Woman Says Her Former Coworker Spent Years Hijacking Projects and Taking Credit — Then Started Emailing for Help After Using Stolen Work to Land a New Job

In a Reddit post, a woman said a former coworker named Lulu had made her job miserable for years before finally leaving the company. According to the post, Lulu started out as a junior employee the writer trained herself, but over time became obsessed with being included in work that had nothing to do with her. The woman said Lulu would complain about being “left out” of projects, pressure management into adding her to unnecessary meetings, and then use those meetings to create delays and drama rather than contribute anything useful.

The more Lulu advanced, the worse it got. The woman wrote that after a significant promotion, Lulu began claiming ownership over work only loosely connected to her role and would repeatedly insist she needed control over projects she was not actually qualified to handle. In one example, the woman said she opened a company account on a free software tool for a specific project, only for Lulu to complain that she should have been consulted first and act like the entire thing somehow fell under her authority. From the poster’s point of view, Lulu was not just difficult. She was incredibly good at manufacturing problems, making herself the center of workflows, and forcing everyone around her to adapt to her feelings.

The woman said working directly with Lulu became nearly impossible. Every attempt at collaboration somehow got twisted into Lulu acting like she was being controlled or slighted, even though, according to the post, Lulu had no issue telling everyone else how to do their jobs. She described a dynamic where the only way to keep the peace was to hand Lulu fake “approval” power over work that had nothing to do with her, simply because management refused to rein her in. She also made clear that Lulu’s actual skills did not match the authority she demanded. In her view, Lulu was green in many basic areas of her own role and yet somehow still managed to bog down entire teams because leadership kept coddling her.

Things took a sharper turn when Lulu finally resigned. In the days before leaving, the woman said Lulu suddenly became intensely interested in the details of her day-to-day work and started asking lots of questions about how she approached specific tasks. That made the poster suspicious enough to go look after Lulu was gone. According to the post, she discovered that Lulu had accessed the company’s internal knowledge center and downloaded several of her guides, frameworks, and templates before leaving. The woman said it looked very much like Lulu had taken the materials to her new job, where she was now doing the same kind of work — and possibly had used those stolen materials to help get hired in the first place.

If that was not insulting enough, Lulu then started emailing her from the new job asking for help. The woman said the messages were syrupy and overly flattering, but the requests themselves were about things Lulu could easily have looked up on her own. That was the part that pushed the whole story from ordinary office resentment into something almost absurd. After years of making the writer’s work harder, taking her materials, and using them elsewhere, Lulu apparently still expected free support on top of it.

In the update, the woman said she ultimately chose the simplest response: she ignored Lulu completely. She did not write back, did not help, and did not give her anything else to use. But she also learned that the behavior had not changed. A coworker later had to contact Lulu about an external system she still had access to, and according to the update, Lulu was rude, unhelpful, and dragged her feet for weeks before doing one small thing needed to transfer ownership. That seems to have confirmed the writer’s bigger point that Lulu’s problem was never one isolated act. It was a pattern of entitlement and disruption that followed her wherever she went.

The woman also said she tried a “soft launch” of the stolen-work issue with the manager who had always protected Lulu, asking whether Lulu’s new company was a direct competitor. When the boss asked why, she explained what had happened. The reaction, according to her, was basically nothing. She said she was not surprised, because management had spent years acting like Lulu could do no wrong. In the repost’s update, she described the entire workplace as the most dysfunctional and frustrating environment of her career, one where even obvious problems never got addressed if Lulu was involved.

By the end of the update, the writer had made a decision that went beyond ignoring Lulu’s emails. She left the company too. She said Lulu may have been gone, but the system that protected her, enabled her, and gaslit everyone around her was still firmly in place. A recruiter reached out with a better opportunity, and she took it. What started as one woman wondering whether she should answer a former coworker’s shameless emails ended as a bigger story about how people like Lulu only get away with so much because somebody in management keeps making sure they can. What do you think: once someone steals your work and takes it to a new job, is ignoring them enough, or would you have gone further?