Coworker WTF



  • Do you guys ever run across coworkers who seem so unprepared for the job that you wonder how in the world they stay employed?  I was called a few times today to help such a coworker troubleshoot a few problems.  She was at a customer's site, and she's been a software developer with this company longer than I have.  I don't know her background otherwise, but so far I'm more than underwhelmed.

    Me:  (after telling her to fix a text config file) "You'll have to relaunch the program".
    Her:  What?  Relaunch?
    Me:  Close it and launch it again.
    Her:  ?? 
    Me:  Start the program again.
    Her:  ??  (this goes on for a few minutes)
    Me:  Don't you have an icon on the desktop?
    Her:  Oh, the icon...  (hunts around for it, finally finds it.  After that she understands what "relaunch" means)

    ... later in the conversation...

    Me:  Do they have a firewall?
    Her:  Fire whu...?

    At some point in the conversation, I'd asked her something that I now forget, but I remember her response was "Whut?"




  • Wow.  Makes one wonder exactly what kind of "software" she
    "develops".  (And -- because if I don't mention it first, someone
    else will -- whether her name is Paula.)






  • @jetcitywoman said:

    ...
    Her:  Oh, the icon...  (hunts around for it, finally finds it.  After that she understands what "relaunch" means)

    ... later in the conversation...

    Me:  Do they have a firewall?
    Her:  Fire whu...?

    At some point in the conversation, I'd asked her something that I now forget, but I remember her response was "Whut?"

    <font size="5">I</font>t sounds like she needs more technical training--on a course in Hawaii.



  • I once had to make an (obviously) idiotic 'guru' a local admin on one of my servers against my will.  Two days later I got the call....

     

    Guru:  I need the o/s cd for server X.

    Me:  Why?

    Guru:  I uninstalled IIS.

    Me:  <sigh>...why?

    Guru:  I was on the phone with Product-Z support and they suggested that I uninstall & reinstall IIS to see if fixed the problem.  I didn't know I could uninstall IIS. 

    Me:  You said (demanded) you had to be a local Admin on the server!

     

    After all the time I spent working on it, this 'mo comes along and blows it all to heck in 30 seconds because he "didn't know that as an Administrator he could uninstall IIS".  Management finally saw the light after I spent another day reconfiguring all of Product-Z again.  And two months later they escorted him out of the building.

    Sometimes these fools get found out in short order.  Other times they get promoted...

     

    Edit: 

       [Shameless BOFH plug]

          They're called cow-orkers mostly these days.



  • I had a boss like that once - absolutely technically clueless. We had ClearCase, and she wanted us to put the C++/Motif compiled and statically linked BINARY (about 45MB) into the repository so that she could just bring up the ClearCase shell, get the icon for the latest executable file, and launch it.

    It took 20 minutes to extract, decompress and finally load the thing before it would run.

    She would do this for demos, and of course the customers would complain that it took too long to load. We would then show them the program being launched from a normal file system (under 5 second launch time), and then have to explain that the program didn't need to be fixed; that only our boss needed to be fixed.



  • Cow-orker WTF

    Reminds me of the guy onsite that took 45 minutes to change two rows in a database via a script(1) and then to patch a win32 app(2)

    1:  The web app was broken in-house before it was shipped because it was such an old version (thanks to others not keeping the codebases between versions separate), so I had him run a script.  This wasn't too bad, 10 minutes because of client interruptions.

    2:  Master copy on the server needed patched: workstation makes a local copy and runs it from there.  Simply copy my patch from the FTP site, download it, and put it on the server.

    No. Don't download it on the server and take it to a workstation (10 minutes wasted)

    Okay, now extract the file...except this time REMEMBER where you extracted it (5 minutes wasted)

    Okay, now drag and drop the new files over top of the old ones.

    It took him 15 minutes...and he couldn't figure out how to drag and drop a file.  I gave up and decided that having him move one file at a time would work...except that it took him 5 minutes to do that!

    Thankfully I could get away with only the 1 file moved (it was all we needed; the rest is a safety catch I figured I could live without.)

    Oh, and 5 minutes wasted trying to tell him how to get the server to call home over the VPN.

    Cow-orker all the way.



  • I call people like this "One Trick Ponies". Your coworker can probably do one thing and that's about it.

    I once worked with a PeopleSoft specialist. She could write Peoplecode well enough but was 100% clueless when it came to anything else in computers. She had to ask a coworker for help sending email and also asked a coworker if he "had gotten this message from the network, too" while pointing to the BSoD on her XP workstation.



  • @Benanov said:

    Reminds me of the guy onsite that took 45 minutes to change two rows in a database via a script(1) and then to patch a win32 app(2)

    It took him 15 minutes...and he couldn't figure out how to drag and drop a file.  I gave up and decided that having him move one file at a time would work...except that it took him 5 minutes to do that!

    reminds me of a guy I worked with who claimed to be able to set up and configure OS400 systems, but copying files in Windows was too much for him.



  • @ogilmor said:

    @Benanov said:

    Reminds me of the guy onsite that took 45 minutes to change two rows in a database via a script(1) and then to patch a win32 app(2)

    It took him 15 minutes...and he couldn't figure out how to drag and drop a file.  I gave up and decided that having him move one file at a time would work...except that it took him 5 minutes to do that!

    reminds me of a guy I worked with who claimed to be able to set up and configure OS400 systems, but copying files in Windows was too much for him.

    reminds me of a guy I knew who claimed he could swim, but he couldn't ride a jet ski to save himself.



  • @Some Idiot said:

    @ogilmor said:

    @Benanov said:

    Reminds me of the guy onsite that took 45 minutes to change two rows in a database via a script(1) and then to patch a win32 app(2)

    It took him 15 minutes...and he couldn't figure out how to drag and drop a file.  I gave up and decided that having him move one file at a time would work...except that it took him 5 minutes to do that!

    reminds me of a guy I worked with who claimed to be able to set up and configure OS400 systems, but copying files in Windows was too much for him.

    reminds me of a guy I knew who claimed he could swim, but he couldn't ride a jet ski to save himself.



    Copying a file using the Windows GUI is, shall we say, a slighly more trivial event than installing a whole system. Your nifty counter-metaphor doesn't hold up.

    NONETHELESS,
    It's still possible that someone has 99% knowledge of something, but somewhere inside the remaining 1% is a tiny, simple activity. That personis then forgiven for his lack of knowledge. I myself only recently found out that you can, er, drag and drop files into Winamp's playlist. But you'll forgive me!


  • @dhromed said:

    Copying a file using the Windows GUI is, shall we
    say, a slighly more trivial event than installing a whole system. Your
    nifty counter-metaphor doesn't hold up.

    NONETHELESS,
    It's
    still possible that someone has 99% knowledge of something, but
    somewhere inside the remaining 1% is a tiny, simple activity. That
    personis then forgiven for his lack of knowledge. I myself only
    recently found out that you can, er, drag and drop files into Winamp's
    playlist. But you'll forgive me!
    Not for that, I won't, you Winamp n00b!



    Still, it is amazing how many people miss many of the absolute basics
    in their (real or supposed) areas of expertise. Sometimes they even do
    really well despite it, kind of like a blind/deaf person, with their
    other senses compensating for the missing part.



    I once stopped an otherwise top quality networks guy from ordering an
    upgraded Win2K box with 5 PCI slots, just because there weren't enough
    slots in the old one to install NICs to give the old one 6 IP
    addresses...


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