is there an opening for Company Retard?

The last couple days have been rather trying and I need to vent. This rather frustrating experience began harmlessly last Friday as my boss sent me an email letting me know I'd be receiving a task first thing Monday morning that needed to be done by early Monday afternoon. No problem. Just a routine job of outfitting an Excel spreadsheet to run with our program. Monday morning I was up early and by 9am had received an email from my boss with the spreadsheet. The other thing I needed was the spec list for the inputs and outputs. This consists of a list of high, low an nominal values for each input and and a description of which values should be integers (1,3,200) and which should be floating point numbers (0.23, 1.5, 44.23243). My boss was supposed to send this along shortly. The spreadsheet contains chip production data for a chip manufacturer which I am not at liberty to name. Anyway, I glanced over the spreadsheet and did what I could with it, but received no spec sheet. By noon I was worried and tried to call my boss. No answer. I tried again at 2pm and 3pm. At around 4pm I was supposed to go play basketball with Giancarlo, but on my way out I got a call from the company financial guy saying that they weren't able to get the info from the client but they had a number for me to call and talk to the client directly. I bailed on Giancarlo and called the number. Little did I know I was calling the world's stupidest professional.

Chris. I won't forget him any time soon. Chris started off by explaining that he had only conceptualized the model but other people had created it since he didn't understand Excel very well. Or anything else for that matter. I would ask Chris direct questions and he would reply with vague talk about this or that module or the presentation that he made that had nothing to do with what I needed. Finally I figured out that by module he meant worksheet. I followed his instructions to find a set of nominal values but this only resulted in a bunch of important data being overwritten. Good thing I made copies. He gave up and promised to email the high, low and nominal values later. I tried unsuccessfully for several minutes to explain the difference between integers and floating point numbers to him. Oh, well, I'll just guess at it and we can fix it later. He called me back later that evening saying that he was unable to find the nominal values in his own spreadsheet. Nate had helped me find them early (the spreadsheet was very poorly organized) so I gave Chris careful step-by-step instructions to find them. This guy must have trouble putting his shoes every day. OK, fine, I'll just do it for you and email it to you later. The next morning I received the list from him. Not just once. Not twice. But, thirteen times. Damn, Chris, stop using a jackhammer to press send. He decided to stick the list inside the Excel model and moved over a couple columns to stick it in which broke several references. The list itself was almost funny. Several entries were simply question marks. A couple had multiple values, such as "200 or 300". Some had "n/a" written in them. As I read down through the list of numbers I realized that for several inputs the "low" value was higher than the "high" value. Others had a nominal value completely outside the low/high range. Hey, Chris, which is bigger 5 or 10? I'll give you 3 guesses. No, that's probably not enough. I called him again this afternoon. He said he had figured more of it out after talking with an expert. I presume he means a kindergarten teacher.

How does someone like this land a white-collar job at a technology company? I think a lot of technology companies suffer from poor hiring choices. Too many idiots are being handed technical tasks. And I have friends who went to Caltech and can't find jobs. This leaves me to believe that the collective intelligence of Human Resource departments is somewhere in between Britney Spears and a chunk of petrified wood. I'd suggest that whoever is in change of hiring be replaced by a chimp with a dart board. And then for a promotion you have to beat the chimp at thumb wrestling.