A coworker keeps dumping her work on me, calling it “teamwork.” Her name is Bianca, and for the last six months, she’s treated my desk like her personal outbox. We work in a busy marketing firm in Manchester, the kind of place where the coffee is always strong and the deadlines are always “yesterday.” Bianca is charming, well-dressed, and has a way of smiling that makes you feel like you’re her best friend right before she asks you to format a thirty-page spreadsheet for her.
At first, I didn’t mind helping out. I’m naturally a bit of a “fixer,” and I like to think I’m a team player. But “teamwork” usually implies that both people are actually working. I noticed that while I was sweating over her client reports, Bianca was often in the breakroom chatting or taking long lunches with the senior partners. She had this uncanny ability to make her lack of productivity look like high-level networking, while I was becoming a ghost buried under mountains of paper.
Last week, it finally reached a breaking point. I had my own massive project due for a retail client, and I hadn’t slept more than four hours a night all week. Bianca sauntered over, smelling like expensive perfume, and dropped a huge, overstuffed folder on my desk without asking. “Need this by 3 p.m., love,” she said with a wink. “You’re just so much faster at the analytics than I am. Teamwork makes the dream work, right?”