Nepotism
The year was 2001 and I had just graduated with a nice 1st in Computing. Sadly, there were no jobs as the computing industry was still recovering from the dot.com crash. So I decided to broaden my horizons and apply to join the graduate scheme of a well known railway company that hadn't yet gone in government forced administration.

One of the people I started with, I'll call him Mr T, was a complete and utter twunt. What he lacked in skill, he more than made up for with a unshakable belief that he was an expert at anything and has an ego bigger than Everest.

Despite the fact that he had a geography degree, he was of the opinion (he actually said this) that he knew more about programming than I did, he even kept this up when I pointed out that I had worked for Fujitsu as a developer for 5 years before going to Uni.

He had a tendency to copy other peoples work or to take sole credit for group projects. Yet, he never made any effort to learn about railway practices. When he was (frequently) presented with proof that he had ballsed up on something, he dealt with it by ignoring the criticism and acting like it never happened. At a push he might have laughed off the criticism accusing you of just being jealous.

He also like to get people in to trouble, such as shouting out across offices "did you drink much last night?", knowing fine well that having alcohol in your system in any railway job could get you sacked or even prosecuted. However, he took a part time job in a pub, which is a super big railway no-no.

Imagine my relief when I discovered that everyone else hated him as much as I did. However, the biggest surprise was yet to come, one day he casually admitted that his dad helped him get the job - his dad was on the board of directors. Such was his dad's power, he got a high-lever management job without an interview which kind of pissed off all the others who had applied for that job. I really hate nepotism!
(Grundie, Fri 25 Jan 2008, 11:37, Reply)