Reply to I think my new coworker is functionally illiterate? Help!

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[quote=Anonymous]OP here.

I don't think I responded yet.

Thank you all for your kind and thoughtful responses.

Yes, protected class. Several. Also, I think she is ESOL even though the country she is from has English as one of the main languages. I met tons of other people from that country and have friends originally from there and they are all 100 percent fluent in English. I talk to them about this person to get their interpretation and they're all like "Um, she should really be able to communicate better," "It's odd that she has such communication difficulties - we mostly speak English in our country," "School was in English, not our language," etc.

Worked with her today. I think she understood about 20 percent of what I said.

I tried some of the tips in this thread (and I'm printing out this thread so I can go back and refer), like asking her to describe what exactly she's confused about. She isn't able to articulate her thoughts at all.

I am trying to be more compassionate and just realize she's never going to be able to learn this stuff. This is horrible, but I think she'd be good as a greeter at a store or perhaps something really repetitive, like stuffing envelopes.

The work she is supposed to be doing is highly technical in nature, with lots of room for creativity, interpretation, and shades of gray. She is in absolutely the wrong place. But in our office, we all have to pretend she's "keeping up." What we do is something similar to software development and designing new processes for complex systems. Innovative work. How the hell is she expected to do this when she doesn't know what the Start menu is in Windows, even after being told this information countless times ("It's the button in the lower left hand corner.") She doesn't understand what left means most of the time.

I even took SCREEN SHOTS of the frickin' start menu to help her understand, but she quickly forgets.

I kind of snapped at her a little the other day (I'm not sure she even understood, because she understands so little) and said something like "Don't you remember talking about this yesterday?" I immediately felt guilty. I know next to nothing about her. What if she had a head injury or something?

The work I'm giving her is something a smart fifth grader could do. She does her assignments quickly, but what she turns back is not usable and such a mess. Unintelligible, completely different than what we talked about, every word misspelled, and so on.

She is nice for the most part, but can get kind of nasty sometimes and then talks to me in a very condescending way, using my first name a lot (which I associate with people trying to come across as powerful).

Thanks for letting me vent. I'm just going to smile and focus on my work, because she's never going to learn this shit. Sad but true. [/quote]

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