Imagine being the most helpful and efficient person at the office and still being taken for granted by everyone.

This is what happened to this man while working at a large German bank, and he shares how he finally woke up and realized he deserved better.

Let’s read the story.

“You are doing too much” – “You are abandoning your coworkers”

So I am a banker.

Not the Gordon Gekko type, but the other kind, the one where every time you try to describe what you do, people give you a blank stare and try to say something polite.

I worked in corporate finance at a large German Bank.

Speaking English and German was absolutely required, ideally you would speak another language as well, as we financed a lot of stuff all over the world.

He was aware he had a lot of responsibilities… His coworkers, not so much.

I worked in a Mid Office function, so right in between the sales guys with the huge pay checks and the back office guys who would drop everything at 5 pm, no matter how important it was.

My job back then was to support the sales guys by basically doing their busy work and taking over a deal as soon as it was signed.

After a deal has been signed and paid out you needed to monitor it for the whole length of its run.

This involved a lot of tasks.

Collect documents, reports, balance sheets and watch out for legal requirements as well as take part in international meetings.

Also just generally be available for everything anyone needs while coordinating all the in-house departments.

Basically I was the first guy you reached when you came in from outside and wanted something to do with the financing in question.

We were separated into different product groups.

When I started my boss sent me to a product which was managed pretty damn badly by an older person who still worked as they did during the 1990s (and this was the late 2010s).

A younger guy who worked with the dedication of a local public servant (or DMV worker, for the Americans).

This put more responsibility on him.

So the product was basically going to **** and I was supposed to save it.

I worked hard for a few months to reorganize everything, having to suffer my older colleague who officially was my senior (while actually not knowing anything) and the younger guy who didn’t do anything.

But I got it sorted. Boss was happy and sent me to another product.

He didn’t complain and the job was done. But there was more work to do.

Now product 1 suffered because of the people, but also because older person was constantly sick.

Product 2 suffered because the person in question didn’t speak English very well and made mistakes.

That was an easy fix, I just set up our in-house systems for them so that they would receive reminders when the contract required it and those reminders gave them a detailed description, in German, of what they had to do.

Boss was even happier.

He was carrying this “group project”.

By this point I did the major work of two products, when everyone else on the team had a main product and worked part time (like 30%) on a secondary product.

I did 100% for 2 products, but since everyone worked veeeeeeeery slowly, it didn’t stress me too much.

So a young colleague decided to leave for another department and someone had to take his place.

Maybe he would get more help now?

I was tired of product 1 anyway and told my boss that I would take product 3, together with product 2…

But he would have to have another colleague take over for me in product 1, since this had been streamlined so much already that it wasn’t much work.

Boss agrees, IF I am always ready to help out (I think you can see where this is heading, think “naive employee believes working a lot will get him praise”, a common theme here).

I agree as well.

Uh-oh.

I start on product 3 and pretty soon I am handling 75% of all deals in that area.

I have a part time colleague who is incredibly slow because she trusts no one’s work, not even her own and spends hours checking and rechecking everything.

Also a younger colleague who is beloved by my boss’s boss’s boss, because he plays football.

But it was a delicate arrangement.

This is where it starts to go wrong.

Younger colleague gets a lot of projects, besides not giving a **** and not working them properly.

I suddenly realize that I have worked there for years and no one will give me a project or anything else that would allow me to develop.

Even though I do the work of three people and I am still working in product 1 as my replacement takes no responsibility and shoves everything troublesome my way.

He spoke up about it.

I say as much to my boss (yeah, I know, younger me kinda lost out when the brains were handed out).

It didn’t help that he never gave me more than 100% on my yearly evaluations, always finding a reason why he couldn’t give me more.

(Mostly it was because it would have been “unfair for everyone else” and I wanted to please so I didn’t say anything).

I found out that the young football guy routinely got 125% while doing far less than I did.

Things sounded okay, but didn’t feel okay.

My boss was COMPLETELY understanding and nice and said that something will come.

Now I am constantly angry and depressed and it’s starting to affect my health.

Boss tells me to take it slow and to actually call in sick when I am sick.

That’s good advice…

So yeah, I do exactly that (cue malicious compliance).

I have a young child at this stage and I am tired and angry and depressed and get a lot of colds and other illnesses, that looking back I can only assume had something to do with my mental state.

So I get sick about a week or two every quarter.

Add to that the 30 days of vacation time and the fact that I had to lose a lot of overtime, and I suddenly wasn’t there 24/7 anymore.

He put himself first, for the first time in a while.

And it turns out that my colleagues are not only not able to do their own jobs without me constantly supporting them, they are definitely UNABLE to do my job as well, because I had taken on so much responsibility.

It became pretty clear that all the so called “seniors” (a job I was denied, as someone would have had to leave before I could get it) completely relied on me.

No one could get my Excel tables to work (I still don’t get why people don’t just Google stuff, Excel isn’t exactly rocket science) and deadlines were being missed left and right.

So now everyone realized how incredibly helpful he was, right?

I kind of hoped that this would cause the bosses to realize how important I was.

But instead all the colleagues complained that I was “constantly” absent.

I actually came back to a very negative place that hated me and a boss who wrote “he abandoned his colleagues” in my performance review, even though that sort of thing would get thrown out by any HR in Germany.

Wow. He realized they just didn’t appreciate him, period.

Cue second malicious compliance: I got really angry and told my boss that instead of blaming me, he should see what I actually did for the team and how it wouldn’t even work properly without me.

He was polite about it but basically said they don’t need me, I am just one of the guys there.

So I quit and I am beyond grateful I did.

Things got better.

I now have a job in a local bank 20 Minutes from where I live (instead of 1-1,5h).

They actually care about their customers and their employees, everyone tries to work constructively with everyone else and when we meet for drinks it’s actually nice and has nothing to do with work.

Here no one gives a **** about education or rank and it’s the first time in my life that I don’t dread going to work.

It’s great to be appreciated.

Let’s see what Reddit thinks about this.

Someone shares their ordeal.

Someone empathizes with him.

This person also left.

Another reader chimes in.

You live, you learn.

Yup.

Hopefully, they learned to be better coworkers.

Because he definitely learned he deserved better coworkers.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.