How do you deal with slacker co-workers?

[Chodon]

So I have a co-worker who is in charge of our environmental, health, and safety team.  She's not the brightest bulb in the box.  She used the word "decimals" to describe the level of noise in our facility and she says "KWH watt hours" instead of "kilowatt hours".  She has never logged into our company's website to monitor our energy usage and only complains about other people not doing things that are her job.

I got roped into this team of hers because I have a lot of chemistry background and I'm one of the few that gives a rat's ass about the environment.  During meetings the rest of the team and I bring up ideas that can make our facility more environmentally friendly.  I brought up the idea of waterless urinals and low/variable flush toilets.  Some other people talked about high efficiency HVAC (our current stuff is 25 years old and I measured it at about 30% efficient...that's right, I purchased the equipment and went on the roof to measure it) and high efficiency fluorescent lights.  She then says "great idea, make it happen."  That kind of chaps my ass.  This is her only job and all her goals/raises are tied to this, not mine.  I have done this in the past on doing calculations for buying renewable energy credits and she got all the recognition.  Now she is sending me nasty e-mails saying she needs facts and calculations on the toilets from me for a presentation to top management.  I can't decide if I should be a good boy and come up with some realistic figures, make up some ridiculous facts that nobody with half a brain would believe (because she wouldn't catch the errors), or if I should just tell her to shove off because I'm not doing this crap anymore.

Anyone else have similar experiences?  How did you deal with it?  Any thoughts on how I should deal with this?  I would love to see her laughed out of a conference room for presenting ridiculous information, but there's a chance it could come back to me.

[FNH]

If your being paid to do it, do it well.  You might also sign your name on it.

If your not being paid to do it.  Dont do it.

[Chodon]

Yeah, there's that pesky "and other duties as assigned" clause in my job description.  This is really outside of the scope of my position.  It's more like an extracirricular activity.  It's something I'm interested in and I think is important, I'm just pissed off when incompetence is promoted.  I hate keeping someone who can't do their job propped up.

She takes my name off the slides I do when she presents them to management.

[DDog]

She takes my name off the slides I do when she presents them to management.

Maybe this is coming from my mentality as a student (in high school I had to write on every test, paper, and presentation, "As a student at ______, I pledge I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this academic work"), but that sounds really sketchy. Is there someone to whom you can bring this up who would have some authority over her, or would it be a case of her word against yours and then you'd be screwed for tattling on her?

[FNH]

Yeah, there's that pesky "and other duties as assigned" clause in my job description.  This is really outside of the scope of my position.  It's more like an extracirricular activity.  It's something I'm interested in and I think is important, I'm just pissed off when incompetence is promoted.  I hate keeping someone who can't do their job propped up.

If your being asked for reports and researches that arn't part of your main job and it will take time, then get the "OK" to spend that time from your immediate boss.  That way your effort is official.

I understand that you "care" but you have to consider why you "care".  If you "care" because it's important to you personally, if its an "issue" for you, then do it on your own time and suck it up.  If you "care" only because you can see credit for you work, then I suggest you dont bother doing it.  She wont let you have it, and your wasting your time trying to get it.

Whatever choice you make dont agonise over it.  Flip a coin if you have to, but decide one way or the other and live with it.  Life is short, and around every corner you'll find a better life.

She takes my name off the slides I do when she presents them to management.

Next time she does that, tell her she has a nice hat.  When she asks "what hat?"  Just say Ass-hat.

[eytanz]

She takes my name off the slides I do when she presents them to management.

Is there any reason you have to give her slides in a format that allows that? Can't you make all your slides into PDFs, or lock them from modification, or anything like that?

[Tango Alpha Delta]

Have you tried the the Trunk Monkey?

[Bdoomed]

She takes my name off the slides I do when she presents them to management.

Is there any reason you have to give her slides in a format that allows that? Can't you make all your slides into PDFs, or lock them from modification, or anything like that?

or watermark pictures w/ your name, locked pdfs are very good, bitch slaps are good

[Chodon]

I'm thinking I'll just not do it.  It's important to me, but so much more could get done if this person were replaced with someone who was competent.  We have the same boss, and he's a real hardass when things don't get done.  I've never had the occasion to have his displeasure directed at me, but I've seen it first hand.  I'm impressed.

Has anyone else ever had a situation like this?

[Listener]

I work in a newsroom.  It is exactly like this.  The TV producers don't pay attention to the web unless they have to tease it, they don't look to see if things exist, they don't even look at our front page half the time, and they don't proofread the things they put in that appear on the site.  There's almost no accountability.  And yet we're expected to kowtow to their every need, put up pages in literally three hours or less that are full of content, graphics, and features, and we just don't have the staff to do it.

The worst offender is the assistant news director, who never even logs into her Outlook e-mail account (the one the GENERAL MANAGER uses to send messages to people), never looks at our site (delegates other producers to do the job for her), never compares our site to other sites for ideas, and only really is polite to one member of the team who she used to work with, almost 10 years ago (the woman on our team has been with the station since the mid-90s, and was a TV producer herself before she moved to web).  NOBODY in the newsroom likes her.

Unfortunately, in my business, you just have to suck up the work other people don't do, or else everyone gets in trouble equally.

The other example I have is our IT guy.  He's competent, and really cool, but a MAJOR slacker and very difficult to find when you need him.  If you can pin him down, he'll fix anything you need fixed, but pinning him down is like trying to catch a fly with chopsticks.  The thing is, we don't want to get rid of him (no one in the web department does, anyway) because a new IT guy might come in and clamp down and put up blocks and take away all the open-source software that's not "necessary" for me to do my job -- like Pidgin -- or the other web browsers -- because all we really "need" is IE.  That sort of thing.

I'm not saying my examples should guide your decisions, but before trying to get action taken against your slacker co-worker, weigh the positives and negatives of what a new co-worker at that position might bring -- and if it looks to make your job suck more, you might just want to stick with the slacker you have rather than the unknown quantity you might get.

Don't make stuff up, though.  That's just bad business all around.  I would say, if her position pays more than yours, try to supplant her instead.

[DDog]

but pinning him down is like trying to catch a fly with chopsticks.

If you practice, you can get pretty good at that.