There is no shame in being lazy. Laziness promotes ingenuity and ingenuity promotes effective solutions to life and everything in it. Unless you’re so lazy that it promotes nothing but coworker dissatisfaction.

But, hey, coworkers can be inspired to do something ingenious about it as well. Like helping their colleague break the habit of cherry-picking the easiest tasks (because nobody wants to work hard) by messing with the task descriptions to make them sound easy, when in reality they’re hard as nails and you just keep stepping on said nails.

More Info: Reddit

There are many ways to stay lazy at work, with cherry-picking easier tasks being one of the more popular tactics to employ

Image credits: Canva Studio (not the actual image)

However, an equally popular tactic is also petty revenge by means of making the cherry-picker jump on hard tasks more often than not

Image credits: u/SnooBunnies7461

Image credits: Mizuno K (not the actual image)

Hopefully, the cherry-picking coworker learned her lesson after the author of the story started changing the task descriptions of hard tasks to sound easy

Redditor SnooBunnies7461 recently shared a frustration of theirs with a coworker. Specifically, OP works with this one person who they claim is lazy. How? She cherry-picks work tasks when the practice is not really allowed.

You see, the team works on a first in-first out workflow basis, tackling tasks in the order of oldest to newest. This essentially means that if a team member can take on a task, they take the oldest one at that moment. However, that particular coworker did not do that. Instead she checked the task descriptions—at least on the ones for which descriptions were available—in a separate system. You can guess what kind of a no-no that is at this point.

Since management did not seem to notice it, and hence do anything about it, OP decided to take matters into their own hands. And they hit where it hurt the most: the descriptions. Because it was exactly this that allowed the coworker to determine easy pickings, OP simply messed about with them by changing the ones on hard tasks to sound as if they’re easy. And you can’t trace that. So, the coworker took the bait.

Soon after OP could hear the coworker’s resounding whining about how hard her work week is and all that. The best part is she can’t just abandon those tasks now—she’s systematically stuck with them until they are resolved. And the better part is, she can’t complain about it too much as people will figure out how she cherry-picked tasks.

For now, OP taught the coworker a lesson, and will probably only go back to implementing this tactic if the coworker returns to their old, lazy habits.

Image credits: Karolina Grabowska(not the actual image)

Well, turns out, a lot of people have had this very issue with cherry-picking coworkers. A lot of the freeloaders in these stories chose to be lazy, often getting burned in pretty much the same way—jumping on the harder tasks every once in a while—but there was also an issue of lacking expertise. Those who cherry-pick and work on the easy stuff often miss out on opportunities to work with harder tasks, and hence stay newbies forever.

Some commenters had the power to make a change—one particular one was a manager and simply revamped the ticket system to make sure both easy and hard tasks are dealt with equally. Others simply let their lazy coworkers know, by means of words, that they are not really doing something incredible performance-wise. And yet others simply commiserated, relating to the situation and sharing their thoughts on it.

Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual image)

Customer service provider Nicereply discussed the problems with cherry-picking at great length. In short, it leads to three main problems: [1] it doesn’t allow for professional growth, [2] it often creates bottlenecks in processes, and [3] it demotivates the team.

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Cherry-pickers are easy to spot. Their task turnover is high, tasks often have fewer changes and less discussion associated with them, and it’s just easy to follow the breadcrumbs when someone has just now picked up a task, but it wasn’t the oldest one in the bunch.

Now, it goes without saying that cherry-picking is not all bad. In fact, there are situations where it’s a good thing. Training newcomers often can’t go without picking out particular, easier tasks to get them started. Or, if an employee feels overwhelmed or burned out, giving them a pass on doing things in a set order can help them get back on their feet.

Still, it’s a plague that needs to be stopped and Nicereply suggests a number of things. Start off by identifying and tackling the motivation behind the cherry-picking. Encourage first in, first out queues, motivate folks to take more difficult tasks as an opportunity for career growth, and support them along the way.

But, back to the post. Folks enjoyed the petty revenge, enough to garner 4,200 upvotes with a 98% positivity rating. You can check it out in context here. But before you go, do let us know how you deal with cherry-pickers, or are you one yourself because work sucks?

And folks online approved, praising the author of the post and sharing their own stories with crummy coworkers

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