1. Durnoid and Swamp Beast
I used to work with someone who couldn't do decimals, and had no idea how to fill in a paying-in slip. It's quite worrying when you have to explain to someone ten years your senior how to add up and that .5 of a pound is 50p, not 5p. She kept insisting that our takings were 45p short, because she punched the 5p into the calculator as .5, and couldn't understand my explanation that 5p is .05 and that .5 and .50 are the same thing. Eventually she just took my word for it.
In the same workplace was a bloke who was quite nice but a real tubbyguts, and often had a wet patch on the front of his trousers. It made sitting opposite him in the back room, making casual conversation, a little awkward. As was the time he didn't have a wet patch but did have a boner.
EDIT: Actually, I feel bad referring to him as Swamp Beast now. He was a nice bloke.

2. Turbomoron
My mum used to work with someone who was (and presumably still is) computer-illiterate. She was taken on when the company still wrote book copy/blurbs (some of the book descriptions on Amazon etc. were written by my own mum). Now it's a a big company that does all sorts of computery stuff, and this woman couldn't adapt. Among her acts of durnoidery were:
-- being told to open a document in Word and asking, "How do I do that?"
-- not understanding that if you open a document in Word and open it in Excel it's still the same document.
-- being unable to grasp the concept of 'double-click'. If you gave her written instructions, you had to write 'clickclick' instead.
-- panicking because there was "a Chinese character" on her screen. It was her cursor on top of a letter.

3. The power-mads
I used to work for that same company as a temp (hoorj for nepotism!) and there's an admin woman there who is a complete control freak. She does things like post laminated signs in the toilets on 'loo etiquette'. You know the sort of thing - instructions that make you want to shit all over the floor in defiance for having the temerity to tell you, a grown adult, to do things that you'd do anyway because you're not a belming gunge.
She was crap at writing the instructions too. She put up a sign explaining how to refill the coffee makers once they were empty, and the steps were in a seemingly random order. Rather than ask someone else for help I actually tried following the instructions as they were given and ended up making a mess. After I'd cleaned it up I found that I had to transpose some of the steps to make it work.

My mum's former manager (and who was my manager when I worked there) is a control freak too. She's normally nice, but if you cross her she devolves into a snarling doombeast. Remember Peter Puppy in Earthworm Jim, who was normally friendly but transformed into a hell-hound if he got upset? She was like that (though I don't think anyone ever thought to try disarming her by tickling her). She told off a guy for using macros instead of doing something by hand and thus saving himself about half an hour of work, in case the computer didn't do it right. And she hated it if anyone talked to someone from another department, as though all our data were strict and confidential international secrets. Obviously it wasn't stuff we could spill to Joe Public, but it was just book publishing details and fine to share internally if it made work easier.

4. The irrational technophobe
My dad has a colleague who is an old Luddite and is still convinced that all this IT stuff is just a passing fad. When the school (my dad's a teacher) brought in these electronic whiteboards (they can output the display of a computer, and you can write on them too, unlike a projector screen) all the teachers were invited to try them out by writing their names on one. You can't use dry-wipe markers; you have to use a special digi-pen. All the staff tried it out and were impressed, apart from this old fart who held the pen ham-fistedly and of course couldn't write properly with it. He proclaimed, "Well, I don't think much of this rubbish," and wouldn't be swayed by his colleagues' protestations that you have to hold the thing like a normal pen. All the staff have computers and he refuses to even try to learn to use his, and he still can't understand the difference between a laptop and a desktop.

By the way, one of my housemates is a bell-ringer, and she's lovely, so it's not that weird.
( Bob Todd whee, Sat 26 Jan 2008, 13:15, 1 reply)

..hated it if anyone talked to someone from another department
I had one of those.


I was asked by a member of her team to help her with a cranky laptop she was attempting to set up for a test. I was in the middle of doing so when I was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and frogmarched back over to my own section. Her 'did something crawl down your throat and die?' noxious breath hissed in my ear "If you *ever* come over on my side of the floor again, you'll be on a written warning!"

Apparently, she was having some spackfest of a schoolyard fight with our manager (a fat tub of useless lard who once, while trying to impress the director, was seen reading an SQL book upside down) over who had the best team him or her. The fact that nobody else gave a shit as we loathed the pair of them was of no importance.
(Fanta Menace Is tall enough to see over the fence, Sat 26 Jan 2008, 14:52, closed)