welcome to your box, bitch

Last Thursday completed my plan to throw my problem child on the project in a box, and keep him there.

He's an obnoxious egyptian, we'll just call him H (he's the guy my customer tried to get fired as depicted in the blog colloquial). Since my project has started he's try to throw one road block after another at me to keep the project from progressing. He's supposed to be in charge of document management. The dude is so disorganized that he can't even find current versions of documents. He's supposed to learn how to use my software to get out of the mode of creating processes in word documents (how stone age) and into modeling them so they can be simulated.

Besides breaking things constantly so I have to fix them for him, he throws me under the bus in front of upper management, saying absurd stuff like "she never helps me" and even when I point out that I spend half my day with him he says "I never see her".

So, I started documenting in a spreadsheet how often we were meeting and what I was teaching him at each meeting, assigning a percentage to each skill (e.g. 75% comfortable drawing a business process diagram without help). I also made the meetings formal invites. In our last steering committee meeting when he started saying he hasn't gotten any training I pulled out the spreadsheet. Then he claimed I made up the percentages and that we had never discussed them, which was a total lie. So I produced all of the emails about the training I had given him. When I called him on his lie, in this sort of subtle but not really way, he changed his argument and said he would have to teach other people what I'm teaching him, and he couldn't do it.

Fine. Last Tuesday through Thursday he was in a formal training class I taught. He spent the first two days sitting there saying nothing was working. Time and again I had to go over and say "H, you can't display your diagram because you haven't opened it". Etc. Then he started carrying on long, loud conversations while I was trying to teach. I would give him a verbal warning and then send a follow up email.

The last day I said "I'm going to do something no person should ever do - I'm going to let an egyptian drive". I made him come up to the front of the room and teach class for two hours. He looked like he was going to cry. The other 15 students in the class liked me and so they harassed him mercilessly. He kept saying "I'm done teaching, you come up here" and I would say "no, keep going, you'll have to do this on your own when I'm gone". After the two hours were up I made the class clap for him.

Which all leads to my grand plan. In the next steering committee meeting, when he tries to report that, after formal training, he still can't do his job, I will point out that he in fact taught the class for a few hours, and everyone applauded for him at the end. Then I will also bring up the emails and say "maybe if there are things you still don't know it's because you were talking when you were supposed to be doing your exercises."

Welcome to your box, bitch.