there’s nothing I can do about my nightmare workload… right?

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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/Choice_Evidence1983 on 2026-07-25 04:00:07+00:00.

I am NOT OOP.

Originally posted to AskAManager

there’s nothing I can do about my nightmare workload … right?

Trigger Warnings: hostile workplace, exploitation

Original Post: March 13, 2024

I’m in a rough spot at work. When I started nearly two years ago, this was a six-person company: two owners and four staff. One staff member, who split a workload with me, moved away a few months later. They posted his position immediately, but nobody from the first wave of applicants worked out, things got hectic, and by the time the dust settled I had been handling the full workload for so long that they never replaced him.

A few months ago, my de facto supervisor took a job elsewhere. Three weeks later, my last remaining coworker did the same. (The timing was coincidental even if the root causes were similar.) During her notice period, one of the two owners went on maternity leave. The remaining owner is a few years from retirement and largely focused on client relationships and big-picture decisions. This left me as the only person around with any operational know-how, in an industry where regulations require us to stay in operation. We hired someone who’s been fantastic, but training is another thing on my plate and there’s only so fast I can do it, particularly since we have no written procedures. It’s slow going and hugely time-consuming to create them, but I know in the long run it saves me time over the “figure it out, and then I’ll look it over and tell you all the things you couldn’t have known you were missing” way of doing things.

We’re slowly easing down from having 100% of all tasks involve me in some way, but we’re still upwards of 90%. (There’s client-specific variation even between comparable work items, so it takes a while for someone new to be able to fly solo.) We’re supposed to get another new hire after the maternity leave is over, but that’ll be another situation where it’ll mean more work for me in the beginning. Having the other owner back will be helpful in some sorely-needed ways, but it’ll also be a net negative because the business will start ramping up for a busy spring.

We’re probably 4-5 months out from my job, not being a complete nightmare, and a month and a half out from me being able to take a week off without this place collapsing. I have a retention bonus coming in April, and my plan is to quit if things aren’t really and truly good by July. The remaining owner means well and panics at any sign of me being unhappy, but I can’t think of anything they can do to meaningfully improve my situation that wouldn’t involve them going back in time and making better decisions about staffing, compensation, cross-training, and documentation.

Here’s my question: Am I right that in situations like this, there’s not really anything to be done except power through it while new hires are trained up? My outlook is basically, “This is miserable, but they’re throwing money at me to get them through it, so it is what it is.”

Editor’s note: for Alison’s response to the original text, you can find it here.

Update #1: April 23, 2024 (over one month later)

I wrote in about getting through a staffing crisis after both my coworkers quit right when one of my company’s two owners went on maternity leave. I wanted to make sure that my “this is awful but that’s what all the extra money is for” outlook wasn’t distracting me from anything else the remaining owner could potentially do to help.

My letter was posted in March, but I wrote it in January, during what was definitely the worst few weeks of the entire stretch. The owner came back in early February, and I was unsure of how that would go — she can be very exacting, and previously most conversations related to my work went through my supervisor. Turns out it was great! Her number one priority was figuring out what she could to do help me out and what she could take off my plate. By the time my letter went up, things were already much, much better than they’d been in a long time.

The owners were grateful I’d kept things running significantly better than they’d hoped. That was great to hear but also concerning, particularly since at the same time, we were working on two transitions to streamline the business. My biggest concern was that between the “that wasn’t so bad (for us)” relief and the efficiency gains from the transitions, they’d decide maybe we were actually fine with the one new hire we made and there wasn’t any need for another. But when we sat down for a post-maternity-leave state of the union, I was clear that I was only happy if the hiring plan was unchanged, and our next new hire is starting in a couple of weeks.

As things stand now, my workload and stress level are significantly lower than they were even before everyone started quitting, which is great considering the multiple raises I’ve gotten. I can basically do no wrong in the owners’ eyes, and they’re really invested in my happiness and my growth in the company. So in theory, when it comes to my self-imposed “quit if it’s not fixed by July” deadline, there should be nothing to worry about.

In practice, I don’t think the owners have learned any lessons about the importance of staff retention, and I’m really unhappy with how our first new hire (who’s now five months in) is being treated. I get all the credit for getting the company through this mess and endless grace for any balls I’ve dropped in the process. There’s no recognition of the fact that our new hire was a huge help and that I couldn’t have done this without her, or that she was a great sport about being hired into a complete mess of a situation, with only me to guide her when I barely had the time or the brainpower for it. She’s taken on so much and made my job so much easier, and the owners extend zero appreciation for that and make her miserable holding her to a standard that’s massively unfair given how haphazard her training has been. My old supervisor used to say she was shielding us from a lot, and I took it with a grain of salt, but now I get what she meant.

So that’s where I’m going to be spending my capital for now. Most of it is that I think my coworker deserves better, but it’s also because if she quits or gets fired, I’m going to quit rather than take on the extra work. I’m gathering my thoughts right now and planning to meet with the owners soon to make it clear that if history repeats, I’m not sticking around to bail them out. I guess we’ll see how that goes, but no matter what I should have a happy update later this year — either I’ll be able to report that they’ve righted the ship, or I’ll be out of there.

Update #2: May 8, 2024 (over two weeks later)

Well, I certainly wasn’t planning to have another update after a week and a half, but I am no longer at this job! Things deteriorated really, really quickly.

Last Monday, my coworker and I realized our bosses were planning to fire her. After they found the new hire we knew they were looking for, they kept the posting up and continued the search — there were poorly disguised interviews all over the office schedule, with timestamps clearly indicating they were added after the new hire accepted the offer. At that point, I was done. It would have been bad enough for her to quit, but the idea that they were going to proactively get rid of my only coworker just when I had room to breathe for the first time in a year and a half … it was the point of no return. The only reasons I didn’t give my notice that day: I wanted to give my coworker space to figure out her own next move, and I didn’t want to burn the bridge until I had my April retention bonus in hand.

Tuesday my coworker gave her notice. They told her they didn’t need her two weeks — she could just wrap up the next day. They broke the news to me on Wednesday morning and told me it was for the best. Even though I knew it was coming and had been heated up about it all week, I still wasn’t really prepared for how it felt. Once she left it was like the past year and a half all came down on me at once, which was pretty crushing. Thursday and Friday I was standoffish with my bosses. I kept to myself — no pleasantries, a couple of petty little silences, and for the most part I sent emails for things I usually would have popped into their offices to discuss.

Monday was mostly back to normal, and then at the end of the day was my annual review. They acknowledged I’d done a lot of great work, but the focus of the conversation was my professionalism and attitude, and that I should really think about whether the company was a good fit for me if I couldn’t be comfortable with change. (There was also a section about how I needed to work on time management and prioritization, because I could “appear to get flustered and overwhelmed.”) I said we should go our separate ways and offered a little more than two weeks’ notice — I was about to take a few days off, so two weeks starting from my first day back. …

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