Coworker keeps pushing their work onto employee, they take leave and watch the project come to a standstill: 'I went to HR'

There's nothing that will make someone miss you more than your absence, and sometimes, you need to make yourself out of the situation in order for them to fully appreciate you… Especially when that someone is your coworker who has been making you do all their work for them. If you're not around, who's going to do their work? This employee wasn't about to put up with being pushed around for too long, and after putting up with their coworker pushing their workload onto them for the first two months of a six-month project, they decided to take some leave and watch things come to a standstill.

When these things happen, we—most of us, at least—tend to want to avoid conflict, quietly complying with the unfair conditions that have been pushed onto us for fear of broaching the hard conversation. The reality is that, most often, putting the hard conversation off is only going to make things more difficult for us in the long run, and standing up for ourselves in the short term will avoid a far worse confrontation that will eventuate down the road anyway, causing more conflict and suffering for ourselves than we were trying to avoid in the first place…