My most recent struggles with issues like these are related to a project we started about 3 years ago. Brand new field that I had no expertise in, and an extremely complex one. Lots of complicated bioinformatics and statistics. So I was supposed to learn together with collaborators. Now how do we get collaborators? Got a grant for the project, and we needed an official expert on it so asked a Chinese guy who just established his research group in our institution and was considered a top notch person in that field. Great!
So he assigned one of his new postdocs to this collaboration. Turns out he does not speak or write understandable English at all! I was supposed to learn from him these complex analyses, but no way. He did it though, so I tried to figure out the result by myself. He left the job after a year or so. Then we recruited an American guy who had superb publication record in that area and apparently great skills. Brilliant, no more communication barrier so we can progress! No easy luck. This guy turned out to have extreme social anxiety, and all kinds of other anxiety... it was simply impossible to talk with him in person, he would just freeze each time. Still works with us and we communicate almost solely via email. But he gets paranoid all the time about everything and then would not do the work... Still works with us as a collaborator.
This is sort of a cursed project, in a few ways actually
