A colleague once tried to foist her reports onto me. I simply forwarded her request to our manager with a note: Please help Sarah, she cant manage her workload.
Sarah joined our department about a year and a half ago. She was a pleasant, tidy woman, diligent in her tasks, and a mother of two. At first, her requests seemed harmless: Sorry, Im stuck at the GPs, could you take my call? or I need to collect my child early from nursery, would you mind uploading my report? Its just two clicks. Our team was used to looking out for one another, and I felt it right to support a colleague in need.
But theres a fine line between mutual help and regularly taking on someone elses work. After a few months, those two clicks became full tasks. Sarah sent messages at five oclock with the note: Youre there until six anyway, and my youngest is unwell. In truth, it was classic guilt-tripping: she played upon social expectations and sympathy for mothers. In our society, motherhood is almost sacred; she relied on that for quite some time until I began to realise my resources were draining.
Sarah cultivated an image of herself as a frazzled, heroic woman, forever juggling home and work. But reality was: our pay was the same, the key difference was that my evenings belonged to me, while part of her workload ended up on my desk. The first time I gently declined, citing my own workload, she shot back with passive aggression: You dont have children, so you cant know what its like to be pulled apart. This is a classic trap: she denied me the right to be tired, claiming my reasons were less valid.
Things came to a head at the end of the quarter. We needed to submit consolidated sales tables painstaking work, requiring focus. At 4:45pm, Sarah emailed me raw data with the message: The nursery plays been moved, and I must dash. Finish it, please, youre our expert itll only take you fifteen minutes, and I havent anyone to look after my child. Ill owe you tomorrow. At that moment, I realised: if I yielded, my free time would be swallowed up for months to come. A direct refusal would spark complaints and icy resentment. The matter needed to be lifted from personal favour to the realm of workplace procedure.
I didnt reply in anger. Instead, I forwarded her email to our manager, Mr James Richardson, with a calm note: Good afternoon, Mr Richardson. Im forwarding Sarahs email. Shes leaving her work to other staff due to family circumstances and cant handle her workload during office hours. Please help Sarah perhaps reconsider her volume of tasks, or offer her reduced hours, so she can focus on her family without overburdening the department. I am fully occupied with my own responsibilities and cant take on her tasks without risking quality.
It was daunting to press send. Thoughts spun through my mind: This is snitching, Shell hate me. But I was tired of quietly working for someone else.
Response was swift. Mr Richardson hadnt realised Id been covering for Sarah; everything had looked smooth to him. The next morning, Sarah was called to his office. I dont know the details, but she emerged red-faced and subdued. Never again did she ask me to cover or finish off her tasks.
Some people might say, Be kinder, children are sacred. Undoubtedly, but kindness at someone elses expense is exploitation. Someone truly struggling goes to the manager to arrange flexible hours, remote work, or leave they dont silently overload colleagues.
What I did was not revenge simply setting boundaries. In business, its simple: if you quietly take on someone elses work, you signal that youre fine with it. The stream of requests from Sarah dried up. Now, relations are formally polite, and the department runs as it did before. It turned out Sarah was perfectly capable of coping herself, once she stopped shifting her responsibilities onto others.
