At small companies, sometimes employees have a lot of different roles to fill.

For example, in today’s story, one employee who is an attorney at a law firm also does a lot of tasks that an office manager would do.

The secretary at the company gets really annoyed by the attorney doing these extra tasks, but it backfires big time when the attorney decides to stop doing the office manager tasks.

Let’s see what happens.

Boss agrees with secretary that I am not the office manager so I stop managing the office

When I was doing my articles at a small law firm (internship to be admitted as an attorney) I was the go-to person for everything at the office (setting up computers, buying stationery, paying bills, going to court, seeing clients, etc).

After being admitted as an attorney I continued doing all this because the secretary only did about 20% of what a secretary would usually do and refused to do anything else.

My boss does some shady business (don’t pay taxes, etc) so he couldn’t just fire her for fear of her ratting him out.

He also never disciplined her.

We are not in the US.

This sounds horrible.

Since we worked from my boss’s mother’s house, the secretary also spent about 50% of her day just chatting to his mother and they became fast friends.

Guess who was always the evil one that everyone ganged up on?

Yours truly.

I was made out to be incompetent at my job and I used to cry a lot and almost became an alcoholic from work stress.

This seems like a simple request.

One day the secretary got really upset with me (after I asked her to buy stationery since we didn’t even have staples) and after a heated argument told me that I’m not the office manager and should stop lording it about as if I was (bear in mind I was her senior both as an attorney and in number of years worked at the firm).

My boss did nothing and rather got upset with me and so did his mother.

I decided there and then I am done doing both secretary work and my attorney work because I was working roughly 50-60 hours per week (standard is 40) trying to get everything done without receiving overpay (the unemployment rate in my country is around 30% and in the legal field supply of lawyers exceeds demand).

She knew this and my boss knew this but no one cared that I was basically working myself into an early grave.

Your wish is my command!

Cue malicious compliance.

If everyone agrees that I am not the office manager than I will stop managing the flow of the office and only do my attorney work.

I stopped paying the bills, buying the stationery, reminding my boss of important meetings, etc.

It got bad really fast.

Within two weeks the electricity was cut off for 10 days because it wasn’t paid and my boss’ elderly mother and the rest of his family had no electricity.

We could also not work for those 10 days.

Once the electricity went on, the phone lines were cut because of non-payment.

We could again not work.

It got even worse.

The post piled up, there were no stationery.

We couldn’t do service of court documents because our service providers cut us off.

It went on for weeks.

I simply worked around the issues and sorted my life out (one example: when the wifi was off I used my cellphone to hotspot my laptop without telling anyone).

There was no going back.

In the end my boss and his mother begged me to do what I used to do but I refused.

Since I was focusing more on my actual work my fees increased and my pay increased as well.

Shortly thereafter I moved away from that office to our secondary office and worked alongside lovely colleagues who all did what they got paid to do.

I have been at this new office (same firm just a different location) for the last two years.

Hopefully the secretary finally started to do her job.

Sometimes the best course of action really is to stop doing anything outside of your job description.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person is glad that she is in a better work environment now.

Yes, being an overachiever isn’t always a good thing.

We Americans do work a lot.

These are good questions.

It does seem odd.

That sounds like a horrible place to work.

Thank goodness she’s moved on.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.