If there is a career that is NOT infested with incompetent jackasses, please send me that pamphlet.

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worse is everyone knowing that they are not imcompetent jackasses, because they know everything.

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Other people in I.T. can be just as bad (if not worse) than the users.

Its not always the users fault they are incompetent... but the I.T. guys tend to be willfully incompetent much more often.

Of course, it could just be that I'm noticing that type of thing more since my job has shifted from supporting the users directly to supporting the I.T. guys. When a user is willfully incompetent they don't do anything more than destroy a single computer/printer, or force me to restore some data from a backup. When an I.T. guy is willfully incompetent there is potential to ruin my entire week/weekend.

When I work with incompetent jackasses I can either turn them into competent jackasses or just make them politely incompetent. I'd have to not be a jackass myself to do any better.

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(note: Managers do not always fall under the list as 'users'. They fall under a completely different category that I would have ended up typing three pages about.)

"Yeah I cant fix this myself but I think I can and I think it should take less than three minutes. Also, I'm going to stand over your shoulder and lord my knowledge over you and try to impress you with techie jokes I read on slashdot or User Friendly. This broke by itself so don't you dare charge the time back to my department"

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There are many days I wish I didn't have to work with incompetent people, but as time goes by it seems that I just need to learn to live with it. No matter what I do, they will be there.

Granted, I know I feel like I am incompetent myself at times, but I also know, given the resources some of these people have I would learn. Learn quickly.

I agree with the other comment that said sometimes the I.T. personnel are the worst. I have moved from supporting users to supporting I.T. staff and sometimes it is great. They know what they are doing and they handle tasks that I know would take me longer to accomplish and I don't need to worry, then there are others I honestly wonder how they have managed to hold onto their job.

Sometimes it reminds me of the whole,

Tech: "Click Ok"
User: "Ok."
Tech: "Now look for the box that says--"
User: "There isn't a box. I only see "
Tech: "You clicked Cancel."
User: "That is right."

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I want to be a fly on the wall during a discussion where quantum physicists are having a conversation about a fellow colleague that they consider a "dumbass".

Also, I have weird aspirations.

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I dunno, the idea of a "dumbass" quantum physicist doesn't seem at all far-fetched to me. I've known plenty of people that had a serious aptitude for higher math that I wouldn't trust to feed a cat.

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Exactly my point. I posit that there are people in every field that are considered dumbasses by their peers. This falls outside the whole "book smart but street dumb" thing and more or less pertains to someone who is a genius but still considered dumb. Mainly, it's a desire to see what the smarter consider "dumb" when it comes to the person's area of expertise.

Ironically, I've known people that I considered "dumb" label people that I consider "smart" as dumb for one reason or another. This falls back to what you just said; Dude could have invented anti-grav but be unable to negotiate the process of checking out at a grocery store. This, however, is much more common-place than a quantum physicist thinking a peer is retarded for his rendition of an unprovable theory.

...yeah, I'm having a meta-thought moment.

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