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A friend of mine works at a University research lab with an Intern under her who is completely incapable.
Let's refer to my friend as Person A and the Intern who is Person B.
Some background and facts:
- Person A's boss is a highly regarded professor running a research lab. Person B's husband is also a well reputable professor and knows Person A's boss well.
- Person B got her PhD thanks to her husband simply signing off on some of her research papers several years ago.
- Despite having a PhD (which she probably didn't deserve in the first place), Person B has shown to be utterly incompetent in her role as an Intern.. basically, she continues to make the same mistakes doing most routine and fundamental tasks since day 1 (she's been there 5 months) and continues to perform at an unacceptably low level with no effort to improve.
- Person A supervises Person B but Person A doesn't have the advanced degree of person B and is 10-15 years younger.
- A week ago, Person A had to take some time off and got approved by her boss. Person B was assigned some tasks on that day Person A has off. When Person A came home and checked her email that evening, she received several emails from Person B along the lines of "where were you? You made me wait 6 hours and I couldn't find you or finish this project."
- Person A responded with something like "I've already told you multiple times I will be out that day." (Which is true and Person B never listened.)
- Person B then responds with something like "I'm reporting you to your boss. We'll see about this."
To summarize, not only did Person B fail to listen to Person A, but when Person A pointed out the wrong, Person B defends her failure to listen by reporting Person A to the boss.
You make a lot of assumptions in your description of her, but in my experience, people who behave wrongly in this way usually end up getting what's coming to them, so to speak.
Last edited by BirdieBelle; 02-08-2014 at 03:55 PM..
Reason: typo
This is a very old story in academia. Professor Important's abominable, incompetent wife is given a job at the university (this is common practice - for universities to find jobs for the wives of professors) and proceeds to do a horrible job and make everyone around her miserable. Welcome to academia.
Out in the real world (business world), they say "The boss sees all". So if a situation like this is "clear as day" to a supervisor, then it is usually also "seen" quite clearly by the supervisor's boss.
But at a university, things are sometimes quite different. It may be next to impossible to fire someone no matter how incompetent they are. Or a department may be run by "committee" (several professors) and none of them wants anything to do with this day to day management stuff - result no action is taken. Many times they can never agree on anything, so nothing is done. Quite frustrating for supervisors.
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