“You Can Go Ahead And Submit A Complaint To My Supervisor”: Entitled Karen Gets Exactly What She Asked For, Loses Job

Everyone has that tale of a coworker from hell, someone who inexplicably holds a job that they don’t do well, that communicates so poorly as to cause chaos with every word, and just generally makes the workplace miserable. But a lucky few are given a golden opportunity to do something about it.

An internet user shared their experience with an entitled coworker that ended up digging her own grave. After consistently reporting incorrect metrics, she told OP that she wasn’t going to change anything and that they should just complain to her supervisor. Well, OP did exactly that and proved the old adage that one should be careful of what you ask for.

OP seemed to have been cursed with the horrible combination of an incompetent coworker in a position to affect their metrics while working a very metric-oriented job. However, there is always a silver lining and this coworker was so unaware of her own incompetence that she readily told the people she was disrupting exactly how to get her fired. This would indicate that she is completely unaware of just how poorly she is doing her job or that she was willing to risk the threat of a supervisor’s attention to shut down the frequent requests to change the misattributed scores. While the former might be more likely, it’s worth exploring the latter just to try and piece together ‘Karen's’ thought process on this matter.

Conventional wisdom would dictate that if a person landed a job they were completely incompetent at, they would do their level best to slide under the radar. Fake it ‘till you make it, the saying goes. However, ‘Karen’s’ risk assessment abilities seem somewhat off balance, as she regularly antagonizes coworkers and even explicitly tells them to report her work to a supervisor. Now, poor risk management is a very human trait, studies show that both people with high and low cognition will make poor decisions when it comes to the probability of assessing risk. So maybe she really thought they would just settle for poor metrics and wouldn’t go to her supervisor. OP mentioned over 200 complaints, but even a small handful would have likely been enough.

A more likely scenario would be that she was just unaware of how incompetent she was, which at times leads to a person being, paradoxically, more confident in their abilities. This is a form of cognitive bias referred to as the Dunning–Kruger effect. In short, people with less ability or knowledge about a subject tend to overestimate how much they actually know. Often this is used to describe particularly dense but overconfident people, however, in reality, it more represents the fact that most of us can’t really know what we don’t know until we research the subject. After all, most of us know that bread is basically, flour, yeast, water, and maybe some salt. But this does not actually make us capable of baking bread without further instructions.

The end result in some cases is clearly demonstrated by OP’s story. ‘Karen’ has ended up too confident in her job and bristles at any indication that she is doing some parts of it wrong. Some professions even take measures during training to prevent this sort of overconfidence from new workers. Even after years of medical school, a new doctor is still a novice in their own field, so many medical training institutions design their education around limiting overconfidence. There are a few upsides of the Dunning–Kruger effect, as it does make people feel better about themselves. All of us probably feel a bit more secure in one position or another, blissfully aware that in reality, we know nothing.