64 Stories Of Weaponized Incompetence That Might Make You Want To Do Everything Yourself
One of the guys who trained me when I started my job told me “If you do things wrong enough, they stop asking you to do them.”
He retires next month, and even as the senior member of our department, he has the LEAST amount of responsibility. He went an entire 20 year career on this ethos, and it worked beautifully for him.
I work with a lot of lawyers. I had a legal assistant once who’d been at the same firm for 14 years. She knew exactly how to file and organize and sort things, she knew exactly where every piece of paper was, and she knew exactly where every email was… For the law firm’s owner. When it came time to help other people, she suddenly had no idea. Couldn’t file a document. “Can you show me how to submit it to the court?” but every single time. Lawyers would train her on stuff over and over and over (by doing it themselves while she watched). One time she had to do it independently and she messed it up and got the attorney yelled at by a judge–forgot to serve the opposing side, whoops. Won’t say it was on purpose but it sure didn’t seem to happen when the owner would ask her to file things. But the firm’s founder saw her as a godsend because she suddenly knew how to do things the second he asked her.
My stepdad. He’s never done a darn thing around the house his entire life. My mom always did it for him. She passed suddenly and he didn’t know where anything was, how to pay a bill or take care of himself. We were trying to sort through paperwork and he just sat there.
He and my brother told me, that I ( the only woman) needed to step up and take care of him. Mind you this is a perfectly normal 62yr old man that still works a full time job. I said no so I was immediately iced out and my stepdad married a lady from his church asap.
My exs chore was unloading the dishwasher. He made it a point to drop and break dishes that were sentimental to me and said he was just too clumsy and maybe I should do it if I didn’t want my things to get broken.
My dad is your standard technologically-inept boomer, but flat out refuses to be taught how to do things. Will walk away, cut you off, or plug his ears if you try to explain something to him.
“I don’t need to learn how to log in to Netflix. That’s what you’re for!”… bruh.
I was helping some friends, a couple, move. He grabbed an armful of clothes and just dropped them into an open suitcase on the floor. Obviously it made a mess, and obviously he’d be able to fit more if he folded the clothes neatly. When his girlfriend called him out he told her she should pack his clothes because she’s better at it.
Worked in a team environment with a lady that seemed to have the IQ of a daffodil.
We would take all of the work from her so our team could finish projects on-time.
One day in the elevator she says “can I ask you a question? People think I’m dumb don’t they?”
Of course I replied “well not exactly”, she cut me off and said, “I’m not dumb, I just act like that so yall do all of my work”.
My coworker insisted he couldn’t format Word documents because he’s a ‘visual person.’ He was a graphic designer.
If I was gone for the day doing something fun without my ex husband, he wouldnt eat all day and then flip out when I got home that he was starving. Yes, a grown man would refuse to feed himself, make it my fault and ruin my day.
my old coworker would mess up even the simplest tasks whenever asked to help. eventually, everyone just stopped asking him. he basically trained everyone to leave him alone.
My friend’s husband. They have three boys between 3-12, oldest is on the spectrum. Whenever he (the husband) has to watch the kids, he’ll purposefully start arguments/fights with them so he can get away with sending them to their rooms and not parenting.
My friend doesn’t get out much. Last time I convinced her to do a thrifting and lunch outing, he called seven times in two hours.
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.
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 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.
My ex-husband.
Our son was a year old. I did the bedtime routine; he was supposed to pick up the living room and tidy up. Somehow, in his head, this meant only picking up the toys on the floor.
One night, after I had gotten our son to sleep, I told my ex husband that picking up means clearing the tables and loading the dishwasher as well, and that when I ask him to clean up, I need everything cleaned up.
His answer was, “But I need you to tell me what to do”. I told him, you own eyes, use them to see what needs to be cleaned up.
He repeated “but I need you to tell me what to do” every time I mentioned that he can see that the tables were cluttered, theres dishes in the sink, etc
We divorced a year later, initated by me.
I had an amazing boss. Then one day, he announced his retirement.
The jerk who replaced him was on another level of jerkness entirely.
He wanted to get rid of all of us, and replace us with people he hand picked. In my case he had me train my replacement before dropping the hammer, and pretended it was just a “backup”.
Not being stupid, I knew exactly what was going on.
So, I trained my replacement alright. I made sure I trained him so well that after I eventually quit they asked me to come back. Which I didn’t.
I’m gonna pick on my partner with love.
I asked him to please clean the bathroom, and we go back and forth because I wouldn’t feel like its clean cause there would still be lots of hair and water stains on the counter, the toilet would have spots on it, etc. and I’d point these out, he’d listen, try again and same thing.
He said one time “I clean the bathroom the way I’m used to, if you need me to do it to your standards you gotta tell me”
“I get where you’re coming from, but I’m bringing my standards down to what I think is a reasonable level, not asking you to meet them. Why do i need to ask you to do it to a standard level?”
“Well you don’t, I just…”
And then he took a minute before admitting he may have been putting bare minimum effort in without even realizing it.
I had a colleague, probably in his 50s, acting like he’d never used a computer mouse before. He was so insistent that he’d never used one, didn’t know how to hold it, couldn’t link his movement to the movement of the cursor, that I passed him off on the manager.
Told the boss, I wasn’t able to get through to him and he needed to see for himself.
My brother in law for just about everything that isn’t his day job. When it comes to anything he likes or wants to do he’s somehow an expert at it who gives it his all, but when it’s a household chore or just basic life skill it’s “oh well you’re so much better at it than I am so I figured I’d ask you.” You try and tell him that you’d like to teach him for next time and he throws a fit, a 25 year old grown man. It’s ridiculous.
My grandparents had a very “traditional” relationship, which meant my grandpa worked, joined clubs, ran for and served in many offices, etc. anything to keep him from house/family work.
In their 70’s, My grandma takes a week long vacation with some friends. Grandpa is home alone for the first time, ever.
My mom drops me off to help him replace the tiles in his drop ceiling, grandpa walks out in shorts(it was cold out) and says we’re heading to the store. I jump in his van and he lets me know he sharted earlier and he’s out of clean pants since he has no idea how to run a washing machine. So we but some pants and ceiling tiles, get back and i start the washing machine and he looked at me like he was disappointed i knew how to run it.
Tl:dr old man buys new pants after sharting.
A coworker hated the company, so he pored over the safety manual. The day OSHA showed up, the company was written up because of his behavior. When the company confronted him, he claimed he was following the safety handbook to the letter. It said to wear hardhats at all times. It didn’t say on which body part hardhats should be worn. Therefore he was completely compliant in strapping his hardhat to his knee.
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).
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 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 Mum just never learned to clean fish, just too silly. Dad always cleaned everything he caught, so…
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.
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 don’t know where all the tupperware goes so I leave it for my wife to put away.
A guy in our antenatal class proudly told us guys over beers that when he was asked to help change his child’s diapers he had accidentally on purpose dropped it with the dirty side down on the carpet. He felt that he would never be asked to do it again.
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.
Worked on a movie, producer mentioned having to make coffee early on in his career and made engine oil type coffee. Was never asked to make coffee again.
The classic move of shrinking two nice sweaters on purpose, giving an overly dramatic apology, and saying “I guess I’m just banned from laundry forever.” Dude lived like a king for three years off that one move.
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.
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.
Oh you mean after my groom’s father’s friend whispered in his ear at our wedding “let me tell you a little secret, just do every badly and act like you can’t do it right and she will do it”- that pretty much summed up everything that happened after that.
My boss will decide he needs to mail things. He will ask me to do it because he is “incapable” of folding paper into a trifold.
Honestly, a lot of what’s called weaponized incompetence is just bad training or unclear expectations. If nobody actually shows someone how to do it right, calling it a strategy feels like a stretch.
My ex used to claim they couldn’t figure out how to load the dishwasher properly every single time, even after I showed them twice. It always ended with me doing it instead, which somehow became the routine without any real discussion about it.
Students saying they can’t even attempt to do their work in class because they don’t have a pencil when there are free pencils right there.
My ex let their car sit broken in our driveway for 4.5 years. They always said it was on me to fix it- but I had metastic cancer and worked full time. Suddenly, when I left them they were able to fix their car: for just 750$.
People being audited that repeatedly say “I don’t recall” or “I don’t know”.
If their job is to know and to recall, then they should get into legal trouble.
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.
One of our maids pretends she doesn’t understand English, to make sure she’s never asked for anything.
My boss. He is lazy, checked out, burnt out, old, and has no professionalism left. The young guys do everything, including the most difficult jobs. Yet the guy still gets paid more than everyone while watching YouTube videos all day. He will retire at the end of this year, so I guess everyone is just letting him be for the remainder of the year.
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.
coworker “couldn’t figure out” the dishwasher for three years and somehow always gets out of loading it.
I teach so I see this just about every single day, but the most common one and egregious in my opinion is the inability to keep track a sheet of paper for even a class period, Much less a day. Students shove it in their backpacks or leave it on the floor, and then act like it’s not their fault they don’t have their assignment to turn in.
Yes my time to share, I was cleaning up a spill and I asked my then bf to please get me the mop pad that attaches to the head of the mop, he tried to bring me a sanitary pad.
A few old people who simply don’t want to learn how a smartphone works or a computer etc.
I have an 8 and 10 year old… I witness it every day.
But if you’re talking real world, my boss is currently someone who was my boss elsewhere, I love her, she is awesome, but she plays dumb all the time and refuses to tasks that will take 5 minutes because “she doesn’t know how” when it’s a core part of our job.
I have a coworker and the busy work we gave new hires he was spectacularly bad at. Like he cause 20 different issues across the 4 months I worked with him. In my entire time working I had one issue that I fixed. Just one in two years.
We ended up not giving him any more of that.
I personally would have fired him but the manager was friends with him and refused to do so.
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.
We had a contractor data analyst that distorted so much data that got me in trouble. I finally just learned computer programming and data science on my own from textbooks because this analyst’s response to every error was: “I did what I was told.”
There were many instances when our boss would yell at me but would shower this contractor data analyst with glowing praise.
Lo and behold upper management comes around and wants to know what we are doing because there is going to be some organizational changes. A project manager mapped out what I had to do on a daily basis and quickly realized I was doing two jobs. Contractor data analyst had to go. Didn’t impact me at all as I was already doing their job.
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.
My social worker ex-girlfriend, with a whole master’s degree under her belt that includes loads of psychology education, telling me communication and consistency were “too hard” and that she was “sick of trying to heal and grow.”
In reality, she was a counter-transference nightmare that was emotionally, potentially physically, cheating on me with no less than two of her clients.
One of my coworkers when I worked at the library botched a children’s reading so so bad that parents complained. He smiled and told another co-worker that they won’t ask him to do it again.
My ex wife doesn’t know how to do anything besides study because “nobody ever taught her and she didn’t think she would live this long”. So she continues to do nothing.
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).
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