They Iced Out a Team Member at Work. Were They Wrong?

Well, that certainly doesn’t sound good…

Especially when it’s a team member at work who is supposed to be helping you out.

Check out this story from Reddit’s “Am I the A**hole?” page and tell us what you think in the comments.

AITA for icing out my team member?

“Hello all, this is my first time posting here, so please ask any questions you would like.

I work in a corporate service firm. I don’t wish to get more specific than that, but it’s one where we do work with clients and it’s task based work with deadlines.

I have a junior team member who I’ll call Evans. She is a decent worker, still learning how to work in a professional environment and in this industry. She is big on work life balance, and never touching work outside the hours.

Normally this is more than fine,we don’t care when you work as long as you are reachable and able to finish your tasks when we need them.

Here’s the issue though, we had a big client presentation. The day before this I gave Evans a task to do with about 2 and a half hours left in the day. The task, while only taking maybe 1 hour, was vital to part of the presentation, which the client specifically requested.

Evans does not finish the task and leaves at 5:00 sharp. Most of us were staying back a bit later doing our own tasks for the presentation, but we took a look at it and saw Evans’s work was not done.

Here’s about as much as I can disclose, Evans has been the go to person for this set of data/topic, and other than a few others, she is the only one with the expertise to deal with it. Because of this, and the fact that I had bigger tasks to deal with, Evans had done a series of tasks regarding this over the past weeks, and she had the data needed to do this.

sorry if it’s a bit hard to follow, basically she was the only one with the tools+expertise to do this specific task, while me and other members of the team had expertise, we didn’t have the tools(data) needed.

We realise this and are all scared cus the presentation was in the morning of the next day, like first thing in the morning. We knew Evans would refuse to do the task after hours, even with overtime, so we just asked her to send the “tools. A 2 minute thing.

I call her work mobile, no answer, one of us calls her personal number, after some texts. Evans picks up, starts chatting, but when we mentioned that we needed the data, she cut the call.

We end up staying till 1:00 to recreate weeks worth of Evans work to finally get the presentation right, also delaying our own tasks, so me along with 2 others stayed the full night to work on this + other tasks.

Just to put things into context about how easy this task was, once we recreated the weeks worth of work, it took me less than 1 hour to finish the task, Evans had 2.5. And then she just refused to even send us the documents.

After this, I spoke to her, and explained why what she did hurt the overall team, and she didn’t care. I admit, I should’ve planned better, but she just showed no remorse. Now nobody really wants to give Evans any tasks anymore because we think if something becomes critical, we need someone reliable to be able to hold the “keys” to fix the issue.

She is complaining about not getting more responsibility now. AITA?”