Employee says he keeps covering for colleague who claims to be overworked. Then he discovers something that makes his ‘blood boil’

An employee became increasingly frustrated with a colleague who repeatedly claims to be overwhelmed with work, leaving the rest of the team to pick up the slack. Sharing his workplace experience in a Reddit post, the user, u/Illustrious-Survey2, claimed that the colleague had been receiving what he considered preferential treatment for some time.

According to the user, team members had repeatedly raised concerns about the coworker’s lack of collaboration, initiative, and competence. Yet their manager apparently continued to defend him and give him the benefit of the doubt.

The situation became particularly frustrating whenever the colleague complained about his apparent workload. Rather than addressing the problem differently, the manager would reportedly ask other team members to take some of his tasks off his plate, even though they were already struggling to manage their own responsibilities.

He apparently didn’t report the incident

Then came the revelation that pushed the employee’s frustration to another level. A former teammate, who had since reportedly moved to a different team, apparently spotted the coworker “streaming himself playing video games DURING HIS SHIFT.” The user claimed he hadn’t witnessed the stream firsthand, so he initially acknowledged that he couldn’t be certain what had happened.

However, he later claimed that he had found the colleague’s TikTok account and checked its livestream history. The two coworkers purportedly worked different shifts in a hybrid setup, meaning the alleged streaming could have taken place while the colleague was working from home. The user also speculated that the coworker might have realized someone at the company had seen the stream.

“And the part that makes me angriest isn’t even just the gaming. It’s the apparent double standard,” he wrote. He was apparently upset that the rest of the team had been taking on additional responsibilities while the colleague continued to receive accommodations for his supposedly heavy workload. He also claimed this wasn’t the only instance of favoritism he had noticed at the company.

The user eventually decided against exposing his incompetent colleague to his manager or HR because he didn’t want to become an “office snitch” or start a “workplace war.” Instead, he reportedly planned to use an upcoming one-on-one meeting with his manager to discuss his own workload and ask whether the colleague could finally resume working with him on a task he had apparently been excused from for two quarters.

He also claimed he was considering moving to another team or finding a new job, although he didn’t expect to make that change immediately. He apparently wanted to stop spending his free time worrying about the situation and focus on his own responsibilities instead. “I don’t want to spend my non-working hours monitoring the guy on TikTok just to see if he’s gonna go on live again because that is freaking mental,” he wrote.