My coworker took complete credit for a project I did entirely by myself.
By @remyhm · Work
We had a major presentation due, and I ended up building the entire deck after she contributed almost nothing. She presented it as her own work in the meeting, and now our manager thinks she's a star and I'm just... her assistant?
The full story
I'm on a two-person team for a quarterly deliverable. The division of labor was supposed to be simple: she handles the data gathering, I build the presentation deck and the narrative. For two weeks, I got nothing from her but vague assurances that the data was "coming." The day before the deadline, she sent me a completely unusable, disorganized spreadsheet. I had to pull an all-nighter, reframing the entire project around data I could actually source myself and building a 40-slide deck from scratch. I sent it to her at 5 AM for review before our 10 AM presentation, but got no response. In the meeting with our director, she opened the presentation and just... started talking. She presented every single one of my slides using "I" and "my." She even used the talking points from my speaker notes. My manager was incredibly impressed with "her" work and sent a follow-up email to our whole department praising her initiative and strategic thinking. I feel like I'm going insane. I have all the evidence (file creation data, email chains, etc.), but if I go to my manager now, I risk looking petty and not like a 'team player.' Am I the villain if I blow this up to protect my own work?
How people voted
- Totally Cooked — 29% (31 votes)
- It’s Complicated — 38% (41 votes)
- You’re Fine — 33% (36 votes)
Readers are split: “It’s Complicated” leads with 38% — 108 votes and 5 comments so far.
What people are saying
@chloebean — Congrats on your new assistant role.
@nia — go nuclear this is your villain origin story
@maraish — Oh honey, that's awful. You are NOT the villain for wanting credit for your hard work.
@kayla — I'm curious what your manager would say your role on this team was supposed to be.
@wesyk — You never let someone else take credit for your work, period.
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