Some co-workers can really make your workload heavier – or at the very least feel heavier – instead of lighter as it should be.

In this case, a man had enough of his lazy coworker and decided to make him sabotage himself in an ingenious way.

Let’s read the story.

Tricking My Slacker Coworker into Sabotaging Himself

I work in an office with a guy I’ll call “Seth.”

Seth is that coworker everyone knows: lazy, always passing his work onto someone else, and somehow always getting away with it.

He’ll sit around on his phone or go to the bathroom every 10 minutes.

He’s the kind of guy who will show up late, make some lame excuse about traffic, and then disappear for “lunch” for two hours.

He sounds like a joy to collaborate with.

For the past six months, Seth’s favorite target has been me.

He’ll send emails asking if I can “help out” with a project, but what he really means is, “do all the work while I take the credit.”

I complained to my boss a couple of times, but somehow Seth always managed to weasel his way out of trouble.

The final straw came when he passed off a major report that was due to a client in two days, dumping it on me last minute.

This is very disrespectful, but it wouldn’t continue for long.

One day I casually asked him if he was good with Excel, and he admitted he didn’t know much about it.

Perfect.

The next time Seth tried to dump a bunch of spreadsheets on me to organize for his next report, I agreed.

But this time, I embedded a series of hidden formulas into the documents.

These formulas didn’t do anything important, just enough to mess with the numbers if someone didn’t know how to check for hidden cells.

It took me a little time, but I was careful not to make it too obvious.

The kicker?

Every time Seth tried to copy and paste the data into his report, it would scramble everything just enough to be completely useless.

That’s dedication.

On the day the report was due, Seth slacked off like usual, assuming I had handled it like always.

When the client called, furious because the report was filled with nonsense numbers, Seth panicked.

He rushed to fix it, but every time he tried to fix one part of the report, something else would break.

He came to me, frantic, and asked for help. I acted confused and said, “Oh, I don’t know what happened! Maybe it’s a glitch?”

I gave him some vague advice and watched as he spent the entire day trying to salvage his mess.

Our boss found out, and for once, Seth couldn’t talk his way out of it.

He got lambasted for screwing up such an important project and was put on temporary leave without pay.

I guess he’ll be doing his own work from now on.

Unfortunately, extreme measures are the only way some people learn.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say about this.

A reader makes a suggestion.

This commenter thinks just saying ‘no’ is enough.

Another reader is glad he got caught.

Someone gives a warning.

Another commenter shares their take on this.

I wonder if this would work.

He learned a valuable soft skill the hard way.

It’s best to just do what you’re supposed to and don’t expect others to do it for you.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.