The pitfalls of retaining idiots

Some years ago, I worked for a good boss with a good team of people - except for one barking fuckwit. I liked my boss, but he had a massive blind spot when it came to the turd in the office down the hallway that reported to him. He simply failed to acknowledge that they guy was useless and a hindrance and was dragging us all down. He was also the greatest source of stress in our office, bar none. If he buggered something up (which he did regularly), we all wore it.

If our workplace was Vietnam and we were yanks, he would have been fragged a long time ago.

After a few particular egregious fuckwit-caused disasters, our boss could be persuaded to realise that the guy was a complete write-off, but then his heart would soften and he would let him off the hook for the 92nd time. He could not bring himself to discipline him, let alone sack him.

Fuckwit was particularly annoying because he knew that the rest of us would carry the can for him. Let's say he was on call over the weekend, and a problem cropped up. The normal after hours procedures would kick in and whoever was on duty would phone fuckwit.

Fuckwit would not answer.

So he'd be called again and again and again and again, on both his mobile number and home number and home-office number, and he just wouldn't pick up. He'd be sent emails and text messages (we all had blackberries) and he just wouldn't answer. He'd be goofing around with a pet project, and simply couldn't be shagged to do his duty - which he was being paid for.

Eventually, the person on duty would ring either me or one of the other blokes, and one or both of us would stop what we were doing and troop into town to fix it. I didn't mind doing that once - everyone forgets where they left their mobile phone every once in a while - but this guy pulled this trick all the time. And we wouldn't get paid, because he was on call and we weren't.

The most annoying part was that come Monday, after we had wasted half our weekend solving a problem that fuckwit had created and then run out on, fuckwit would be storming around the office complaining about us "tampering" with his stuff.

Yes, we had tampered with it - it was the only way to fix the problem, and he wouldn't admit that what we had done was actually something that he should have done months ago - in many cases, he would tell us in a management meeting that he had completed a certain task. A month later, something would fail on a weekend and we would discover that he had not completed that task - in fact, he hadn't even started on it. He'd simply lied about it, and moved on. So the only reason I had to work on a weekend was because he had not done his work, and had lied to all concerned about it.

Then we were all given an opportunity to stick with what we were doing, or move on to something else.

The only two people left in our department were our boss and fuckwit. Everyone else opted to split. None of us could bear the thought of working with fuckwit for one minute longer.

Crap eventually catches up with everyone.