‘I’m not a team player. I’m a crutch’: Employees share the moment they started working their wage after realizing their boss takes advantage of their hard work

Author image for Elna McHilderson
Elna McHilderson • Managing Editor
Jun 17, 2025 9:00 AM EDT

Welcome to corporate life! Upper management encourages you to work your hardest and climb the latter. What they don't tell you is that latter has a lot of tricks up its steps or whatever you call it. Your boss and even coworkers will encourage you to go "above and beyond" and to "show you're hardworking," and that will get you up the latter! But it turns out that is simply corporate jargon for "we don't want to pay you for the extra work you are putting in." It's more than annoying, it feels like highway robbery! 

 

After working that office life for a while, you start to have that realization, an epiphany, if you will. You start to wonder why you are working 100x harder than your co-workers, and yet getting paid the same amount? That's when you need to start acting your wage. Either it will help your boss recognize you are actually doing all the work and deserve a raise, or the place will crash and burn without you. Either way, you're winning imo. 

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  • If you still haven't had that employee epiphany, go on and scroll below to read up on employees who have had that epiphany and are now set on working their wage. 

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    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • "I found out I’m doing 70% of my team’s work. My boss’s response? 'Well, you’re just really efficient.'"

    Started tracking my workload out of curiosity. Turns out I'm handling roughly 70% of what out team produces. Reports? Me. Client escalations? Me. Fixing Jason's constant typos and forwarding "his" emails? Still me.
    via WitnessLongjumping2
  • So I brought it up in my 1:1. Boss smiles and says, "You're just really efficient. I don't want to mess with a good thing." Translation: please keep being a human buffer for your incompetent team for the same salary.
    via WitnessLongjumping2
  • Meanwhile, Sarah "forgets" every deadline. Jason forwards entire client threads with a "can you handle?" and our junior literally waits for me to do anything before moving.
    via WitnessLongjumping2
  • It finally clicked: I'm not a team player. I'm a crutch. And the second I stop carrying, this place limps. Thinking about letting it all hit the floor just to see who notices.
    via WitnessLongjumping2
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    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • Sugar_Mama76 So had this happen long ago when I was doing data entry. Got bitched at that I was making three times the mistakes as the person who had been on the team for 20+ years. So I apologized and said I would use her as an example. So whenever she would get her next batch, I would get mine. And do the data entry at the same rate.
    via Sugar_Mama76
  • Within a week, manager wanted to know why we were missing KPIs. No idea. And then she looked at the actual from the past and realized I had been doing twice the input of the next fastest person. Now I was tracking with the slowest person, but hey, zero mistakes!
    via Sugar_Mama76
  • It was decided that perhaps my mistake rate per 100 was actually well under and please, do what I had been doing. Point is, your manager doesn't care because you're hiding the problems. Their metrics look
    via Sugar_Mama76
  • good. If you want change, drop the rope. Tell your manager you will no longer be performing management duties. "Sorry, don't have time to review Jason's work, I've got to prioritize client escalations" and escalate to manager. Don't
    via Sugar_Mama76
  • worry if Sarah misses her deadlines. All of those are manager problems. And when manager gets smacked with metric failures, they will have to make changes. Because they're being held to the fire. Work your 40 and don't ruin your life because manager doesn't want to manage.
    via Sugar_Mama76
  • Sloth_grl My daughter was in school for finance and accounting. She was hired as a receptionist and had a decent salary but her supervisor just kept giving her more accounting chores. Her supervisor was fired so my daughter was the only person left who knew how to do some things.They kept promising her
    via Sloth_grl
  • they were going to "groom her for the cfo position" but never taught her anything. When she quit, they gave her 3 days to train her replacement. That poor girl was lost. Then my daughter's ex boss went off the deep end. Keep in mind this was a small construction company.
    via Sloth_grl
  • He was emailing and insisting that she come and train her replacement on her own time, that she committed corporate espionage and that he was going to have her arrested. I told her she could have just said I quit and not even given them notice. He can't arrest you for not training your replacement. If
    via Sloth_grl
  • they have no one to train her, that's their problem. So, my daughter just ignored him and he shut up.
    via Sloth_grl
  • UrdnotCum This happened to me a while back. I was on a team that only answered customer service emails, all day. It was myself and two others, and I noticed that the number of items in queue really only went down as I answered them after about 10am. I had a suspicion that my
    via UrdnotC*m
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    via Unsplash+ (And Getty Images)

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • peers just weren't working once we got into the flow and the boss got busy... so the next day I logged on, then called out sick at about 10 but "forgot" to log off so I was still listed in the queue. Sure enough, no emails were answered after I 'left'.
    via UrdnotC*m
  • The next day, I screenshotted the outgoing stats and sent an email to my boss asking if both my peers called out as well, since no emails were answered after 10am and the queue was huge now.
    via UrdnotC*m
  • One was let go within the week and the other was very sheepish in meetings until being let go about 6 months later.
    via UrdnotC*m
  • Somebodies NobodyT... Oh friend I've been there too. Your manager's response is complete bulls and honestly I would at this point go over his head if I were you. Also shine up that resume and find something that will pay you better, give no notice, just leave when the better opportunity arises. It will
    via SomebodiesNobodyTRA
  • be a most satisfactory moment when you can do that. When I ran the numbers at an old help desk position, I discovered I was doing twice as much as the next productive member on my team, with everybody else's numbers much much lower, and for months two
    via SomebodiesNobodyTRA
  • other technicians had been blindly reassigning me tickets without any discussion or notificatios. My 'tism kicked in and I spent two days making detailed reports on everything including the ticket reassignments, showing patterns of behavior amongst some of my team. I
    via SomebodiesNobodyTRA
  • never set out to throw anybody under the bus, just to try to find out why I always felt swamped but the rest of my team seemed lackadaisical. I took my spreadsheets and reports into my manager's office, closed the door behind me, and had a come to jesus talk. Showed him all of this data
    via SomebodiesNobodyTRA
  • that frankly he should have been on top of this, not me, and said as much too. This is where our stories differ, my manager at the time having previously been in the trenches, immediately saw the issue and took steps to rectify the situation, even to the point I received apologies from the two
    via SomebodiesNobodyTRA
  • team members who had been just shotgunning tickets at me. All that to come back around to the point that, your manager obviously knows this and he s ks, and if you want to try to S see any change I would immediately go over his head after I got that type of response,
    via SomebodiesNobodyTRA
  • while at the same time looking for a better place to hang my hat.
    via SomebodiesNobodyTRA

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