CLODS by Jessica Zafra -Tw7sted (11.24.2001)

It is an inescapable fact of life that the more competent you are at your job, the more shit you will get at work.

If the world were a fair place, you would be rewarded for your job performance with faster promotions, higher pay better benefits and longer vacations. Instead, complete dunderheads get promoted above you, you stay at the same salary level for seemingly forever, and you can't take vacations because the office just can't spare you the time. You are made to carry not just your own workload, but that of your inept colleagues who are too thick to realize their own inadequacies. "It's very difficult for the incompetent people to know they are incompetent," Cornell University psychology professor David Dunning told Eve Tahmincioglu of the New York Times. " If they could figure out, they probably wouldn't be". If you think you are incompetent, you are probably aren't. If you think you're a genius at work, it is highly probable that you're an idiot.

In the same article, management professor Frank M. Shipper noted that approximately one out of six employees or managers fails to realize their own incompetence even when told about it point blank. Yes, incompetence generates a force field of obliviousness.

By covering for these incompetent clods in the name of teamwork, you make it possible for them to not only ensure their job security but to land the promotion you want. How? By giving them the free time to suck up to your senior executives, socialize with the boss, and forge personal connections with the people who might decide to terminate their non-services. None of these have anything to do with their ability to discharge their duties, but for some reason your senior executives are taken in. Aren't these bosses supposed to know better? to be continued.........