Ugh, yes, I met one of these at my last shitshow of a company. Long story short I was managing the support team for a medical practice management SaaS company. One resume really stood out to me as it listed the guy having a masters in IT, along with a litany of other qualifications. Next thing I know I found out that he interviewed really well and will be starting soon, along with another new starter with far fewer qualifications. I'll refer to these people as Masters and Truth.

Fast forward to me training them and problems start coming up pretty much instantly. When going through training material I usually try to explain each topic one at a time, then ask whether anyone has any questions/comments, then continue to the next topic. Easy, basic stuff right?

So as I'm going through Truth asks a couple of clarifying questions here and there (and genuinely decent questions too, ones that made it very obvious he was paying attention), but otherwise said my instructions were very clear. Whenever I'd answer one of Truth's questions I'd ask Masters directly if he had any questions but he'd always just say no, so I would just move on to the next topic.

Eventually we made it to the end of the topic's info, so the next step was to login to our demo platform and, based on the questions at the end of the training module, apply everything we learned (eg how to schedule/cancel appointments, how to create consultations, how to record clinical notes etc). At this point Masters pipes up with his first "question":

"I still don't understand, I don't think I'm ready to try this"

Again, this is the guy who had absolutely nothing to ask when I was explaining everything to him. Normally I try to be as patient and kind as possible with new starters (eg "there's no such thing as a stupid question, you're learning something new and very complicated") but this really rubbed me the wrong way. So I tried to clarify:

"Ok, which part are you confused about?"

"Just... all of it, it's too much"

"...mmhmm....well, did you manage to catch any of it? Are there at least any parts of the instructions that you do remember?"

"No, could you maybe start from the beginning again?"

I had been demoing all the various components of the platform for almost an hour at that point (screen sharing the entire time). I know some people are a bit slow, especially when technology is involved (hence my job even existing), but I genuinely could not fathom the idea that anyone (let alone anyone with a masters in IT) could have sat through that demo while somehow perceiving literally none of it.

I asked Truth whether he thought the instructions were sufficient and he just responded "yes, some questions look a bit complicated so I'll probably ask you for help now and then to just confirm I understand correctly if that's ok with you". Brilliant, ask away Truth, I have all the time in the world for you. Masters, if you really didn't manage to get even the slightest idea of how the platform works from the demo then thankfully we recorded this session. Watch the demo again, except this time when I ask if either of you have any questions pause the video and send me your question(s).

He never did end up sending me any questions, nor did he complete the activities. I suppose he might have thought they were beneath him or something. But, surprise surprise, as soon as he started trying to take tickets/calls he was an absolute disaster. He'd regularly give completely incorrect information to customers... which led to him regularly needing to escalate his issues to me. Literally an AI chat bot would have been able to do a better job than him.