Incompetent Coworker Keeps Disappearing After Calling Meetings—Leaving Her to Do Double the Work
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Some coworkers will really make you want to pull your hair out!
This woman shares how her coworker kept putting her off for meetings and made things difficult to manage.
Find out what actually happened.
Coworker keeps ghosting me during meetings she asks for
Honestly, I don’t know what to do about this.
I’m working a remote, contract role with no schedule. It used to be a chill job for me; just me working independently and sending my finished work/updates primarily though email to my manager.
She was not expecting things to go like this…
Recently we’ve had a new team member join. She’s in a similar position as me (also remote, on-contract), and we have some overlapping responsibilities that we need to work together on.
I was excited about this at first but I’m getting to the point now where I’m getting frustrated by how flaky and avoidant she is.
As soon as she joined, I noticed she’s very insistent that all of our conversations (even just small updates/check-in’s) need to be done through virtual calls.
I’m fine and all with this, but honestly it’s a confusing choice because one; we’re in different time zones (she’s three hours behind where I am), and two; this isn’t our only responsibility, we both have either school or another job outside of this role.
She wanted things to flow easily…
So because of that all of our conversations needs to be coordinated in advance, which has begun to slow things down for me because I can’t get started or advance on my work until these conversations happen.
What’s really making this frustrating is it’s become a very regular thing for her to never show up and ghost me during these meetings that she requested.
It’s become a common routine where I’ll join the meeting and have to wait up to 30 minutes for her to join.
I’ll send her a message during it asking if she can make it, only to receive a response either hours or days later with a simple “oh sorry.”
There’s never an excuse or explanation, instead she requests we do it instead on later date. Then when I join that later meeting.. the same thing happens again.
That’s super RUDE!
I’m not even joking.
I’ve had a request from her for a “quick 5-minute call” to answer something for her while she troubleshoots an issue, continuously get pushed back and rescheduled by almost an entire month because she could never commit to the times she’d request.
I got really irritated and eventually asked her to just write what she needs so I can get to it immediately, but no, she’d insist it needs to be done in a call.
Finally, we were able to resolve it during our monthly check-in meeting with the manager. It literally went like this:
Her: “are you able to see this thing on your end?”
She was being so unreasonable!
Me: “no”
Her: “oh, okay”
.. Seriously? That was all it was.
I was able to get away with not needing to work closely on anything for a while after that, but recently, I’m now relying on her to get context on a project I need to do, and again I’m dealing with this same routine.
I wasn’t able to join our check-in meeting at the beginning of the month. It got rescheduled last minute to a time I wasn’t able to attend, so I asked her to please fill me in on what gets discussed and what I need to work on.
She scheduled a meeting with me to discuss the project and same thing, she never joins it.
She knew things would backfire!
A week later my manager sends us both a message asking for progress and I message her again to please fill me in so I can work on it immediately. She responds a week later saying “a call would be suffice.”
Well for two days now I’ve given her my availability and asked her to call me whenever works best for her, and I’m getting ghosted again.
I’m so over it.
It’s at the point now she’s just withholding the information I need to do my work, and now I’m about to miss the deadline for it.
I don’t understand the logic. She’s not old (she appears to be around my age or younger), so I don’t understand her reliance on everything needing to be discussed verbally. It’s like impossible for her to just write things down.
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That’s so weird!
I was trying to theorize why she’s like this with my partner – I thought maybe it gives her an excuse to put things off, or maybe that she’s just doing everything as a meeting to look more professional, but then get anxious last minute and avoids them.
But at this point it’s starting to almost feel malicious and deliberate, which is also odd to me since she’s relatively nice when I’m able to talk to her.
I’m not sure what to do or if it’s worth bringing this up to my manager since this is only a contract role. I’m trying my best to find another position at the moment but its taking some time.
YIKES! That sounds like an annoying coworker!
Why wouldn’t she complain to her manager about the coworker’s behavior?
Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.
That’s right! This user understands that speaking to the manager is the only way out.
This user believes the boss needs to be updated on the schedule of these meetings.
Exactly! This user knows this coworker is not the boss!
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a man who is shocked to learn how little he has to do to keep his cushy remote job.
This user suggests keeping the boss in the email thread.
This user seems to be reaching the root cause of this issue.
Somebody here needs to take some action!
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