'John threw you under the bus’: Lazy coworker leaves a novice colleague high and dry while he's on vacation, then faces the consequences with management upon return when everything falls apart

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Jesse Kessenheimer • Writer and Editor
Dec 6, 2024 1:00 PM EST

Being the newbie in the workplace is insanely stressful, but when your senior colleague (who's in charge of training you) leaves you with their clients for your first week on the job, the stress levels boil over beyond comprehension. This happened when the guy in our next story was onboarding for a new position…

Most employers would consider you a 'New Hire' until about a month or two with the company. You're still learning the dynamic of your role and the process of your position, so naturally, it would be foolish to assume that a newbie could handle the nuances of problematic troubleshooting without the guidance of a seasoned coworker. But when John, the training manager of the data analyst in our next story was planning his vacation, he failed to prepare his cover properly to handle the workload, expecting u/ryangosling-san to juggle the entire department in his absence without adequate instructions.

Read on for more details of how karma came back around after a new hire survives the most stressful first week ever recorded.

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    Star UPA
    via ANTONI SHKRABA

    This image is for illustration only, and the subjects are models; the image does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

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    My workmate left pretty bad instructions and my boss finally caught on L I work with a pretty chill team. Almost always when somebody goes on leave, someone's there to cover for the reports with little to no problems.
    via ryangosling-san
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    However, the past months, our headcount declined which means some people had to work a bit more (but smaller) clients. This colleague, let's call him John, was handling two clients, C1 and C2.
    via ryangosling-san
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    A bit more background, I've been with this team for more than 2 years now, handling client X. Last September I resigned, but eventually came back last November. Somebody already filled up my spot with X so I got reprofiled to C1 and as backup to C2 (John's client).
    via ryangosling-san
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    John was happy because I basically know majority of the general processes within the company, which means less stress for him when he onboards me.
    via ryangosling-san
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    During my first week, John told me he was going on a week- long vacation on the following week. I asked him if our manager already knows and he sakd that everything was ok.
    via ryangosling-san
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    Being backup for C2, I immediately raised the concern that I might have a hard time covering for him because even though most processes are similar to my previous client X, there's some nuances which makes me not have the confidence to do the work correctly.
    via ryangosling-san
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    Monday, the week before his vacation, I asked him if he can onboard me, he just told me try and study stuff on my own while he tries and solves some problems with the reports. I obliged. Tuesday, he introduced
    via ryangosling-san
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    me to one report. Took him 10mins to run me through it, and then went out to do whatever his foing. Wednesday, my manager asks if I can hop in a call with him and John. I found out that John just asked permission to go on vacation on
    via ryangosling-san
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    quite this day. My manager alarmed and asked if I was already onboarded with all reports for C1 and C2. Before I could speak, John said that 100% is ready and I can fully take care of myself during his
    via ryangosling-san
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    vacation. After the call, I confronted John and told him that he had 9 reports per day, and I was only onboarded with 1. Not even onboarded, he showed me, in 10mins, how he does it and what the excel sheets mean. He assured me
    via ryangosling-san
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    that I'll be ok and that he'll call me during his vacation. Thursday and Friday, I kept bugging him if he could write full documentation of all the reports just so I have a guide in the reports maintenance and I could debug queries if there are
    via ryangosling-san
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    problems. Friday before his shift ended he gave me a list of the reports with data sources, and around 3 sentences of where to copy-paste which. I gave him the benefit of the doubt that I could do it. But
    via ryangosling-san
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    mind you, I already have three C1-client reports that I am still trying to figure out and had errors and bugs that I had to solve without any documentation. On top of this, I had 8 different reports I needed
    via ryangosling-san
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    to prepare, which takes almost half my day just running the queries, rendering my laptop useless. During his vacation, I was able to power through Monday to Wednesday, wherein everyday it had errors with the queries.
    via ryangosling-san
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    Some reports even had queries connected to data sources that's only available on his work laptop. Then came Thursday. I found out there was a weekly business review. Another report which
    via ryangosling-san
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    weren't part of the first 8 that he listed. He told me it was going to be easy and that he'll call to walk me through the report. First half of the day I did the usual reports I needed to do. Around 4pm, the client asked me to deliver the report at 6pm.
    via ryangosling-san
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    I had 2 hours to do the report. I called John, and he wasn't answering. For thirty minutes | kept calling him until he finally picked up the phone at around 4:30. Luckily, we were able to finish it by 5:30, but Jesus the amount of stress because some
    via ryangosling-san
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    queries weren't working, some files were only on his laptop which I needed and I had to get permission from my manager who leaves halfway across the Globe to access data on his laptop. My manager was ped
    via ryangosling-san
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    already at this point, and I was too, because none of these were supposed to happen if only he did the onboarding correctly. But I got work to do so I really didn't bother for now, I just needed to get through it.
    via ryangosling-san
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    After shift I confronted him basically telling him my gripes on the work he left for me without any proper onboarding or what. I really lost my temper here, I was basically doing OTS just because all the reports he had were poorly made. I basically told him this is the last time I'll be covering for his a.
    via ryangosling-san
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    Came Monday the week after, he went back from vacation, barely even talked to me. Then I found out that I had three other reports with C1. None of these were mentioned to me during my first weeks, and I had
    via ryangosling-san
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    no clue what these are. I sent him a message asking if we could start the onboarding again. But John, again, just chatted me a list of the reports and where the data sources were.
    via ryangosling-san
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    Everytime I tried to reach out, he'll just send a very bad set of instructions, and expects me to figure it out on my own. So that's what I did. I decided to and just do the exact f things he wrote down. If anyone was wondering how bad the instructions, it reads like this:
    via ryangosling-san
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    "Copy values from Column A to C and paste on file B on column D-E, and G." "Click this button" If you work with data, sometimes data isn't perfect, and that's what happened. The
    via ryangosling-san
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    queries were returning error values. Some numbers don't make sense. But f , he said these exact words to my manager: John: "I gave clear and detailed instructions to OP, he should be able to do it."
    via ryangosling-san
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    Until today. His instructions were "message this person and ask for this data" So I did. And the person was hella confused. He then messages my manager, and my manager asks John and I. He
    via ryangosling-san
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    checks the reports and sees a lot of mistakes. Manager asks me what the f was going on with the report. I told him I was just following the instructions John gave me.
    via ryangosling-san
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    And that I have no clue about the other things he's asking because John didn't tell me anything about those. John sees the chat, storms out of the office and blocks me on all social media.
    via ryangosling-san
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    My manager wants to talk to me tomorrow to let me explain what was going on.
    via ryangosling-san
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    FoxxyPhoenix424 Sounds like John threw you under the bus. Hope everything goes well with your meeting.
    via FoxxyPhoenix424
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    MysteriousTable6394 You probably have it already, but document everything John told you to do. That way, he can't spin it back and make it solely your fault - you were following his instructions after all. Hope all goes well and keep us updated!
    via MysteriousTable6394
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    Popular-Drummer-79... Top 1% Commenter You did what you could. Your manager should require John to fully document and it's clear he can't. Ask for a documentation writer to assist since you have your own people to support. This isn't a YOU problem... yet.
    via Popular-Drummer-79

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