New role woes

LegacyUser

I worked in a company for nearly 2 years. I coasted along in a just ok-paid job, but didn't really like the job or the people I work with. All it had going for it was it was a reasonably strict 9-5. I was actually looking for jobs externally, but there is little in my area and I didn't fancy a long commute. Then this job came up internally with decent pay, a Team leader (TL) title, and despite the baggage something I thought i'd be more than capable of doing.

There were only two people on the team:
The staffmember, who started the job 10 months previously.
The previous TL, who was now leaving her role for a new position within the company. I applied and got the job. I'm now 2 months in, but strictly speaking it's closer to 3 months as I had access to staffmember, mailbox and began self-training immediately on finding out I had the job.

The "training" i was provided was basically 3 x 1 hour sessions of listening to the former TL ramble on and on (later found out much of what she was going into intricate detail was completely irrelevant) without actually showing me anything in the line of systems, programs or spreadsheets, while forwarding me dozens of emails with no context for doing so other than some contained unresolved issues I would now be responsible for. She actually hid a folder of notes (out of date and not very helpful, but better than nothing) - another team's staff member gave them to me just a couple of weeks ago. They were in a filing cabinet on another floor for about 5 years.
She just insisting her work was all ad-hoc and project work, there were no regular queries or tasks that she could show me that the staffmember could not.

The (current) staffmember is a 50-year old, very slow, English is not his first language mumbles a lot... He cannot touch-type, even though his job is to reply to email queries. I reckon his typing speed is 10wpm. His tactic is to pick an easy, data-entry-style query and to spend the morning doing it, and the afternoon doing another easy query, when it would take 15 queries a day just to keep on top of things. When I joined the team, there were 3500 emails in the inbox (mainly cc'd stuff he was too lazy to delete, or the same sender sending reminder emails). I've gotten it down to about 60 (mainly large/more complex) queries still outstanding. Trouble is, these queries are the drudge that the guy is paid to do, and by doing them myself I'm doing his job and not mine. If I leave him to his own devices, the queries build at a rate of at least 10 per day and result in escalations.

To make matters worse, there's an integration project going on, and a lot of the responsibility seems to fall on me to set up things correctly to work around system limitations, despite me having little knowledge or experience of the system.

And finally, the previous TL who provided me such bad training and no procedure documentation is still on the scene, getting involved in the queries like some sort of subject matter expert, while remaining unhelpful (she doesn't deal with queries start to finish, instead she opens a can of worms with every response, overcomplicating even simple things, and making me do the legwork). I never wanted to work with this woman, and I have a feeling her new role isn't that secure and she wants to remain involved in my role (her new role isn't in a completely unrelated area), but with me doing the actual work but her getting the credit for being the helpful, knowledgeable SME!

So, that's the venting.

My options:
1. go to my manager. go to hr. tell them my sob story about how it's all the previous TL's fault, along with the other guy they hired (who got a good performance appraisal and passed probation by the previous TL). clearly, not an option i want to explore.

2. suck it up. just do my best. learn from my mistakes. try to fix what's broken. try to cover my arse. hope for a replacement staffmember (even though it would take 2 months just to train them up, and not guaranteed anything better than they currently have). hope nothing really bad blows up in my face. remember faraway hills are greener. Many people where i work are terrible at their jobs and just coast along in this manner (although it's harder to hide with only 2 people on a team, and a very high-profile integration project on the horizon-failures of similar projects previously resulted in people losing their jobs)

3. start looking for something else immediately. visit a recruitment agency next week. the place is a disaster, i wanted to leave anyway, and 2 years in one company is acceptable, maybe other companies won't mind me packing in my first "TL" position after only 2 months.

I'm leaning towards option 3 now to be honest.