This senior manager has spent years on a small product team quietly absorbing extra work that no one wanted to touch.

While one longtime coworker openly mocked documentation and administrative tasks as “beneath her,” the rest of the team stayed late and worked weekends to keep things running.

Now that coworker is retiring, and leadership wants to celebrate her with an expensive, personalized gift. That’s when one team member finally decided she was done paying—literally.

AITA for refusing to contribute to a farewell gift for a coworker who constantly minimized our team’s work?

I (31F) am a senior manager on a small, five person product development team. Our coworker, Brenda (55F), is retiring next week after 20 years at the company.

Brenda is technically competent, but she has a notoriously negative attitude toward our team’s administrative workload.

Throughout her entire tenure, she treated essential tasks like documentation, data entry, and procedural compliance as beneath her, calling them grunt work and often openly mocking them.

We all know a Brenda.

Consequently, the remaining four of us had to absorb 100% of these critical but less glamorous responsibilities.

This imbalance meant the rest of us routinely worked late and weekends just to keep up with the mundane tasks Brenda shirked.

Our boss knows this happens but has always been hesitant to discipline Brenda due to her long service.

Oh please.

Now that Brenda is retiring, the team lead is organizing a big farewell gift a $600 personalized luxury watch and asking for a mandatory $100 contribution from each of us.

I politely declined to contribute anything. I explained privately to the team lead that I respect Brenda’s long career, but I cannot financially contribute to a celebratory gift for someone whose persistent refusal to share the basic administrative burden severely and negatively impacted my work life balance for years.

I said I would sign the card, but that’s all.

Ouch.

The team lead told me I was being petty and disrespectful, and that Brenda’s past behavior shouldn’t overshadow the need for professionalism during her retirement send off.

The other two coworkers who have also felt the strain of the extra workload are now uncomfortable because they feel pressured to pay the full amount, and they are saying I am making them look bad for not contributing.

AITA for refusing to pay for a luxury farewell gift for a long-term coworker whose negative attitude and refusal to do her fair share of the work constantly added a substantial burden to my own workload?

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Now she’s asking Reddit whether refusing to bankroll a glossy goodbye makes her unprofessional…or simply honest after years of imbalance.

This person says the minimum is WAY too large.

This person says no one is required to contribute to a work gift.

And this person makes the point the company should be paying for it anyway.

Turns out the hardest part of retirement isn’t leaving the job, it’s making sure everyone else forgets how much work you left behind.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.