Nice, but dim

I once moved to another team in the same company. My old colleagues would tell me horror stories about the new bloke, who didn't have two brain cells to rub together. For example: he argued that if there were two cars doing 100mph on parallel roads, a motorway (freeway, autobahn) and a regular road, the one on the motorway would get to the end first. Hmm...

Even though he clearly wasn't up to the job, the HR people were tentative about getting rid of him. He was one if the few black employees, and they were worried about appearing discriminatory. IT work is a bit of a white boy's club, which is a bad thing, but this guy wasn't the person to fix that.

They tried giving him "busy work" that he could fail at so they'd have enough evidence for letting him go. One of these tasks was documenting a database, with a page for each table, listing the fields and data types. After a while, the team lead asked to see what he'd done, and was shown some printed pages. It was OK but poorly laid out. Could there be some improvements to that? His reply was "Oh" and a long pause. It turned out that instead of putting all the info in a word processor document, he'd made a page for one table, printed that, replaced it with the next table, printed, and so on. To change the layout, he'd have to start again.

One of the devs on the team wrote a fake chat program and told him he could use it to talk to the helpdesk. All it did was dump anything he wrote to a file on a network share. When anyone else edited the file, he got a reply. This worked well for a while. He was comfortable asking the anonymous helpdesk person how to do all the simple things he didn't understand, and the rest of the team could help him out discreetly.

Things took a different turn when he started to make small talk on the fake chat. Someone decided to have some fun with him. The anonymous helpdesk person turned out to be female and willing to chat. A small relationship was brewing. But although this seemed like harmless fun, he was soon suggesting that they should meet. It was a no smoking office. Smokers had to use a gazebo outside. Could he meet her there? The problem is, she isn't real. But no one wants to tell him they've been deceiving him, so off he goes to the gazebo. The poor guy was gone for ages, being stood up by someone who doesn't exist.

I don't think he every found out, but HR had some more bad news for him shortly after.

#dim

#helpdesk

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