The Coworker Who Stole My Report in the Worst Possible Meeting

I spent three weeks on a detailed analysis for our department. A coworker, the kind who is always around when credit is being handed out and never around when work is being done, asked me to share it "just to review." I did, because I was naive.

He took the entire thing, changed the title, put his own name on it, and scheduled a meeting with the senior executives to present it as his own work before I could present it as mine. I found out an hour before the meeting, from a calendar invite I was, insultingly, not on.

Here is the part I am a little proud of. When I had built the report, I had done what a mentor once taught me: I kept a clean master copy, and any version I shared with someone I did not fully trust had one small, deliberate error planted in it — a specific wrong figure in a specific footnote that no honest reviewer of the real data would ever repeat.