this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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{screaming intensifies}
There is a guy on my degree course who actually made me consider crashing my car, because that seemed preferable to having to keep tolerating him. Given that I'm not generally prone to such thoughts, that says something about the severity of my reaction to his behaviour. I have met lots of arrogant people, and I can cope with those. I have met lots of stupid people, and I can cope with those. But the combination of this guy's incredible arrogance and his profound incompetence at virtually every task is having a severe impact on my mental health, in large part because he's a team member on a group project and I'm the team leader, which means I can't ignore him and it's me who has to fix his many, many fuck-ups so that the whole project isn't derailed.
When I assign him a task that is actually within his abilities (and where it won't matter much if the output isn't great), he refuses to do it because he considers it beneath him. He insists on doing something important and central to the project, and literally won't stop doing it when I tell him to stop (and it's not like I have the option to physically stop him). When he fucks it up, which he does every single time, he argues with me when I tell him to do it again and do it properly. Repeat two or three times until he's actually done it right. Or, you know, until I give up and just fix it myself, because that often takes less time than arguing with him.
On top of this, he constantly interrupts me to try to tell me how to do the things I'm working on, because he's under the erroneous impression that he knows more than me. He doesn't. We come from different subject backgrounds prior to starting this degree, and in short, the tasks I'm working on for the project relate to my subject background, not his. A particular task he was lecturing me about today is one I was graded over 95% for last year. The way he was telling me to do it was flat out wrong, and I had to be ruder than I like to be in order to get him to back off, because "no, I got this" wasn't cutting it.
I am not the only one who is frustrated. 30% of the class have expressed annoyance or anger. One fellow student bought noise cancelling headphones for the sole purpose of not having to listen to him. Pretty sure he was a contributing factor in another student dropping out. The others are probably just too polite or shy to say anything. But we are currently teacher-less due to an unforeseen medical emergency, so largely in an "independent study" phase, which makes it difficult to get help.
So there is screaming into the void.
As you are limited in your ability to appeal to higher ups, I'd gear up to axing him.
Be careful to document EVERYTHING, and ideally to give him some research task or other discrete element out of the main project & which you can attribute solely to him. If he bangs it out of the park you'll have to just be glad he has strengths after all.
These assignments are supposed to train students how to work with those we do not get along with, but sometimes that necessitates not letting an obstructive individual have the opportunities to be obstructive.
I have already been documenting everything, since that is part of the assignment. We get graded individually based on contributions, so we have to keep records of who did what. So at least he can't fuck up my grades.
We also have to do individual research. He won't do it because he thinks it's pointless. This is definitely contributing to his lack of competence, as he's not learning techniques that he should be. This is a very practical skills based degree, so learning skills by looking at what professionals have done is a big part of it, and he literally won't do it because "you don't learn to drive by looking at the history of the car" (he can't drive either). It makes it challenging to assign him something at the edge of the project. The thing I assigned him to last week was intended to be that - it needs to be done, but it's a part that will work well whether it looks great or crap. And this was the thing he refused to do.
So he's probably on the way to being axed of his own accord. It's just terribly frustrating in the meantime. I've always thought I could work with anybody, even those I don't get along with. I can find common ground to get along with almost everybody. Turns out having a couple of shared interests with this guy isn't enough. He thinks he's the main character and everybody else are just NPCs.