When you are really busy at work, you should be able to count on your coworkers for a little assistance.

What would you do if you asked your coworker to take on a little work that you were behind on, and several days after she agreed to do it, she returned the papers to your desk and said that she was too busy to get it done (even though it was due the next day)?

That is what happened to the worker in this story, so in the next meeting with the coworker and several managers, she asked about what was keeping her so busy. When the other managers confirmed that they hadn’t assigned her anything, everyone knew she was caught in a lie. She was fired shortly after.

It is never a good idea to be dishonest at work because it will often come back to bite you. Read through the full story below and see what you think of how it was handled.

Got my lazy colleague got fired

I was an admin assistant supporting 5 professionals, I was swamped with work, time was running out so I handed some of it off to Lazy Suzy, who only supported three people and had nothing to do.

If she wasn’t going to do the work, she should have said that up front.

Two days before deadline she dumped it back on my desk, saying she had been “too busy to get around to it”. I knew this wasn’t true because her department had nothing on at the time.

For me this was the last straw. I wanted to get her fired. I went round to the three execs she supported and said “I’m doing a review of admin workflow, what admin tasks do you have outstanding?”

She is going to get some things changed.

“None right now” was the answer. This wasn’t unusual. Theirs was an ebb-and-flow kind of unit. Swamped one week, twiddling your thumbs the next. But our unit was busy most of the time.

I worked overtime to get it done. I’d previously spoken with my manager about being overloaded, so I went to her office and used that info about no assignments in the pipeline in that other unit to make the case for revising the admin workflow.

Suzie did not prepare for this.

At the Monday morning staff meeting our manager asked why I’d had to use overtime to get the work done. I said “Ask Suzy. That work had been on her desk. Then she brought it back to me.”

Suzy said “Because I’d been too busy.” Perfect! She’d trapped herself in a lie! My manager said “May I ask, doing what for who? Because as far as I know, you were completely available. Did any of you have tasks assigned to Suzy last week?”

This must have been so awkward.

They all looked at each other. See, none of her three people knew that the others had also not tasked her with any assignments.

Suzy blushed crimson red and stared at her shoes. She had just got caught lying to our boss in front of ALL of us. It was excruciating. Everybody winced.

Many managers hate liars.

I KNEW that Lazy Suzy not helping out when she had NOTHING to do would make our manager angry to no end.

Interviews for Suzy’s replacement began the next week. She was gone by the end of the month.

If a manager can’t trust you, they aren’t going to keep you around very long.

Check out what the top commenters on this story had to say about it.

She did this to herself.

Management should have known long before this took place.

Things just fell into place.

Getting to know the admins is very smart.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a manager who wonders why productivity dropped after he banned overtime with no exceptions.

It was a great story.

If you’re going to pretend to be busy at work, you better not say it in front of the people who assign you tasks. She really should have thought it through.

If she had just done the work from the beginning, or even said that she couldn’t help from the start, none of this would have happened.