This idiot is constantly looking for problems to solve, that only he can solve so he can swoop in and be the saviour. The only problem is that they're always non problems and sadly I have no real way to prove it. Whenever I call him out he gaslights me and uses a lot of overly complicated technical jargon to make it seem like I just don't grasp the full complexity of the situation.
A little game he loves to play is after inventing his fake problems, he then goes to management and tells them how he just solved this enormous (non-) issue and how great it is for everyone.
Today I finally found definitive proof that he's full of shit. Not that I didn't already know. We work in biopharma and his whole schtick has been that our predecessors couldn't do their jobs. There were some problems but somehow the place run fine for around a decade prior to our arrival with these supposed incompetent fools. There are certainly things we do better since we are graduates and they are not, but they weren't bad at their jobs.
Our job is managing inventories. They generally take the form of freezers. A few weeks ago he had a very quick glance in a freezer our predecessors filled and came back to our team telling us how it's completely messed up. When I asked him how: are boxes unlabelled? Are they labelled incorrectly? Are samples just in the wrong place? He just kept telling me that it's complete chaos and it's so complicated he cannot possibly summarise it. So I asked him if we can just fish out one box and take a quick look to see what it might be and he says it wouldn't be representative data and not to lmao.
Fine. Whatever.
So he also drags his feet and always has done. This is quite a high priority task, to audit our inventories. There's around 4000 samples in that one freezer and we need to catalogue them properly. Since I've now chased him up on this multiple times and he isn't interested in starting I did it myself.
3000-4000 samples later and I only found around 100 inconsistencies. Either something is missing from our electronic inventory and I need to register it in, update a barcode or the sample was in the wrong spot. The craziest issue was a total of 5 typos. Someone didn't capitalise letters in a case sensitive string. The most common issue was something ran out and it hadn't been deleted on our electronic inventory. Took 2 afternoons.
So quite obviously he either finds easy tasks very difficult, or he tried to orchestrate a situation where once again he came to save the day from a problem he fabricated.