I’ve been covering for [Coworker]. She has some big project, and I don’t mind sitting in a few meetings once in a while if it helps a coworker out.

I hear that her project gets cancelled, but she still acts like she is the busiest person in the company. I stop covering her meetings as I do actually have other work to do.

She takes offence to this, but it was a favour, after all, and I legitimately was getting behind with my work. I make some excuse and she stops asking.

One morning, my boss pulls me aside.

Boss: “I’m going to ask you to support [Coworker]; she’s really busy at the moment.”

Me: “I have my own priorities to deal with. Are we sure this is the best use of my time?”

Boss: “Not really, but [Project] is getting a lot of attention and it’s apparently really important.”

Me: “That’s been cancelled; I heard it from [Senior Manager] himself.”

Boss: “What? I’m getting to the bottom of this.”

It turned out that [Coworker] didn’t know the project had been cancelled, as she never attended any of the meetings and actually didn’t have work to do. She just got her name added to the project team when she heard how important it was and then pretended to be busy with it without really knowing what it was about.

She got a warning and a lesson in not fobbing work onto others.

My first job out of college is working for a startup company. There are times when I am literally the only employee. It is overwhelming, to say the least, but the vice president agrees to take me under her wing.

I immediately start noticing some very obvious red flags, but even though I know some of the garbage she is spewing is wrong and not true, it slowly eats away at my self-esteem. When I have been employed with the company for three years, the global health crisis hits. At this point, I am ready to leave having realized how poorly she has affected my mental health, but due to the hiring freeze, I am forced to stay.

Her abuse begins to skyrocket from there, and then she tries to cover it up by isolating me. At one point, she tells me I am not even allowed to talk to my own mother. She insists that I must continue coming into the office — while everyone else works from home — and continues to expose me to the illness. I drive home crying literally every night.

Luckily, things get better, and one of the other managers sees how horrible she is to me. He insists, rather than firing me as she wants, that he will take over my managerial duties. I begin to flourish under him. Six months later, though, the PTSD symptoms start to set in and I am diagnosed with c-PTSD. My new manager knows about this and supports me as I go to therapy and get on a regime to lessen the symptoms.

Unfortunately, my new manager ends up leaving the company for a better opportunity (which I can hardly blame him for). Fortunately, the owner realizes how well I can do when I am not under the vice president and decides to make himself my manager.

Meanwhile, because I had been pulling her weight for three and a half years and haven’t been for a year, she tries to make “amends”. She “apologizes for her part” in a vague statement that overlooks what she has done to me and takes me not completely rejecting it as an invitation to start calling me at all hours of the day again and asking me for ideas to handle her other subordinates.

Prior, my new manager made it abundantly clear she was not to ask anything of me. With him out of the picture, she thinks she can get away with it. Luckily, before he leaves, he has a talk with both her and the owner, and the owner sides with him — not to the point of firing her, unfortunately, but my exposure to her is minimal and I do not have to pick up her calls, so that is great! And any time she manages to trap me alone, I tell her that I would like to discuss it with the owner — which she is none too happy about as she is trying to mine me for ideas — or tell her to ask him instead.

Meanwhile, the health crisis unwinds and I begin the job search again. Prior to doing that, I ask for a long-overdue raise. In the past, anytime I implied that I should probably ask for a raise, it was met with guilt-tripping and gaslighting on her part. She’d tell me how I “deserved” it but we “didn’t have the money” and it was selfish to think only about myself. Without her standing in the way, I am able to negotiate a 10% raise and five more vacation days within three weeks.

Using that raise that finally puts me at industry standards and the skills I learned over the past year not under her, I manage to find a better job! It is a real shame, though, because I liked my coworkers and loved the product. But after years of being told I should be grateful because I know my abuser and the type of abuse I will receive, I had to put myself first for a change.

[Coworker] works as a driver. I only meet her in passing, but that’s enough to realise she is a very clumsy, slightly ditsy woman. Her van is a state, both dirty and damaged. When I hear that she is referred to as the best driver we have, I’m shocked. For someone who often forgets why she has come into a room or ends up in the wrong meeting room, how she is the best we have is beyond me.

It’s none of my business… until I get a complaint from one of her customers. Apparently, all of my paperwork was completed incorrectly, I messed up poor [Coworker]’s deliveries all the time, it was all my fault, etc. The complaint copies in my manager and demands a new representative.

Luckily, I am the only one who keeps the paper copies of my sales receipts, so I check and I can prove that everything I did was perfect. [Coworker] messed up big time. I see my manager.

Me: “Hey, here are all the sales receipts. I have highlighted where the numbers show that I completed them correctly.”

Manager: “Oh, really? Okay, well, this looks in order. I’m glad one of you double-checks your work; I’m sick of [Coworker] complaining about mistakes.”

Me: “What mistakes?”

Manager: “Constant mistakes with addresses, names, and orders. Poor [Coworker] spends most of her time redelivering things.”

Me: “I didn’t know of any mistakes.” 

Manager: “[Coworker] insists on talking to the representatives herself. It’s sweet that she doesn’t want them to get into trouble, but to be honest, it’s overdue that I took over and dealt with this.”

Me: “I have never heard anything about any mistakes or ever seen [Coworker] in the office talking to anyone.”

Manager: “What are you suggesting?”

I asked around, and no one had ever heard anything from [Coworker], and they knew nothing about any mistakes. It took a lot of digging, but we couldn’t find one single issue with any of [Coworker]’s paperwork.

It turns out she would make mistakes regularly. When she was caught out, she blamed the paperwork. She had convinced all the customers that it was our fault and that she was the only one helping them.

They swapped her customers with other drivers and suddenly all the “mistakes” moved with her. I think they moved her into a back room somewhere, but she wasn’t working for the company a few months later when I checked.

I work for a fairly large company. Typically, once a year, we have a regional leadership meeting, and management from each location has two or three people attend. These meetings are usually Tuesday to Thursday and are held at a fairly nice resort-type hotel. However, the meeting schedules do not allow for much enjoyment of the facilities. They have always been scheduled so that there is a “travel day” on Monday, though, so that if folks want to bring spouses or families for the weekend, they can have a little relaxation prior to the meetings.

A few years ago, the meeting was changed and we were flown to California so we could visit the company headquarters. Fewer people took advantage of the extra days due to the expense of paying for flights for family members, but there were a few. My co-manager and I were friends and decided to fly out early and do some sightseeing. As typical, we booked our own reservation for the “extra” days since that part is not covered by the company.

Imagine my surprise when an email went out to the group that advised that they did not want us staying at the host hotel for personal stays prior to the meeting because they were worried about possible billing errors. Sadly, several people actually changed their hotels because of this.

I sent an email reply and advised that I was an adult and I would not let the company dictate my choices as it was my money and my time off to do as I wished. I suggested that the hotel probably wouldn’t appreciate them actively discouraging us from spending additional days there. I also pointed out that if the hotel was so poorly run that they didn’t think they were capable of keeping our separate personal stays separate from their large corporate event, maybe we should consider holding the event at a different facility.

I did, however, offer that if they wanted to reimburse me for the extra time — at double pay since it would be on my scheduled time off — and expense it would take for me to repack my belongings, switch hotels, and unpack again, I would consider it.

I got a reply email that simply said that it was fine for me to keep my reservation as it was. But I still shake my head that they somehow thought they could dictate how I spent my time off just because I chose the same venue as the event.

I work with a woman who is pushing sixty and enjoys infantilizing herself to try to get me to accomplish her tasks. As far as I can tell, it is usually because she thinks the tasks are beneath her. For the first three years of my employment, I just go with it as it is my first job, and as a twenty-something straight out of college, you don’t really know the industry norms.

However, after a while, when [Coworker] starts to become blatantly abusive, I stop and focus on MY job. But don’t worry. She usually figures it out on her own. Because I am no longer a willing participant and it would be absurd (and highly inappropriate) to demand I do her work for her, she has resorted to living in Lalaland and acting like a toddler.

One day, [Coworker] calls me.

Coworker: “Hey. What is the password to [account]? I need to get in to purchase some things and I don’t want to put it on my card.”

Me: “Check the password list. You have access to it.”

Coworker: “Can you just do it for me?”

Me: “Sorry, but right now I am busy. I can look into it in a couple of hours if you like?”

Coworker: “I need it now!”

Me: “Best of luck to you, then.” *Hangs up*

She stews for an hour or so before she texts me, “Never mind. Found it.” Good for her, I suppose.

Two hours after she finds the password, I get an email from the purchasing website that the transaction was declined. I figure it is her, so I discover that she was trying to purchase nearly $6,000 in cellphones on my card. My card has a $1,500 limit as I am a tiny little fish, so it is no surprise, but what is a surprise is that she used my account. I go in and change the password and let her know. I CC our boss on the email.

Me: “Hey. It seems you tried to use my card to make the purchase and it got declined. Thanks for reminding me to change the password, though!”

Two minutes later, I get an email telling me someone is trying to reset my password. A minute after that, she tries to call me. At this point, I decide to ignore it. She ends up calling twice more, sending me a grand total of ten text messages, and sending three more attempts to reset MY password. After about thirty minutes, I finally resend the email, once more copying our boss.

Me: “Hey. I don’t know if you saw, but I reset the password due to the security concern. You will have to use your own account and your own credit card. You can reset your password if you need to.”

I also send her a text letting her know.

Two hours later, I get another text.

Coworker: “Thanks. I got it. Turns out there was a credit limit cap. I need these for a client, ASAP. I told them I would order them. I will have to purchase it in increments. Please be on standby.”

Me: *Thinking* “For what? What can I possibly help you with?”

I was issued a new credit card due to fraud concerns from some crazy person trying to purchase nineteen cell phones with it, and [Coworker] was informed that in the future, she needs to go through purchasing — and to use her own company card.

And for her grand reasoning? She didn’t want to fill out the expense report, and she had told the client they would be in on Friday. Interesting how she filled it out last week with no issue.