I finished my coworker's section of a project without telling her so we wouldn't miss the 3 PM deadline.
By @paigelately · Am I the Villain
She left for a personal appointment and said she'd finish it tonight, but our team gets penalized if it's late. Now she says I overstepped and made her look bad.
The full story
Our team had a firm deadline of 3 PM to submit our final quarterly spreadsheet. Everyone got their sections in by lunch except my coworker, who pinged our chat at 1:45 PM saying she had an appointment and would wrap up her part tonight. If the file is late, our manager dings the whole pod's timeliness score. I had all the raw numbers sitting right in our shared folder, so I just opened her tab and spent twenty minutes finishing the inputs myself to submit by 2:50 PM. Now she is upset, claiming I stepped on her toes and made her look unreliable to our manager. I figured getting it submitted clean on time was the only thing that actually mattered.
How people voted
- Bad Move — 30% (41 votes)
- Needs Context — 41% (56 votes)
- Reasonable — 29% (39 votes)
Readers say “Needs Context” (41%) — 136 votes and 5 comments so far.
What people are saying
@brynnkindof — My coworker did this with our inventory sheets last spring and took credit in the all-hands meeting so I hid her stapler for three weeks. You saved the score though.
@willaok2 — tell your manager she asked you to do it
@idkman — she made herself look unreliable by logging off before the deadline.
@gabefr — A deadline is a deadline and you protect the group first.
@alsosame — L teammate.
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