Tales of Dunning-Kruger Inc.

So one of my good coworkers just got back from New Office and apparently the person New CEO hired to do accounting over there is incompetent. While Coworker was there someone from the electric company came by to shut off their power for non payment.

Apparently they assumed Madge would be paying all the bills for that office? Which doesn't even make sense. But she hasn't even been checking to see if invoices are being paid. And I'm no expert but it seems like "We have $X but we owe $Y. Now we have paid $Y so our total money is $X-Y" is what accounting is?

When Juno was hired, it was to replace a department head who was retiring. After he took over the department officially and began handling clients he asked me “make him some email signatures.” This was a bit of a baffling request. We don’t have any required email signatures. There is a company style guide but Dwight, in his infinite wisdom as head of marketing, likes to keep it secret. Also, Juno is a technically competent person so I figured he wanted something fancier than he could just type into Outlook in 15 seconds (which is what literally everyone else has done if they’ve done it at all. We have techs whose default settings are blue on grey comic sans. I swear to god I am not making that up. Comic. Sans.) So I thought perhaps he wanted me to get him a copy of our logo to put in it.

Now the DK Inc. logo is just the name of the company written in grey Helvetica but none of the computers in our office have Helvetica installed. The parent company also has a fancier logo (so, just any logo) so I pulled both of these so that I could do signatures with either/or. Of course there was no reasonable quality image of any of these logos anywhere on the shared server that I could find. So I just went to our website and grabbed them there. I sent Juno his options and he picked the boringest one and starts sending emails.

Dwight then calls Juno into his office. He is very angry because he wants to know WHERE?! Juno got that logo?!?? Juno did not want to throw me under the bus so he says that he got it from our website. Dwight is furious. That HAS to be a LIE because our website is SECURE! He has it LOCKED DOWN!

Did I mention that Dwight is also head of IT? It’s gonna come up a lot.

I can’t remember why I was also in Dwight’s office at this point but I was having an extremely difficult time keeping a straight face. Juno, on account of being still new, is a little bewildered at this sudden, ridiculous hostility. He says, “I just put DK Inc into Google image search and it came up!” Dwight glares at him. He is skeptical but there is a seed of doubt. So he pulls up Google, right in front of us and enters the company name. First result is our website but there is no picture of our logo, ONLY TEXT. He turns around with a sneer, delighted to have caught Juno in this transparent lie. But then! Something catches his eye. In his peripheral vision he has spotted that little tab on Google.com that says, “Images.” He freezes. He slowly brings his cursor up to the little tab. Slowly, he clicks.

And there. Is the company logo. Helvetica. Dark Grey.

“Oh,” he says. He says we can go. I believe we went straight to Juno’s office, closed the door and laughed till we cried.

I thought I’d just briefly share why I chose this particular alias for this company. I feel like most of the time when the Dunning-Kruger effect comes up it does so in conjunction with Imposter Syndrome. It’s used to help explain to talented people why they seem to experience so much anxiety and doubt about their own capabilities. DK Inc. deals very much with the flipside of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is about competence. A person who is skilled at their job can identify areas where they need to improve, or things that they need to learn so that they can do their job better. They can recognize that they don’t have X skill but that X skill will be crucial for their ability to perform at a higher level. When asked to rate their own competence these people will say that they are average, that they have a lot to learn.

By contrast, somebody who is INcompetent cannot recognize what skills are valuable. They don’t have the skills or knowledge to assess themselves accurately. Consequently, they think they know all that there is to know and when asked about their own competence they rate themselves very highly.

Behold this graph that I stole from Wikipedia. As you can see, once you become a legit expert in a thing, you do become aware that you are an expert in the thing. But take a look at that confidence spike over on the stupid side of this chart. The very tip top of that spike is where Dwight lives. Most of my coworkers exist somewhere on that spike, but nobody is as high on their own bullshit as Dwight.

I find the Dunning-Kruger effect useful for all the reasons that I illustrated above for people in that average competency bowl, but also because it allows me to have some empathy for idiots. Dwight isn’t being difficult on purpose (usually), he thinks he’s genuinely good at his job. He’s frequently frustrated by really stupid things. People don’t listen to him. They ignore his sage IT advice. 

I’m not gonna say that excuses him or people like him. Any reasonable company would have fired his ass a decade ago. But I do have an easier time dealing with him than most of my coworkers because I can at least see where he’s coming from. 

I’ve decided to stop numbering Dossiers because I will def eventually lose track. Anywho.

Title: Sales Engineer, Good Coworker

Juno is one of the 3 coworkers who I don’t hate. Or he was until recently when he got another job and got the fuck out. He is a bit of a contradiction because he definitely used to be the bro-iest dude ever. He was on (or almost on, can’t recall) the Junior Olympic Team. He was in the military and takes great pride in the BS he pulled to get out of marching and other drills he thought were stupid. He has had a series of medical issues that he’ll tell all about to anyone who will listen, and I think maybe those mellowed him because by all his own accounts he must have been absolutely insufferable 10 or so years ago. Now, he’s a giant nerd who loves to lecture about chemistry and will not shut up about how much he loves his wife. Would you like to see his wedding photos? He will show you his wedding photos. He keeps a video on his phone of his proposal to her on a mountain top. Jesus. But yeah, still some asshole tendencies, definitely. We’ll get to those.

Memorable Moments: Our Yugopotamian parent company sent us some books about how great the company is. He flipped through it until he found a picture of a crow eating Starbucks garbage and kept it prominently displayed in his office for most of his tenure. 

Please, heads up, do not be concerned for me, it was super unprofessional but our office is super unprofessional. So. He called me into his office and showed me his underpants on at least two occasions. Once because his wife had bought them for him and they were very warm. The second time was because they matched his socks and he knew “I would appreciate it.”

So when I started this job I had a typewriter on my desk. Not a cool vintage typewriter, but an enormous electric typewriter from right before the dawn of personal computers. I was told by my predecessor that I might be called upon to use it occasionally although she never had. I was skeptical.

This typewriter took up huge amount of desk space and I wanted to get rid of it but I waited to see if it was actually ever required. After a couple months watching this thing collect dust I decided to quietly move it to the bottom shelf of a storage cupboard. 

I was in the middle of a big project that involved a lot of stacks of boxes in front of my desk so it took over two weeks for Madge to notice that I’d moved it. But she did eventually and she was very upset.

“Where’s the typewriter?!”

“It was taking up a lot of space on my desk so I put it in the cupboard,” I answer pleasantly. I’m trying to be non-confrontational and reasonable.

“Well we need that typewriter! You’ll use it all the time.”

“Can I ask what for? Is there really something that can’t be done with the computer and the printer?” 

She stares at me for a minute.

“We have these labels! You’ll be asked to make these.” The labels come on a roll and would need to be fed through the typewriter to put customer names in the blank spaces.

“OK,” I reply. “When we need to make those labels then I’ll get it back out of the cupboard.”

DK Inc, is a small company that makes a niche product for which there is very little competition.  Earlier this year Mark Chang was very concerned about Russian hackers. He wouldn’t put it past Putin to give the order to take us down. Presumably so that our US industry would be crippled and Russian industry could profit? I don’t know why he thought Putin would be personally invested in destroying us. But Mark Chang was worried so he went to Dwight to discuss what could be done to fend off the Russians.

Dwight agreed that this was a serious problem. But! Fortunately DK, Inc. gets a free subscription to Norton Anti-Virus with it’s internet package! So Dwight helped Mark Chang install it on his work computer.

Title: Former CEO

For most of my tenure at DK, Inc. Mark Chang was the CEO. In the restructuring he was deposed. Mark Chang is from Yugopotamia. If you saw a character like him on a TV show you’d think it was a ludicrous, borderline offensive generic European stereotype.

Memorable Moments: Yugopotamia is not a country famous for it’s shoes, but according to Mark Chang all the best shoes are from there. He will inspect your shoes and either berate or praise them depending on the brand.

He has one pair of shoes that are ridiculously squeaky that he has claimed to be breaking in for years. They are incredibly loud and they are distracting to everyone in the office. They are shockingly not Yugopotamian, and he blames their squeakiness on the fact that he bought them in the US. 

Title: IT Manager and Head of Marketing

Dwight is equally good at both his jobs. Which is to say he’s bad at both of them. He’s extremely controlling and extremely incompetent. He’s shockingly condescending and has snarled all of data storage to the point it’s unusable and has also locked down most of our software in the same way. It’s absolutely ludicrous that he hasn’t been fired.

Memorable Moments: He once designed a print ad with vertical text but instead of orienting the letters vertically he just rotated the word 90 degrees. He claimed that being forced to turn their heads sideways would draw reader interest.

He spends most of every day working on his personal hang gliding website.

Every time he calls tech support the first thing he does is berate the technician because he is an IT professional and should not have to wait on hold with all these idiots, and he demands they give him their direct line. 

Title: CFO and HR.

Madge is extremely controlling. She refuses to delegate even basic tasks. She is always extremely busy. Any suggestion of even minor change is met with an extreme knee jerk negative reaction. She is convinced people are trying exclude her in decision making. Also with the recent restructuring she believes that you're either with us or against us and anyone who cooperates with the new head office has committed a deep betrayal.

Memorable Moments:

When I started here I was put in charge of buying all the office supplies. Nobody gave me a budget or any kind of spending guideline so I started a spreadsheet of what I was ordering so I could figure out how often we ordered what and how much we were spending. I showed it to Madge and she liked at me like I had two heads and asked "is that necessary?" She's head of accounting.

She insisted that I would use the enormous electric typewriter on my desk all the time. Couldn't specify for what exactly.

I went to ask a question about health insurance and got treated to a 45 minute story about a cyst she had surgery on. I have now heard this story multiple times.

I said I wanted to begin in media res, but I don't think that will work. So. My workplace is fantastically disfunctional. Nearly everyone who works here is incompetent.

I began as an admin here 2 years ago and it took me a little while to figure out how bad things were. It's an ongoing discovery process.