If all our favorite workplace sitcoms tell us anything, it’s that each workplace has a whole variety of characters.

And that’s exactly what makes things interesting.

But for the coworkers of the woman in this story, uniformity seems to be the order of the day.

Read on to find out why they got so mad about her doing things differently.

AITA for working too hard and making my coworkers look bad?

I am a 24-year-old woman, and I work at a fancy grocery store in the kitchen.

We have a salad bar, hot bar, and lots of other ready-to-eat food we make in house.

There are eight possible stations to work, but since we’re short staffed we usually only have four or five people working.

We’re all scheduled to work a certain station, but when closing time comes everything has to be shut down and cleaned and everyone’s really good at being a team when that comes.

Let’s learn a little more about this woman’s work ethic.

Sometimes the station I’m assigned doesn’t have enough prep or work to last me from my shift start time to when we start closing.

Say I’m assigned the salad bar but I’ve finished the prep list for the evening – so I’ll just go over to another station and see what’s going on there and do some prep (like, I’ll go slice things for the sandwich station).

We only have a supervisor five nights a week, and on the nights we don’t have one it’s really hard to access certain things on the computer, which can make the next day’s work a real pain.

So I asked if it was possible to give me access to these things so I could print off the par sheets for the next day and I was trained on that.

And while this is working for her, it isn’t working for everyone.

Personally, I don’t like standing around. I’d rather work to make the shift go by faster, so I feel like this level I’m doing is perfect for me and I don’t feel overworked or taken advantage of or anything.

But yesterday a couple of my coworkers told me I need to stop doing things on stations I’m not scheduled for, because it makes everyone else look bad.

One of the guys is always complaining about the sandwich station and how empty it is. I told him that I’m just trying to help him out.

His response was that it SHOULD be empty to “show them” that we don’t have enough labor to get all this stuff done.

That wasn’t the end of her colleagues’ complaints, either.

They told me I need to stop printing the par sheets because that’s “management’s job,” and I’m just letting them take advantage of me.

Personally I don’t want to be a manager, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable that I print a par sheet because when I don’t the people the next day inevitably complain there’s no par sheet.

Their argument is that the store is trying to make us do too much with too little, but the thing is, they DO have time to do extra.

They just stand around and talk for twenty minutes at a time.

And they continued to try to make the rules for themselves.

They decided they wanted to leave early tonight, and started closing duties at 6pm, even though we don’t close until 10pm.

I feel like I have time because I don’t really socialize and I think starting closing at 8pm is enough time to be out by 10pm – and I don’t really want to leave early because I want my hours…

I also feel like maybe the corporation wants us to do too much, but our direct manager over our department is really honest and straightforward and definitely WANTS to hire more people but there aren’t a lot of applicants. I don’t think he’s lying about that.

But I don’t know should I do less work to prove a point about labor?

AITA?

Sure, her colleagues do have a fair point, that the company could hire more employees to cover all the stations – but in truth, if there is time for them to stand around chatting, it doesn’t really seem like they need more staff.

It’s nice that the woman is taking initiative and responsibilities on the days that management aren’t around, and it’s true that she should be compensated for doing managerial roles.

But if that isn’t happening right now, it’s always helpful to have someone print off the sheets that will be needed tomorrow.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person thought there was nothing wrong with what she was doing.

And others thought they were just annoyed she was showing them up.

However, this Redditor thought she might be making a sticky situation for her future self.

Really, it seems like her colleagues are the problem.

She’s keen to help out – and that has many times included helping them out too.

It’s not her fault that she doesn’t want to be like them.

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.