Lazy co-workers can make one’s work life miserable. One Information Systems professional boasts about how he took care of a lazy co-worker with whom he was placed on a project. The man works for a major international corporation and the project in question involved an extensive overhaul of the company’s primary software platform.
Team members would be required to go to each machine within their location in order to perform a backup and convert the machine to the new platform. One of the early phases of the project involved the creation of a timeline that would detail how the team would divide the building and perform the conversions. The man took charge of this and created a timeline that detailed and color coded the phases of the project. He then sent it to the other team members.
Later that day, he overheard his co-worker, with whom he shared an office, speaking over the phone to their boss and taking credit for the timeline. He heard the co-worker promise to send a copy of the timeline to the various sectors of the building so that employees of the building could anticipate the downtime required to convert their machines. The co-worker had been pulling such stunts for some time in an attempt to make himself look good and undermine his colleagues. So this time the man decided to get even. He immediately began work rearranging the timeline and subsequently sent out a “revised” timeline to everyone except the co-worker from the co-worker’s machine while he was out of office. He then deleted the copy from the co-worker’s “sent” box. Needless to say, the co-worker was very confused and embarrassed when he started going to the wrong sectors on the wrong days and times. The crowning moment came when he was pulled into the boss’s office and asked why he wasn’t working from the revised timeline. All in all, it was a great way for the man to think on his feet. However, one should use caution when tampering with work associated with a team project of which one is a member as it could backfire and reflect badly on you as well as the rest of the team members.