I had a situation once that was almost on-point to this topic.
I was a secretary in a law firm, and my attorney boss instructed me to sit down and take lessons from our paralegal on how to do estate planning paralegal-style work.
I did so, but the paralegal made the learning impossible. She muddled things up, didn’t finish sentences, started a project and then stopped and started something else. I came away more ignorant of the subject than when we started.
I told the other secretaries and they laughed. They said, “Yeah, that’s what Carole has always done. She’s middle-aged and afraid that someone is going to learn her job and then she’ll get the boot. She’s never taught anyone a thing, even when instructed to.”
It was hard to tell my boss that I wasn’t learning a thing and that it was the fault of the paralegal. I think he thought I was a nitwit who couldn’t or wouldn’t learn new skills.
My dad had a story like that from when he was in school. He wasn’t a slacker, but he certainly didn’t feel much need to be an exemplary student either, at the time. Apparently his school used to do yearly IQ tests, and his teachers would hassle him because he did well on those tests, but his regular classwork wasn’t living up to the standards they expected of “gifted” students.
So one year he deliberately tanked the IQ test, giving wrong answers only. As he said it, “If I wasn’t sure what the right answer was, I left it blank, just in case I accidentally got it right.”
As he told it, the teachers left him alone after that.
I did the “play dumb” thing in high school. In grade school I got crap like getting the highest scores on tests but getting a “B” in a course since I “wasn’t working at my ability according to the IQ tests.”
The high school teachers didn’t have the time to check student’s files so I played dumb a bit and got reasonable grades.
Then in college, esp. grad school, The Secret could not be kept and the disincentive grading began again.
She was the only estate planning paralegal in our firm, experienced and of long standing. She had additionally been office manager before her smaller firm merged with ours, and was pissed that our office manager became the manager of the merged firm and not her. So she was hanging on grimly to her remaining job and had the support of the highest-named partner of her pre-merger small firm. Something about being his mistress back in the day, as I heard it.
ETA: also, it wasn’t like she refused to teach me when told to. She just made the teaching so muddled and muddied that it was impossible to learn.
We have a lot of people coming in to do court-ordered community service (CS) or service hours for school. Most do the work just fine and even enjoy getting to hang out with the animals. But then there are those who don’t want to be there, so they mope and whine and half-ass everything. Most of the time, it’s not a calculated attempt to get a better assignment so much as it is just that they don’t wanna work or be told what to do and are throwing a big baby fit about it.
But we do pretty often get those who, once they’ve done a few shifts and learned that there are some assignments they prefer and some they don’t, will make themselves useless in their less-favorite sections and then suddenly become perfectly competent when they get shuffled to a more-favorite section.
The most useless often end up doing laundry because it’s an easy job, it’s not that big a deal if you mess it up, and the office staff is directly in charge of them, so it gets the rest of the staff to quit interrupting us every five minutes to whine that their CS worker won’t wash the litterboxes right.
It’s not a perfect system, but like… they’re there for a limited amount of time, we’re not paying them, and our job is to take care of the animals, not spend all our time begging grown people to mop properly. If it becomes more work to babysit the CS than they would save by having them help and they can’t pawn them off on another section, we just tell them to go brush cats, which means “just sit somewhere and stay out of the way til your hours are up”. So if the goal is to get out of working… they do get there in the end.
I worked with an old guy who’d been drafted (Vietnam-era). He quickly saw that the service would eat up those with a gung-ho attitude, and those with a bad one.
So he came up with a plan for survival, that sounds just like the thread title. If he refused work, he’d’ve gotten the smelliest detail. So he tried enthusiastically raising his hand at the beginning of jobs being handed out, then throwing his whole being into painting the supply cabins or whatever it was (he went on to write for the theater, so maybe he was playing a role…).
But when they saw the final product, his CO growled “Uncle Sam is never letting you near a paintbrush again.”
He’d also noticed that there were more soldiers than jobs each day, so there were a dozen or so guys “unassigned” each day. Well, pretty soon he’d “flunked out” of each job, and no one really noticed (or maybe cared) that he was “unassigned” every single day.
I was to train the new guy to be a chyron operator and projectionist for a TV station. The guy was obviously very bright but just couldn’t get the hang of doing this gig. He was JUST good enough to not get fired and he relied heavily on me to get his job done.
Being the excellent politician he was, he thanked me profusely for the training I did, making sure I looked good to our manager. He wasted no time setting himself up to rub elbows with various commercial clients, often times contributing nothing but fetching coffee and sucking up. He had no technical ability whatsoever but he was a master at saying stuff people wanted to hear.
He is now the GM of a mid-market Sinclair station. And I’m sure he has at least two more houses than I do, judging from size of his boat.
<possible hijack>
Where I work, all employees have to complete a table of competencies.
However, for each competency, you can also mention how interested you are in that area of work. Reason being, employees used to put low skill numbers for things they didn’t want to work on. (I didn’t get the chance, but I would have definitely undersold my C++ skill).
You might wonder what the difference is; if someone is adamant not to work on PRINCE2 stuff, say, what difference does it make knowing they have that skill? Well, the difference is, we at least know a person who can answer basic questions about it, even if they wouldn’t be willing to be assigned to a long term project.
My best friend is a tradesman/skilled laborer by profession. Specifically, a metalworker/repairman/handyman for the Prague transit commission. His work involves welding, repairing roofs, trams, making metal gates, things like that. One day perhaps ten years ago, he was promoted to a “higher” position that would have involved him working in the control/dispatch center of the transit system. He was not happy about moving to this environment, which would have meant going from working at various locations in different workshops, depots, out of doors, to working in one enclosed, bunker-like structure filled with electronics and switches. He assumed the new position, but quickly found that he hated it as much as he thought he would. So, he deliberately started showing incompetence at whatever they asked him to do there, and it worked. He was soon “demoted” back to his original position/job description.
I did the same thing. I was tired of being smart so every so often I’d fluff something in Middle School. When it came time to sign up for HS classes they told me I was going to be in all the advanced classes and that seemed like a lot of work to me so I said no, please put me in the regular classes.
Unbeknownst to my dumb middle-school self, I had been in the advanced classes all along and thus all my friends were in the advanced classes in high school, and by going to the regular classes I was completely cut off from all my friends my freshman year. Oops.
I caught back up with them my sophomore year. All in all it was not a worthwhile experiment on my part.
They almost certainly had SAT, ACT, and GRE scores. Particularly in grad school, if a student’s work does not reflect their high GRE score, they will get a talking to. Of course, if they had low GRE scores to match the poor work, they likely wouldn’t have been admitted in the first place.
Profs are good at figuring out who the smart kids in class are. I was amazed after my first quarter how one prof picked me out to be a paper grader the next quarter. (The start of my move into the other side of academia.) Once I became a prof, I found that it was indeed quite easy to sort students out.