There is a difference between helping a coworker and becoming their personal assistant.

When an employee spent a year picking up the slack for a colleague who never did anything for herself, the frustration had been quietly building for months.

So the day her coworker silently held out a certificate and expected it to be delivered without so much as a “please,” something finally snapped.

Keep reading for the full story.

AITA for not taking a certificate to HR for my coworker?

I have a coworker, and she’s very — I don’t know if lazy is the right term or if dependent is.

She’s newer than me, but she has more years of experience in the field. And she’s been here for a year, so not brand new.

She describes their working relationship in more detail.

I’m not her supervisor. Our boss tasked me with training her when she was hired, but we have the same job title.

She’s also disabled, which may be relevant to her motivations in this specific instance. She can walk, but she needs a cane.

This coworker isn’t the best at working independently.

When she wants to know about a specific thing, she doesn’t look it up in any of the guides. She asks me, who then has to look it up because these aren’t things everyone has memorized.

Once I told her “It’s in (name of guide),” and she got angry at having to stop what she’s doing to look it up.

She seems to really need a lot of guidance.

When I was training her, she wanted me to type instructions instead of her taking notes.

I did this for some things since our team didn’t have many training materials, but at a point I was busy, so I told her I couldn’t do so with this task and suggested she take notes. Her reply was, “Well, we’ll see.”

And when she’s encouraged to look up things for herself, she resists at every step.

Even after a year at the company, there are resources I’ve sent and shown her multiple times, but when she needs them she just asks me to send them to her instead of finding them on shared drives.

I’ll send her a path to the file in a reply to an email with the same email I already sent her months earlier to show her she had received it before, and she’ll still say, “I never knew about this.”

Eventually, she starts to feel outright resentful of this coworker.

So by the time this incident came about, I was a bit frustrated since I feel like she isn’t trying to learn anything. I feel like she is mooching off me.

So then came one of the most frustrating instances of all.

But on this day, we each got a reward for a project we worked on. To claim it (a gift card), we would need to hand the certificate to a person in HR.

HR is a floor above us, but there are elevators. So while she would have needed to walk a bit, it wasn’t far.

But even still, her coworker couldn’t do it herself.

I got up and started heading toward the elevator, and she said, “Are you going to see (HR person)?”

When I said yes, she just held out her certificate. She didn’t ask me, “Could you take this up for me?” She just held it out like this was expected.

This was finally the last straw.

So I was tired of her leaning on me for everything, and I felt like this assumption on her part — that she could just hold it out and not even ask — was a bit rude.

So I told her, “I think you need to hand it to her yourself to pick out the gift card.” (This used to be true — now they just send you a link — but that was the best I could think of without saying something like, “Do it yourself.”)

Then her coworker started making a scene.

She got angry and started saying loudly (and I feel intentionally so that other people would hear), “You really won’t take it up for me? Really? Really?”

I guess I could have taken it up. I was going there anyway, and this might be tied to her mobility issues.

I guess I just felt that she wasn’t asking for a favor — she was demanding it.

AITA?

Independence is a very important skill you need to learn if you want to succeed in the workplace.

What did Reddit make of all this?

At this point, her coworker is acting a bit childish.

Regardless of who’s at fault, this working relationship needs serious help.

It’s possible this coworker could be using her disability as an unfair crutch.

There’s a limit to how much you can lean on someone before they finally push back.

If you enjoyed that story, read this one about a mom who was forced to bring her three kids with her to apply for government benefits, but ended up getting the job of her dreams.