Former Coworker Steals Her Work — Then Keeps Coming Back Begging for Help

A woman said her former coworker made her job miserable for years.

The coworker, Lulu, started at the company about seven years earlier as a junior employee. She was new, inexperienced, and enthusiastic enough that the woman helped train her on some of her duties. At first, things were mostly fine. Lulu had some rough edges, but nothing that seemed impossible to manage.

Then the need to be included took over everything.

According to the Reddit post, Lulu became extremely sensitive about projects that did not involve her. If she was not invited to a meeting, she would act hurt and disappointed. Instead of telling her the meeting had nothing to do with her job, management started including her anyway.

That decision made the problem worse.

Lulu rarely contributed in those meetings, but she insisted on being there. Her calendar became packed with meetings she did not need, and then everyone else had to move their schedules around to accommodate her. If they did not move a meeting when she wanted, she would run to their boss and complain that people were going behind her back.

The woman watched the pattern repeat over and over. Lulu would claim she needed to be involved. The team would explain the project did not affect her work. Then, in front of their shared manager, Lulu would perform the same complaint again with more drama.

After Lulu received a major promotion, her behavior got worse.

She started claiming ownership over things barely connected to her role. In one case, the woman created a company account on a free software tool so other departments could work on a specific project. Lulu complained that she should have been consulted first because of the nature of the tool. It did not matter that the account was not truly her area. She wanted approval power anyway.

That became the only way to work with her: pretend she had authority over things she did not understand.

The woman found that maddening because Lulu was still green in many parts of her own job and did not understand the woman’s work well enough to direct it. But if anyone tried to collaborate normally, Lulu treated it like she was being bossed around. Meanwhile, Lulu had no problem telling the woman how to do her job.

Eventually, the woman avoided working with her whenever possible.

That hurt the team’s work, but she felt there was no better option because management kept protecting Lulu. The boss seemed determined to treat Lulu as if she could do no wrong. Everyone learned to work around her moods, her complaints, and her need to be centered in projects that did not require her.

Then Lulu resigned.

In the days before she left, she started intensely quizzing the woman about her daily work. How did she approach certain tasks? What systems did she use? How did she handle different parts of the job?

That set off an alarm.

After Lulu left, the woman checked the company’s internal knowledge center. That was when she discovered Lulu had “checked out” and downloaded several of the woman’s guides, frameworks, and templates.

The woman had created those materials herself. They were not random company handouts. They were her work, built from her experience, her systems, and her job knowledge.

Now Lulu had a new job doing essentially the same type of work.

To the woman, it looked like Lulu had taken her materials and used them to get or support the new job. Lulu was not just moving into a similar role. She was allegedly walking into it with another person’s playbook.

Then, somehow, Lulu still had the nerve to ask for help.

She began periodically emailing the woman with questions. The tone was sweet and overly flattering, but the questions were things she could easily look up herself. The woman could not tell if Lulu thought she was charming enough to get away with it or if she truly did not understand how insulting it was to steal someone’s work and then come back asking that same person to train her from afar.

The woman debated how to respond. She could ignore the messages. She could answer just poorly enough that Lulu would stop asking. Or she could tell her outright to figure it out herself.

After years of Lulu making her job difficult, she was not inclined to help.

In the update, the woman said she chose to ignore Lulu’s emails completely. Eventually, Lulu stopped contacting her. But Lulu’s behavior did not disappear entirely. Another coworker later needed access to an external tool that Lulu still controlled. They had to ask Lulu to remove herself from the account so someone else could take over.

Lulu ignored that coworker for weeks.

When she finally did what was asked, she was rude and unhelpful about it. Even after leaving the company, she still found a way to make a simple handoff harder than it needed to be.

The woman also brought up the stolen materials with her boss in a cautious way. She asked whether Lulu was now working for a direct competitor. The boss said she was not, then asked why she wanted to know. So the woman explained that Lulu had downloaded her guides, frameworks, and templates before leaving.

The boss barely reacted.

That did not surprise her. After years of watching management coddle Lulu, she had stopped expecting them to suddenly see the problem clearly. Even after Lulu left, even after the downloads, the response felt like more of the same: no urgency, no accountability, no real acknowledgment of how much damage had been allowed to happen.

That realization helped the woman make a bigger decision.

She left the company too.

A recruiter contacted her with a strong opportunity, and she took it. She said Lulu was gone, but the larger dysfunction remained. The gaslighting, the management failures, and the willingness to let one difficult employee dictate everyone else’s workflow were not going away just because Lulu had moved on.

The stolen templates were frustrating.

But the real problem was the company that let Lulu become powerful enough to make everyone else work around her for years.

Commenters were furious that management still seemed to protect Lulu even after she left. Many said taking internal guides, frameworks, and templates to use at a new job sounded like stolen intellectual property, especially if those materials were created by another employee for that company.

A lot of people were also frustrated that the boss barely reacted when the woman mentioned the downloads. Commenters said management had spent so long defending Lulu that acknowledging the theft would mean admitting they had backed the wrong person for years.

Several people told the woman not to help Lulu under any circumstances. Some joked she should give bad advice, but most agreed ignoring the emails was the cleanest option. Lulu had already taken enough of her time and work.

Others focused on the bigger workplace pattern. Commenters said Lulu sounded like the kind of employee who bogs down entire teams because managers would rather appease the loudest person than make the right call. The woman leaving made sense to them, because even if Lulu was gone, the company culture that enabled her was still sitting there waiting for the next problem employee.