Have you ever dealt with someone so thick you wanted to actually cry or just leave the room without a word?

This is where I am…dealing with an obstinate, uniformed workforce will make you ill. As a matter of fact, idiots in the office are just as harmful to your well-being as cigarettes, caffeine, or greasy food. I thought it was me who was being unreasonable but then I ran across an eye-opening study by Dr. Dagmar Andersson. She confirms that those dopes can kill you!

Dr. Andersson, says her team studied 500 heart attack patients, and was puzzled to find 62 percent had relatively few of the physical risk factors commonly blamed for heart attacks. “Then we questioned them about lifestyle habits, and almost all of these low-risk patients told us they worked with people so stupid they can barely find their way from the parking lot to their office. And their heart attack came less than 12 hours after having a major confrontation with one of these oafs.

“One woman had to be rushed to the hospital after her assistant shredded important company tax documents instead of copying them. A man told us he collapsed right at his desk because the woman at the next cubicle kept asking him for correction fluid — for her computer monitor.

“You can cut back on smoking or improve your diet,” Dr. Andersson says, “but most people have very poor coping skills when it comes to stupidity — they feel there’s nothing they can do about it, so they just internalize their frustration until they finally explode.”

Stupid co-workers can also double or triple someone’s work load, she explains.

“Many of our subjects feel sorry for the drooling idiots they work with, so they try to cover for them by fixing their mistakes. One poor woman spent a week rebuilding client records because a clerk put them all in the ‘recycle bin’ of her computer and then emptied it — she thought it meant the records would be recycled and used again.”

You can’t always choose the people you work with, but if a hire makes work harder for you and others you certainly have cause to complain. Of course, by taking action you might put this dumb coworker out of a job which is a tough thing to put on your shoulders, regardless of how incapable one may be. So, before taking action, you need to see the full picture. When you’re truly sure you’re dealing with a coworker you just can’t work with, here are different possible actions:

Find the root of the problem – they might just be dumb, poor learners, or don’t understand what you keep telling them and fear your reaction if they tell you. Give them a chance to offer an explanation. Maybe you are a terrible teacher and you just don’t realize it. Maybe they just struggle with certain tasks and don’t know what to do. In this case, you can ask how to teach them and work with them a little more closely. Of course, it is not your responsibility to spend a lot of your time educating a coworker. They should come in mostly knowledgeable about how to do their job. You shouldn’t spend hours training them in basic tasks they should know how to do, unless you have the time and the desire to help someone else improve. Most of us have our actual work, however, and can’t devote this kind of time—especially when we’re not sure we’ll actually get anywhere. But if you can spare some moments each day, you can help someone struggling who will, in turn, remember what you did and want to help you in return some day.

Ask another coworker to try – ask someone on your level or above you to work with this problematic coworker for a little while and assess the situation. Your smarter coworkers may not find a problem. If they don’t, you have to consider that you have some sort of issue with this “dumb” coworker and need to resolve it.

Talk to a Manager, Boss, or Human Resources – human resources operates, to some extent, to help solve issues between employees. If someone doesn’t carry their weight, employers want to know. They, presumably, don’t want to waste their money on an underperforming member of the team. If you decide to report the problem to the company, follow this two-step plan:

Schedule an appointment with HR –  explain the issue in as unbiased of a manner as you can. Suggest a few options that don’t include termination.

Find humor in their stupidity – sometimes dumb coworkers are here to stay despite their lack of intelligence. Sometimes you’re the only one who thinks they’re dumb. Regardless of the situation, if you fail to resolve it through the above means you should stop fighting the battle and relax. Try to find the humor in their stupidity. Replace the frustration with a laugh. If you didn’t have to work with them, you’d probably find a lot of their actions funny.

If you don’t try some of these things, trust me (and Dr. Andersson), those dopes will kill you!

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