frustrations of a plebeian (1)

I am but a simple, subsistence farmer in the society that is my company. Sure, I'm a landowner and [more or less] have a good deal of freedom, but I am wholly unremarkable with respect to money and power. Mr. D (a pseudonym, of course) is a also a farmer, but a much more powerful one. He does not have his own commercial farming organization, but he runs a co-op that includes several farmers in addition to himself. Consistent with the Peter Principle, he seems to have been promoted [at least] one level past his competence.

To be fair, running the co-op does not take all of Mr. D's time. The portion still spent farming is quite productive; he's not a bad farmer at all. To run the co-op, however, requires different skills: namely, leadership. Such a leader needs to not only inspire confidence in the other co-op members, but also command respect from the outside farmers with whom he competes and/or cooperates. Needless to say, Mr. D does not have those skills.

This whole post started because of Mr. D's ability to all-too-frequently make me shake my head and mutter [under my breath] "Good Lord... get your shit together, buddy." His beginning-of-meeting routine is a good example. Meetings at my company are inevitably shifted 5 minutes late because the people in the conference room before you never leave on time, so neither do you, or the folks after you, and so on. People calling in from their desks are normally on time; so not only are you starting late, but the poor fellas on the conference call have been listening to hold music for 5 minutes before you even enter the room.

At this point, a smart Meeting Leader would dial in to the conference call, bring his laptop out of standby, refresh the Sametime webpage (the software we use for online collaboration), and be up and running within 30 seconds. Mr. D enters the conference call, apologizes for the previous meeting lasting too long, then proceeds to delay the start of /this/ meeting by at least another five minutes. First, he unpacks the A/C adapter and mouse. Apparently, nobody told him that laptops have a battery and pointing device built the fuck in[1]. Once those are organized and plugged in, he turns on his computer: not 'resumes from standby', or even 'resumes from hibernation', but 'turns on' his computer. For the laptops in my group, booting up can waste anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes; resuming from standby takes about 15 seconds. Once powered up and logged in, he has to search for and open the Sametime meeting and any documents germane to the topic at hand. If, during the meeting, he has to find a new file, he often closes all the other open windows. Of course, if he needs any of those now-closed files again, he has to find and reopen them. Maybe all these things aren't frustrating to other Luddites, but they make me want to pull my hair out. Technology exists to make our lives easier, faster, cheaper, and more productive, but Mr. D uses technology to waste my time and make himself look like an idiot.

This has been nothing more than a rant, and I apologize for that... not because I don't think it's a worthy topic, but because I don't think I took enough time in composing it. This guy projects a constant aura of incompetence, and I was hoping to provide a clear picture of the computer-related aspect of that aura.
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[1] At least he's smart enough to use the wireless network instead of taking the time to set up a wired connection.