Employee refuses to cover for coworker who always takes long lunches, coworker blames employee when she gets in trouble for it with boss: ‘[You] should have warned me’

Author image for Bar Mor Hazut
Bar Mor Hazut • Senior Editor
Aug 7, 2026 8:00 AM EDT

The only one responsible for your actions is you…

Some coworkers tend to form a sense of camaraderie among themselves in the office. This group of employees can find a lot of comfort in each other and find ways to help one another when they need to. If they all share one terrible boss, this might even strengthen the group, as having a common enemy can truly bring people close together.

But even if this group of coworkers is close and occasionally works together to get something out of the upper management, that doesn't mean that the coworkers become responsible for one another. At the end of the day, every employee should look after themselves and not involve themselves in someone else's drama. It's a workplace, your not going to war together. Don't put others above your own needs.

If your coworker asks you for a favor that might risk your place in the company, think hard about whether you should agree. Even if you care about them and want them to stick around, you still have to be careful with the help you offer them. Which is why the employee in the story below refused to help a problematic coworker.

This coworker constantly takes long lunch breaks: we're talking two hours of her being gone from the office, instead of the 45 minutes she is actually allowed to take. Since other people in the office started noticing her absence, the coworker asked an employee to cover for her if someone asks about her being gone. Well, as much as the employee might like this coworker, lying on her behalf wasn't something they were willing to do. So, when one day the boss asked about the coworker and wondered why she wasn't at her desk, the other employee answered truthfully, which led the coworker to get in trouble when she was finally back from her extended lunch.

Even though no one other than the coworker is responsible for this mistake, she still blames the employee for refusing to cover for her…

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    Female Colleagues having a Disagreement
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    Female Colleagues having a Disagreement.

    Subjects are models.

  • 02

    AITA for not warning my colleague that our boss was looking for her while she was taking an extra long lunch?

    I work in a small office of about twelve people. My colleague Rebecca and I sit near each other and have a decent working relationship,
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    not close friends but perfectly civil day to day. Rebecca has a habit of taking long lunches. Not occasionally, consistently. Our
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    lunch break is forty five minutes and she regularly comes back after an hour and a half, sometimes closer to two hours. Nobody has said
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    anything officially but people have noticed. Last Tuesday our boss came back early from a client meeting, which nobody
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    expected, and started looking for Rebecca to ask her something about a report that was due. Rebecca was not back yet. It was one hour and twenty minutes into her lunch at that point.
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  • 07
    My boss asked me if I knew where she was. I said she went to lunch and I was not sure when she was back. That was true.
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    My boss waited at her desk for about fifteen minutes, visibly unimpressed, and then went back to his office.
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    Here is the thing. Rebecca had texted me about ten minutes before my boss arrived asking me to cover if anyone asked because she
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    was running late getting back. I had not replied to that message. I did not actively lie to my boss but I also did not text her a warning when I saw him waiting at her desk.
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    She came back, saw the situation, and the conversation with our boss was apparently not great.
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    Lunch break.
    via Africa images

    Lunch break.

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    Afterward she came to me and said I should have warned her and that she would have done it for me.
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    I told her I did not feel comfortable covering for her and that I had not lied to anyone.
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  • 15
    She said I had let her walk into that on purpose. AITA?
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  • 16
    Prisca Pearl Nta. She's an adult and should take responsibility for her actions. It's a good thing you choose not to get involved in that
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    Regular_Boot_3540 That's pretty hilarious that she said she'd have done it for you. You should have said "There was never a need for you to lie to the boss about my taking a long lunch,
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    because I don't do that." It's okay to let people suffer the consequences of their own bad behavior. NTA
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    More_Sir_1842 Consistently doubling her lunchbreak time? NTA
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    Legitimate_Job2188 NTA but next time just say you didnt see the text. It would help you avoid the drama of a truthful response
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  • 21
    AntiSnoring Device She took a double risk: consistently cheating her lunch break time and relying on someone else to cover up for her. NTA
    via AntiSnoringDevice
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    Newsjunkie1922 NTA What could you have said that would have made it better? She is asking you to jeopardize your job for her. The boss would have found out eventually.
    via Newsjunkie1922

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boss workplace-stories employee job work coworkers lunch Office workplace break
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