Some people take pride in their work, while others prefer to pawn their responsibilities off on everyone else.

When one slacker colleague tried his lazy antics yet again, he found himself caught in a web of his own making — one corrupted spreadsheet cell at a time.

You’ll want to read on for the full 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.

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

Seth isn’t being super discreet, but he also never seems to catch any flak for it.

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.

Then Seth’s antics escalated.

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.

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

Perfect.

This admission turned out to be the perfect leverage to use against him.

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.

Fixing it would only make it worse!

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.

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

But things weren’t handled at all and Seth fell right into the trap.

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.

But this time was going to be different.

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.

The numbers don’t lie!

What did Reddit have to say about all this?

In this corporate world, sometimes the answer is over-communication.

This vengeful coworker should be careful to cover their tracks.

There’s no sense in doing a bang-up job if you don’t get any of the credit.

Many people just hate to admit when they don’t know something.

With corporate revenge, you often have to play the long game.

The numbers betrayed him, his excuses failed him, and for once, his charm couldn’t save him.

Seth finally ran into a problem he couldn’t copy and paste his way out of.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.