Employee amusingly unmasks a lazy co-worker who kept dumping his work on them without remorse

Most workplaces have an infamous slacker who is passively and leisurely productive, thanks to their knack for appearing busy while expertly avoiding actual work by passing it on to someone else. However, their laid-back approach can't survive for long because karma works in mysterious ways. In one scenario, karma took the human form and caught the slacker red-handed. An employee, u/SeagullFanClub, shared the story on Reddit of how they unmasked the shenanigans of their lazy co-worker. They did it so subtly that the co-worker had no idea.

Referring to the slacker co-worker as Seth, the employee explained, "Seth is that co-worker everyone knows: lazy, always passing his work onto someone else, and somehow always getting away with it." Frequent bathroom breaks, constant scrolling on the phone, long lunches and late arrivals at work were all a part of Seth's routine. The employee was quite annoyed by this mostly because they were Seth's "favorite target." He often sends them emails asking them to help out, but by help, he means to do the work for him while he takes the credit. "I complained to my boss a couple of times, but somehow Seth always managed to weasel his way out of trouble," they mentioned. 

The employee added in a comment they were nice to Seth initially, as they were newer to the role than he was. But they were done with the sluggard when he dumped an important project on them. Knowing Seth wasn't so good at Excel, the employee decided to take their sweet revenge when he was passed several spreadsheets to work on. "This time, I embedded a series of hidden formulas into the documents. These formulas didn't do anything important, just enough to mess with the numbers if someone didn't know how to check for hidden cells," the employee explained. Though it took a while, it was worth it because it would leave Seth with scrambled data every time he tried to copy and paste something. 

The day when the report was due, Seth was quite confident as his work was already taken care of. Little did he know that he would soon get a call from the client about "nonsense numbers" in the spreadsheet. "He rushed to fix it, but every time he tried to fix one part of the report, something else would break. He came to me, frantic and asked for help. I acted confused and said, 'Oh, I don’t know what happened! Maybe it’s a glitch?" the employee said. They even offered him some advice, but ensured it was a vague one and left Seth to deal with the mess the whole day. Eventually, their boss became aware of Seth's tactics and the slacker had no excuse this time. He ended up being put on a temporary leave without pay.

"If only he knew how to paste values instead of just regular paste. Good job getting him caught," lauded u/yaypopbo. "I keep myself pretty busy and tend to ignore any idiotic requests. Any extra work has to come from my boss with proper support documents. If there's no paper trail, it ain't happening," pointed out u/ExcitementRelative33. "I salute you, Sir. In fact, everyone who's ever worked in offices where there's at least one 'Seth' salutes you!" chimed in u/Bhimtu.