Basic Trope: A professional who doesn't have the basic skills required to do his job.
- Straight: Bob hires Mark the mechanic to fix his broken tractor. Mark proceeds to dismantle the whole thing and is unable to put the machine back together.
- Exaggerated: Mark the mechanic has never even seen a machine before, and has to ask Bob about what the various tools and parts are—including the most basic items, such as screws, nuts and bolts.
- Downplayed: Mark manages to fix the tractor, but his workmanship is poor, and the vehicle breaks down after Bob uses it for 5 minutes.
- Justified:
- Mark is a fresh grad with no working experience, and he's never handled tractors during his college practical course.
- Mark's father used to be a famous mechanic, and he is continuing his father's business, despite not being qualified for the job (he studied medicine, for one thing).
- Mark is actually an electrician, and Bob hired the wrong guy.
- Mark is a mechanic, but the specifics of the situation at hand go way over his head (ex. Bob's tractor is a brand-new experimental type, essentially the tractor version of KITT, and Mark's experience is with plain-jane John Deeres).
- Mark is a Jet Ski mechanic, not a car mechanic. Bob should have read the advertisement a bit better.
- Inverted: Bob asks for his neighbor Alice to help him fix the tractor. Despite Alice's protests that she can't fix a thing to save her life, and that she's never seen a tractor before, much less be able to help him with it, her random Percussive Maintenance somehow makes the tractor engine run again.
- Subverted:
- Bob hires Mark to fix his broken tractor. To his horror, Mark proceeds to dismantle the whole thing, but only because many of the parts are broken beyond repair and need to be replaced.
- Bob mistook Harold for his TV character Mark the Mechanic.
- Double Subverted:
- The replacement parts Mark procures are completely different from the previous ones. They don't fit the tractor, and ends up breaking the whole machinery.
- Harold landed the role due to him being a licensed mechanic. question
- Parodied: Mark is a Walking Techbane, but somehow manages to make a living as a mechanic for several years. For some illogical reason, people keep on hiring him even though he always makes things worse.
- Zig Zagged: Mark dismantles Bob's broken tractor, but assures him that he's only going to replace the parts that are beyond repair. He then procures a bunch of random parts that is completely different from the previous ones. Mark proceeds to build an entirely new tractor from scratch, and it looks much better than the one Bob has before. Bob is impressed, and jumps to test his new vehicle, only for it to completely fall apart the moment he starts the engines.
- Averted: Mark is a decent mechanic, and manages to complete his job well.
- Enforced: The creators of the show want to encourage the viewers to be more careful/attentive when hiring other people to work for them.
- Lampshaded: "You call yourself a mechanic, and you don't even know what a tractor is?"
- Invoked:
- Mark declares himself a mechanic because it sounds cool, even though he's aware that he's not qualified for the job and will not be able to make a decent living out of it.
- Mark writes "how-to for dummies" books in mechanical maintenance… of course, having no knowledge of mechanics but plenty of experience in explosive failures, he writes them as "whatever else you do, don't do this" warning pamphlets.
- Exploited: Jimmy, Bob's rival, pretends to be Bob and hires Mark to check on "his" tractor, knowing the result will be a perfect sabotage.
- Defied: Mark realizes that he will lose his career if he keeps on screwing up his job, and takes a course to improve his skills.
- Discussed: "If you need to have anything fixed, don't hire Mark. Despite his experience, he absolutely sucks at his job."
- Conversed: "I've seen this episode before! It's the one where Bob hires Mark to fix his tractor, only for Mark to ruin it completely. Serves Bob right for being a cheapskate."
- Deconstructed: Mark's consistently poor workmanship earns him a reputation as a terrible mechanic, and no one is willing to hire him. Mark refuses to find another career, and dies penniless.
- Reconstructed: Mark decides to focus on whatever few strengths he has and he knows can only get better, not worse, with his occasional bumbling: as he is still competent at taking things apart, he seeks work in a junkyard or chop shop. Also, he makes a little extra on the side by hiring out his services as a vehicular saboteur.
- Played For Drama: Mark is hired to fix a machine and it explodes because of his careless work. It kills and/or injures several people, and Mark faces criminal charges for his negligence.
- Played For Laughs: Mark's fixing work always involve colorful Stuff Blowing Up that somehow ends up as Accidental Art. People hire him for the entertainment value instead of his non-existent mechanical skills.
- Played For Horror: Mark's not just a shitty mechanic. He's the very definition of "Lethally Stupid" applied to mechanics. The vehicular accidents for which he's responsible would fill about a dozen more Final Destination films.
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