Difficulty with a co-worker
I'd like to share something that I'm dealing with at work and was wondering about ways that I could handle it.
So, this co-worker was hired on the same day as myself and has been working alongside me on most tasks and projects. When I came in I already had some experience and a few certs. This is my co-worker's first job in IT.
The problem is that now I'm starting to notice that he lacks skills in just about every area of the job, including soft skills. While I understand that this is first IT job and he has no certs, he does not have any initiative to read or learn. I've spoken to him at length about certifying, reading, labbing, practicing, but he just makes comments like "I can't stand reading", "I just want to go home and watch TV", "Man, you study too much". This is becoming an issue for me because he is attached to me like glue. Literally, everytime I turn around, he's there. He is becoming more and more reliant on me to solve the problems and explain things that he's not understanding from our superiors, either because he doesn't get it or he's not paying attention. When others, including myself, try to explain something or show how to do something, he'll continually interrupt with his on thoughts, which are rarely even related to topic at hand. For example, we've had some more complicated projects that are ongoing and he seems to be fine when I'm working beside him, but if I get pulled off to something else, he'll just stop completely and sit and wait for me. I've talked to him today about this and said that we need to be able to work independently because we're so busy, but he continued. He's extremely pre-occupied with the things that I'm working on and will completely stop anything he's doing to come over and watch me. I know he's probably interested but he's not receptive to learning about it when I try to explain it while I'm working. More interrupting with unrelated topics and laughs when he thinks it's too much of big deal.
The other issues are related to laziness and inattentiveness. For example, when he and I are patching cables or labeling things, he is careless and misspells names and locations, he'll rip old cabling out of racks without looking, throw new servers in racks without making sure the rails are correctly spaced. Leaves cables hanging out of the racks and doesn't care about making anything neat - just throw it in there and go. Pulls things out of my hand without warning me. I've tried correcting him on this but he just smirks or laughs.
I was sort of hoping that these problems would become apparent to my superior but it doesn't seem that way. Most of the time, I'm going behind this co-worker and fixing the issues so it doesn't look bad on me. I don't want to start leaving the issues and be that guy that says "It wasn't me, he did that." I don't like being vocal unless it's absolutely necessary. In our case, however, our actual boss is in another state and our lead is very busy with things of his own. I just don't think it would be appropriate at this time to get him involved with something like this. I'd like to handle this on my own if I could and just looking for advice.
Has anyone dealt with a situation like this before? Should I have a heart to heart with him and risk him getting mad? I feel like I'm this co-worker's boss because I always have to tell him what to do, where to go, what to watch for, what tools to use. I have no issue training somebody or teaching ways to do the job but he does not listen - not even a little bit. But then he's the first to say he deserver more money because his buddy down the street makes more. I just don't want to get the heat for something he's going to inevitably goof up.
Sorry for rambling. There's more but I don't want to make this too long.
