crap apartment, a crap car and gets crap pay and can't figure out how Homer has a house, car etc being that he is an incompetent slacker?
I think the world of work is a lot like that - I see an awful lot of very bright people working their nuts off, long hours, complicated, skilled jobs, crap pay and masses of pressure.
On the flip side, I see an awful lot of window lickers who have an inflated ego and self worth who get paid a fortune seemingly despite their total incompetence and sheer laziness. It beats me as to why things are like this, but it's almost as if the arrogant, lazy thickies get a kind of "pass" for life. Pay and what's asked off you in return seems to bear more to do with how up your own hole you are and how full of your own unquestionable self worth - wtf is with that?

I believe that was one Frank Grimes. RIP.

kieranfitz

I work for stupid people.

weemcd

Stupidity is one of the few things that never ceases to amaze me, every time I think I've heard enough something will come along and blow this notion out of the water completley.

I work with (in a roundabout way) the general public, jesus wept, I hear things almost daily that actually hurt my head and leave me with a furrowed brow. The problem is that while stupidity on its own is a bad enough trait, stupid people tend to have traits of stingyness, ignorance and down right bad manners to go with it. Plebs, bottom feeders, chavs, scum, I don't know what to call them.

wonton

I remember one of my not so smart co workers before said

"i'm gonna pack out the stock for the back wall, because it's the most hereditary thing to do"

me and an other person that was there just looked at each other with the same "did he just fcuking say that ****?" face.

marty1985

Deleted User wrote: »

Its a fact that people are promoted to a level of incompetence and then remain there. that's not just the public sector either.

There's a wiki page for everything!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

The Peter Principle states that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence", meaning that employees tend to be promoted until they reach a position in which they cannot work competently. It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous [1] treatise, which also introduced the "salutary science of hierarchiology."
The principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Eventually they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions.

marty1985

lazygal wrote: »

I believe that was one Frank Grimes. RIP.

Or Grimey, as he liked to be known. RIP.

lazygal

weemcd wrote: »

Stupidity is one of the few things that never ceases to amaze me, every time I think I've heard enough something will come along and blow this notion out of the water completley.

I work with (in a roundabout way) the general public, jesus wept, I hear things almost daily that actually hurt my head and leave me with a furrowed brow. The problem is that while stupidity on its own is a bad enough trait, stupid people tend to have traits of stingyness, ignorance and down right bad manners to go with it. Plebs, bottom feeders, chavs, scum, I don't know what to call them.

I enjoy the Cries of Retail thread on Ranting and Raving. I was that soldier. The number one thing I learned is that middle aged women who've never had a job always 'know their rights' which never coincide with the actual consumer law pertaining to them. There are some very, very stupid people who torment retail workers with their idiocy on a regular basis.

Skerries

marty1985 wrote: »

There's a wiki page for everything!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

I much prefer the Dilbert Principle

marty1985

Skerries wrote: »

I much prefer the Dilbert Principle

Ah, but I much prefer Putt's Law

gigawatt

btw OP potatos is spelled 'potatos' not 'potatoes'. so your classroom assistant was actually in the right. I think George Bush also made that fatal error while visiting a classroom once and it ended up all over the news.

weemcd

lazygal wrote: »

I enjoy the Cries of Retail thread on Ranting and Raving. I was that soldier. The number one thing I learned is that middle aged women who've never had a job always 'know their rights' which never coincide with the actual consumer law pertaining to them. There are some very, very stupid people who torment retail workers with their idiocy on a regular basis.

scenario:

wee: do you have an order number?
pleb: no
wee: do you have an account with *insert name of faceless company*?
pleb: no
wee: ok, ill take a few details and get you setup for an account
* 5 minutes wasted. I try to register the account, of course they are set up with us already and shop twice a week.

/wee slams his head off table giving himself slight brain damage, and another small slice of the soul he is not sure he has anymore fades away...

Gee Bag

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

0-49 below average.
50 average.
51-100 above average.

Also, what I love is the Dunning Kruger effect.
.

The actual figure would be 50% minus 1. I took the liberty of rounding it off.

You really must love the Dunning Kruger effect, is it a code you live by?

Duggys Housemate

Ficheall wrote: »

Aye, that was the 'weighting' I was referring to when I said in my initial post that I wouldn't argue that point. Trying to assign a "number" to the intelligence of an individual is certainly beyond me - even saying one person is "more intelligent" than another is daunting. Theoretically possible though.
I don't think that's where any of the 49%ers were coming from, though. I could be wrong. Perhaps one of them will enlighten us.

Icepick wrote: »

That would be under median.

Intelligence cant really be measured directly, so it assumed to be a normal, or Guassian, distribution. Someone on 140 may be twice as smart as someone on 100, not just 40 % smarter.

But IQ is merely is a mapping of your position in the distribution on the IQ test to a number representing that position, 100 being average, 15 being the standard deviation. They could have picked 500 as average, and 75 as the deviation. Or whatever.

Median and average ( mean) are the same, here.

The 49%ers seem to think that we only every measure 100 people.

gigawatt

gigawatt wrote: »

btw OP potatos is spelled 'potatos' not 'potatoes'. so your classroom assistant was actually in the right. I think George Bush also made that fatal error while visiting a classroom once and it ended up all over the news.

It has an "e". Quayle's error was "correcting" potato to potatoe.
And it wasn't fatal

marty1985

bluewolf wrote: »

It has an "e". Quayle's error was "correcting" potato to potatoe.
And it wasn't fatal

The children died.

gigawatt

all through school we were taught that it was 'potatos' so it would seem that every teacher that ever taught me was wrong. I went and looked it up and potatos is the possessive form as in 'this potatos skin looks a bit green' whereas potatoes is the plural. I mixed up George Bush because Dan Quayle was his vice president, it was fatal because it was so absolutely cringeworthy! he'll never live it down!

The King of Moo

gigawatt wrote: »

all through school we were taught that it was 'potatos' so it would seem that every teacher that ever taught me was wrong. I went and looked it up and potatos is the possessive form as in 'this potatos skin looks a bit green' whereas potatoes is the plural. I mixed up George Bush because Dan Quayle was his vice president, it was fatal because it was so absolutely cringeworthy! he'll never live it down!

Final word on the matter, not being a Grammar Nazi, just clearing things up:

The possessive is actually "potato's" with an apostrophe.

Also short for "potato is" of course.

nicechick!

lazygal wrote: »

Have you ever worked with someone who is just stupid? And wondered how they got the job at all? I've had a few different jobs in my time, in the public and private sector, and each time I've come across a colleague who is so blatantly stupid I wonder how they even managed applying for jobs in the first place.

Here's a short list:
The retail manager who couldn't use a printer to print off information signs, she left it all up to me 'because you're a whizz on computers'.
A classroom assistant who misspelled potatoes. Spelled it potatos.
A current colleague who can't (or won't) work with an IT upgrade, so her work has to be edited every time its submitted as its not compatible with everyone else's.
A colleague I have some interaction with (thank goodness not on a daily basis) who works on a switch board and can't transfer people's calls, instead he cuts them off. Every time.

So your manager admits to not knowing how to use the printer doesn't make her stupid but honest maybe you should have suggested helping her by teaching her

So the classroom assistant got it wrong it happens

Your current colleague isn't working with a particular upgrade has he/she been given the relevant training you can't decide she either ''won't or can't'' which is it?

Who's to say your colleague isn't purposefully cutting off those calls

oh Did I mention I think this is a really stupid thread

120_Minutes

I call a guy I work with "50 first dates", you can guess why.

Also when I ask who's doing such and such and im told it's him I reply with "you let dougal do a funeral????"

It's gotten so bad that he can just about handle the most menial of tasks and if he has to handle more responsibility his hands start to shake, because even he knows how crap he is.

Yet he's also studying for a degree. I'm convinced he has undiagnosed asbergers.

BroomBurner

120_Minutes wrote: »

I call a guy I work with "50 first dates", you can guess why.

Also when I ask who's doing such and such and im told it's him I reply with "you let dougal do a funeral????"

It's gotten so bad that he can just about handle the most menial of tasks and if he has to handle more responsibility his hands start to shake, because even he knows how crap he is.

Yet he's also studying for a degree. I'm convinced he has undiagnosed asbergers.

That's actually quite sad. Maybe he has an issue with his nerves.

There are some posts here that aren't actually about stupid colleagues, just some genuine mistakes or misunderstandings.

I'm feeling very old now.

Duggys Housemate

120_Minutes wrote: »

I call a guy I work with "50 first dates", you can guess why.

Also when I ask who's doing such and such and im told it's him I reply with "you let dougal do a funeral????"

It's gotten so bad that he can just about handle the most menial of tasks and if he has to handle more responsibility his hands start to shake, because even he knows how crap he is.

Yet he's also studying for a degree. I'm convinced he has undiagnosed asbergers.

He may have asbergers but that wouldn't make him stupid, far from it.

kincsem

I was interested in Dilbert's and Putt's law. My experience was the top man surrounded himself with the least able who also happened to be brown nosers (or "mentored" if you prefer). This removed the able to a few levels below the glorious leader and made him appear head and shoulders above others.

mikemac1

No you don't have swine flu though you are a swine
You don't have bird flu
SARS? GTFO
I think you read the paper and choose the fashionable sickness of the month.

You have more drugs in your desk then a dealer in Ballymun

And now you want HR to organize flu shots for us staff?
No way, management have no business telling me what to do here. I'll refuse on principle. I don't care if it's free, that's not an employers job to organize and overstepping into my life


Learning some info on medical issues is good but only idiots try to diagnose themselves by reading internet articles.
It's guaranteed you'll fear the worst

Why is there one of you in every office, how do you get hired. Why are you always middle aged bitter women who actually scare me a bit.
You're causing me to get depressed with the constant moaning

Positive things happen to positive people

LilyCricket

I knew one lad, who was going for an interview, and stood at the door of the company, no one there at the door to let him in (in spite of a door buzzer) who could not contain himself, so he broke the emergency door release (setting off the alarm) to let himself in.

Needless to say, he did not get the job.

Grayson

I knew a girl so bad that her supervisor went to HR to see if she might have some educational difficulty.She was a nice person but honestly she had to have an incredibly low IQ. She had huge difficulty mastering the simplest of tasks and it was cringe worthy listening to her. One of the slowest people I've ever met. But she was a genuinely nice person. Eventually she left and got a job working in a newsagents. Apparently she's so happy there and the stress is gone.

Grayson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:
tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

It won an ignobel prize