Sometimes, you find that the person doing the least work makes the loudest excuses.

So, what would you do if you were drowning in deadlines, and even though your colleague didn’t have tasks assigned to her, she still claimed to be “too busy” to help you? Would you let it go and do it alone? Or would you find a way to get her fired for being too lazy?

In the following story, one admin assistant finds herself in this situation and chooses the latter. Here’s what she did.

Got my lazy colleague got fired

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

Two days before the 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.

She planned a way to fix the problem.

I went around to the three execs she supported and said, “I’m doing a review of admin workflow. What admin tasks do you have outstanding?”

“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 information about there being no assignments in the pipeline in that other unit to make the case for revising the admin workflow.

Then, she threw Suzy under the bus.

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!

Suzy wasn’t around for much longer.

My manager said, “May I ask, doing what for whom? Because, as far as I know, you were completely available. Did any of you have tasks assigned to Suzy last week?”

They all looked at each other. See, none of the three people knew that the others had not tasked her with any assignments either. Suzy blushed crimson red and stared at her shoes. She had just gotten caught lying to our boss in front of ALL of us. It was excruciating. Everybody winced.

I KNEW that Lazy Suzy not helping out when she had NOTHING to do would irritate our manager to no end. Interviews for Suzy’s replacement began the next week. She was gone by the end of the month.

Wow! It’s not like she wasn’t asking for it, though.

Let’s check out how the fine folks over at Reddit feel about what happened.

This person thinks that Suzy did it to herself.

This is funny!

Exactly.

Here’s someone who makes friends with admin assistants.

She didn’t cause it, just helped it along a little. That was really well-played!

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.