Quick one from several years back. Had a small customer (10 people) that was fantastic. During the pandemic they sold to a larger conglomerate, but this takes place in the late 2010's. At that time, their office manager Kris was retiring, so they were interviewing replacements and hired someone named Kayla. Kayla was young - nothing wrong with that - but had no actual work experience outside the home, let alone any managerial experience. OK then. Doesn't really impact us much, we're just their third-party IT firm.

Except Kayla was utterly incompetent. She didn't know their line of business at all, nor their LOB software. They brought in a trainer from their software vendor to work with her. She'd always ask us questions too, which was fine, but we weren't their software people, just IT. She'd routinely do billing incorrectly, pay the wrong customer of theirs the wrong amount, and otherwise just mess stuff up that Deb, the #2 lady, had to always correct. Deb on the other hand was great; older and close to retirement herself; I'm surprised she didn't just up and leave as she should have been made manager when Kris left.

At any rate, back to our story. They're located in a rather rural area and had lousy power to boot, so we had set up each workstation with its own small UPS. They don't last long as you know, and one day Kayla's died. She called us and we shipped her a replacement, and I told her to use a power strip until the new one arrives. Easy enough.

Being reminded of her incompetence though, I also made clear that, when the new UPS arrives, on the bottom is a door where you slide it open and connect the battery leads (this is just a small PC UPS). I reiterated she has to do this before swapping it out, else it won't work.

The UPS arrives in a day or so and she emails and says it isn't working. I call her and ask, "did you take the battery out underneath and plug it in?" She assures me she had. I told her just to put the power strip back in and next time we have a service truck nearby we'll take a look.

Fast forward a few weeks and I happen to be in the area, so I stop by. I check the UPS, Sure enough, the battery was never connected. Kayla was snippy-like and said, "here's the new battery backup that doesn't work." I opened it up, connected the battery, and put it in place where it of course works fine. Kayla stammers and says she did that, but a battery does not disconnect itself. I just silently do my work and ignore her, before chatting it up with Deb a little bit before leaving.

A year later they got hit with ransomware. They had backups and recovered almost everything, but everyone including their GM was pretty sure Kayla was the source of the infection. She "left" (never heard if voluntary or not) a few weeks later, and a shortly after that the pandemic hit, where they eventually decided to sell.

I happened to check the new company's website and Deb is still there, running that location as a division of the company as manager. I guess she wasn't close to retirement after all!