New Co-worker

The BBQ Pit
1

So my organization just moved an engineer to my work area last week. While he’s actually a very good civil engineer, he reportedly had issues getting along with others, so he was relocated to our area.

I’ve actually known him for years, but have only talked to him in passing up until now. This afternoon he stopped by my cubicle to rant about the education system in the U.S. (He thinks people have been getting “dumber” over time, especially since the 1950s, which is when America was “great.” (“Uh-oh,” I thought to myself.)

Since he’s moved down here, he’s also often told me how smart he is. He took an online IQ test the other day that proves this. He scored a 155, and was “particularly gifted in spatial analysis.” He is very good at math (he reports), and took math courses in college up to matrix theory, obtaining a minor in math in addition to his engineering major. This was a prelude to him telling me that he was fighting with his children’s teachers about how to teach math. Last year he apparently pulled his kids out of public school after an argument with the school principal, so his kids are now in private school.

Anyway, after ranting about the state of the education system this afternoon, I get an earful of his beliefs. He does not believe the dominant long range force in the universe is gravity. Instead, it is electromagnetism. Gravity is a short range force created by the Earth’s atmosphere. What about the Moon, with no atmosphere, I stupidly ask? More gibberish resulted from this question, including something about the Moon “ringing like a bell” during the Apollo missions.

He also believes that cosmic rays somehow affect the Earth’s core, which somehow affects continental drift… “You mean plate tectonics,” I ask? “No, that’s a myth.” …to the Earth being smaller in the past, and that’s why the continents were close together in the past (not because they actually moved; it’s because the Earth expanded), to the Earth’s rotation being affected, which is why the climate has changed in the past…

…and the climate, of course, has nothing to do with the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air (which is actually highest right before an ice age, he says), and of course global warming is a myth.

He also believes in antigravity, and how it has something to do with experiments by the Germans before WWII with mercury. Oh, and Tesla – he was a genius, and all of his ideas for free energy and free energy transmission were hidden by the oil tycoons who bought up his patents… Oh, and speaking of oil and fossil fuels, it is being continuously produced by cosmic rays (OK, we’re back to cosmic rays, again?) which he seems to have confused with neutrinos. I made the mistake of pulling up the Wikipedia article on cosmic rays (because I remembered they were charged particles, not electrically neutral like neutrinos are, but couldn’t remember exactly what kind of charged particles they are), and he had a conniption, because “anybody can edit those articles.” “Yes,” I replied, “but they also have references, like the first reference in the cosmic ray article, which references a physics textbook.” I then get an earful about how bad textbooks are today.

“You know none of this is supported by any mainstream scientists or universities,” I say. “That’s not true!,” he replied. “Just look at these videos on the internet!” :rolleyes:

I finally couldn’t take it any more. I told him these all sound like whack-jobs ideas with no basis in reality, and to not believe everything he finds on the internet. Then I told him I needed to get back to work.

“We’ll argue some more another time,” he promised. “But you’ll never convince me I’m wrong!” :smack:

Great. I have to work with this guy now? :mad:

2

I suggest low-key mocking, of the type that you can laugh about later, but won’t get you in trouble at work.

3

You can’t believe anything you read on the internet… but watch this video!

My neighbor hates Catholics, because a Sunday School teacher from his childhood told him Catholics were bad because Romans were pagans. But, I told him, the Romans converted to Christianity centuries ago. Nope, all Catholics he ever met tried to rip him off and take his money.

There’s just no way to make them change their minds, so just change the subject to basketball or something.

4

:sigh:

More evidence that crank magnetism is a thing, and swallowing more Republicans or conservatives as we speak.

5

One antidote mentioned by Randall Munroe, from XKCD:

6

The OP reveals two encouraging things for robby:

Your mental faculties are in great condition because you can remember all his ranting in all its misinformed detail. I’m sure I couldn’t because I would have switched off.

And you didn’t either ignore or offend him. Good trick.

7

Yeah, no…you may just have to tell him to STFU. Good luck.

8

Tell him that if nothing you say will convince him he’s wrong, then there’s no point in talking about any of it.

9

I hate these kinds of situations because there’s not a polite way to get him to stop. We all hope that people like this will take a hint that you don’t want to hear it, but they never do. And it doesn’t have to be conspiracy crap either. Some coworkers feel like everyone needs to hear their thoughts on home improvements, their kid’s accomplishments, their vacation, etc.

One alternative might be to take the offensive. Are you capable of talking nonstop about boring topics? If so, start talking as soon as he approaches and don’t stop, pause, or present an opportunity for him to interject. If he interrupts, tell him “wait I’m not finished” and keep going on. Eventually he’ll may stop coming to you.

10

I would’ve tried to listen like you did, but when he got to this:

I would’ve said “Naaah, I’d rather just get my work done.”

11

I had a guy like this who ‘worked’ for me. His conspiranoia went every which way from “Libs/GHWB recruited John Hinkley Jr to assassinate Reagan” to “Dirty Power” along with the more mundane birtherism/father’s rights/whatever Sean Hannity said nutterism, and I put ‘worked’ in single quotes because if did an actual minute of productive work for me in the nine months I had to oversee him I couldn’t find it. I made the mistake of just asking the HR rep how to start the performance improvement process, and although he promised go get me information he went around me and had a private conversation with my manager where they decided that he would not be put on a PIP and I was to, “keep him under control”. After nine months of this horseshit including creating makework assignments, askibng him to not talk about his politics/conspiracy theories loudly in the office, counselling him on things he shouldn’t say to other employees, and keeping track of all of the hours he was disappearing from his desk without notice or explanation other than to claim that we was there and I must have just “missed him”, and being denied approval to start a formal process despite asking every couple of weeks, he finally openly threatened another employee. Guess who got blamed by HR for his behaviorial outburst and not acting preemptively, and who was disciplined for mismanagement even though the shithead reportedly went on an unhinged rant when he was finally fired which validated everything I had been saying for months?

My advice is to avoid this loony fucker as much as possible. Don’t expect either your management or HR to remove or discipline him unless he does something overt, and keep any complaints about him restricted to job performance, either he affects you, or that his performance is imparing your work, unless he makes a direct threat, and remember that HR exists not to serve the interests of individual employees nor to support line management but to protect the company from liability, so whatever complaint or claim you make needs to pose a greater problem to the company than any hypothetical claim he might make. I would not engage with him either to try to correct his false beliefs (pointless) nor to mock him (potentially provocative and juvenile), keep note of any really overtly disruptive or problematic exchanges or outbursts he has, and encourage others to do the same. If he persistently refuses to leave when you ask him, make that observation to your management but leave it at that unless he says something actionably offensive (e.g. racist, threatening, et cetera).

Stranger

12

Cultivate a friendship with someone from his last department; maybe eventually you can learn how THEY managed to get rid of him.

13

Meh. I met one guy who insisted that the government had a machine that could cause earthquakes wherever the power elite wanted them.

I’m glad I was just picking up a chicken dinner, and I never saw him again. I just never went back to that restaurant. Not because of him though.

14

It was invented by Tesla.

15

He kinda has a point there. :slight_smile:

16

One way to handle him is to enlist a friendly coworker to call your office phone whenever he starts talking. Then you can say it’s a work question and you have to deal with it.

17

This doesn’t sound like a problem. Just restrict your conversations to work-related projects. While he’s an engineer, he’s not working on anti-gravity technology, so he can live in fantasy (or a startlingly accurate future) in his own mind if he likes.

18

It could be worse.

My first job after college was as a lab manager of a biological science lab at a university. We got a new Ph.D. student who was suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Within two weeks of her arrival, I joked to the PI that he would have to watch his ass because she was so nuts I could see her accusing him of sexual harassment. A few months later, I found out she had done exactly that to her adviser at her previous university where she was supposedly getting her masters degree.

I did not get along with her at all because she used to leave equipment on and I would have to replace reservoirs and she created other make work for me. Just a moron.

At a journal club, we covered a paper where they transfected the famous HeLa cell line with DNA that expressed an always active oncogene. I joked they gave cancer to a cancer cell. She took issue with this and set me multiple emails which I still have saved to this day where it was obvious she didn’t understand the paper, conflating two different proteins in a signaling pathway (she thought MAPK and MAPKK were the same protein and just had different phosphorylation status, for those in the know).

At another journal club meeting, she got into an argument with a professor about using the relatively new method of using siRNA to knock-down gene expression of enzymes involved in lipid metabolism because “[nematodes] didn’t have body fat. That’s just stupid”. Yeah, new student telling a professor that in front of everyone.

People in the department would see me in the hallway and ask me what was wrong with her.

I went on to a postdoc and a few months after that, catching up with my old lab mates at a happy hour, I was told she wanted to accuse another professor of sexual harassment because she was failing his class. I was told this was total BS on her part because she had blatantly doctored his emails to her.

It was so bad that at a happy hour years later I mentioned her and was told: “We don’t talk about her”.

So, instead of just being a kook, she had no problem fucking with people’s careers with false accusations.

19

Give him something like this to solve Should keep him out of your hair for a while unless he knows puzzle rings. You get the idea.

20

Politeness is overrated. In the OP’s situation I’d walk away from the guy unless the discussion is work related.