When a team is full of competent people and there is one incompetent and arrogant person, guess who is the leader of the team.

Incompetent people who don’t listen love power.

See how a power trip made this arrogant, incompetent worker look bad.

Colleague thinks she’s the big boss – But actual boss said no overtime no matter what!

One Friday evening at I get a call from the CFO of my employer, who liked playing at project management sometimes.

They desperately needed people to come in on Saturday and Sunday and work because a project needs to be delivered to the customer on Monday morning and I agreed to come in.

He told me I would be joined by 5 of my colleagues plus a colleague who has all the information regarding this project so she would “lead” it and tell us what needs to be done – lets call her Genius.

Like all power trips, this one clouded Genius’s judgement.

Genius says in these exact words: “I’m the boss, you do what I say, I have all the schematics in my head if you don’t know something ask me and I’ll tell you how to do it”.

The CFO says, “No matter what, no one works overtime – no more than 12 hours a day NO MATTER WHAT.”

Genius promises the CFO that the job will be done no matter what within those 2 days of 12 hours.

Saturday’s work is done after 12 hours we all say goodbye and leave coming back the next day.

The next day we can see that we are not going to make it on time.

We try to tell her that but she is adamant that this will be done on time.

Genius got herself into this mess, but will she get out of it?

Exactly 12 hours after arriving: “No more than 12 hours no matter what!” and we leave.

Later on I found out that she stayed by herself until 04:00 in the morning to finish it all by herself.

She couldn’t do it and had to go home as well. Her Project manager friend came in on Morning to help her finish the job.

The project was late, the customer came in to pick it up and wasn’t happy to see it still not packaged or ready to go.

Here’s what folks in the comments are saying.

It’s THE WORST. I hate it. Fortunately I’ve mostly avoided it because I’m a freelancer.

That’s what I think, too. She wants to be able to say she led the project and likes bossing people around.

I’m not sure I would try this, but hey if it helps you…

I don’t get this either. I imagine it was a lack of workflows for assessing progress and errors.

Exactly. People who refuse to get their hands dirty tend to be a nightmare.

Sounds like this co-worker would like a throne to sit on.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.