former coworker stole my work and keeps contacting me for help

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I have a weird issue that I need help with. My former coworker, Lulu, joined my company about seven years ago as a relatively inexperienced but enthusiastic junior team member. I trained her on some of her duties and, due to the nature of our jobs, we worked closely together for a time.

All was (mostly) well, but I noticed Lulu’s sensitivity and immaturity about some things, mostly about feeling “left out” of projects that didn’t concern her. Because she would claim to be hurt and disappointed by being left out, our manager began including her in recurring meetings she didn’t need to be in. She’d rarely contribute to these meetings but insist on attending; often, we’d need to move the meeting to accommodate her increasingly messy calendar, which was full of all the meetings she insisted on joining. If we didn’t move the meeting at her request, she’d have an urgent meeting with our boss, complaining that we were going behind her back.

Lulu received a significant promotion a few years into her tenure, and her behavior worsened. In meetings with my team, she’d bring up how being “left out” negatively impacted her work. We’d explain that she didn’t need to worry about the project in question, and then at meetings with our mutual manager present, she’d repeat the whole performance again with more dramatic flair.

She also started claiming ownership of things only tenuously related to her job. At one point, I created a company account on a free software tool for other departments to do work related to a specific project. Lulu complained that due to the nature of the software tool, she should have been consulted before anyone opened the account or used it. In other words, she was very good at borrowing trouble where there wasn’t any and bogging down workflows due to her own hurt feelings and self-importance.

I was supposed to continue working with Lulu, but it was extremely difficult. Several times, I approached her about working collaboratively on new initiatives, but regardless of how I worded the request, she interpreted the conversation as me trying to tell her what to do. Maddeningly, Lulu frequently did tell me how to do my job. The only way to work with her was to give her “approval” power, even when it made no sense. This grated on me because she was very green in many areas of her own job, and not at all knowledgeable about mine. So, eventually, I just avoided working with her whenever possible. Our team performance suffered because of this, but since our boss coddled Lulu there was nothing more to do about it.

A month or so ago, Lulu got another job and resigned. In the days leading up to her departure, she quizzed me intensely on my day-to-day work, asking how I did or approached certain things. This tripped a wire in my brain, and after Lulu left my company, I looked at our internal knowledge center and discovered she’d “checked out” and downloaded several of my own guides, frameworks, and templates.

She is now essentially doing my job at her new company – the same title/type of work, but also literally my job because she’s using all my collateral, which I also suspect she used to get the job in the first place.

The latest development is that she periodically emails me and asks for help. These emails are obsequious in tone and are things she could easily google for herself. I can’t decide if she thinks I’m dumb enough to help her out or if she believes she is so charming that I couldn’t possibly resist her request.

I am torn between pretending I don’t get these emails (or just responding half-heartedly enough that it’s no longer worth her time to even send them) or telling her outright to figure things out for herself. She made my job incredibly difficult for years; I am not inclined to help her.

If this were a movie, you could send her bad advice, which she would then steal, ultimately torpedoing her career due to her own incompetence and underhandedness. You, meanwhile, would get a promotion and also a handsome boyfriend.

This not a movie, so don’t do that. But you definitely don’t need to help or even respond to her emails at all. Just ignore them.

If you feel awkward doing that, the next best thing is to take a long time to respond and then, when you finally do, be vague and unhelpful — or just say, “Sorry, I’m swamped right now and I don’t want to hold you up, so don’t wait on me.”

But really, you could just ignore her. Set her emails to go straight into your trash if you want. You don’t owe this person who made your life difficult, and who apparently stole your work, anything. You definitely don’t owe her help doing her new job.

If you could prove she had stolen your work — or your company’s property, more broadly — and taken it to her next company where she was presenting it as her own, that would be worth tipping off your boss about. Your company might have Feelings about that kind of theft (especially if she’s at a competitor, but even if she’s not), but it doesn’t sound like there’s conclusive enough evidence to go in that direction (even though I agree with you that it looks pretty clear), especially given your boss’s coddling of Lulu.