He keeps a spreadsheet. Private, hidden, meticulous. And what it tracks is every single instance of our manager taking someone else's work and presenting it upward as his own. Not vaguely — dates, details, what was said, whose work it actually was. Eleven entries in eight months. A quiet, methodical record of a specific kind of theft.
He showed it to me exactly once. After a genuinely brutal week where it happened again, more brazenly than usual, and he needed one other human to see that he wasn't imagining the pattern. Pulled it up, let me scroll, closed it.
I asked if he was building a case. Planning to take it somewhere, drop it on leadership, blow it up. He said no. It's not for revenge, he told me — it's just for his sanity. Because when it keeps happening and you keep saying nothing, you start to wonder if you're being oversensitive, if it's really as bad as it feels. The spreadsheet is proof, to himself, that it is. That he's not crazy. That eleven times in eight months is a real number.
And I believe him. It's not a weapon. It's a mirror. Somewhere to put the thing so it stops rattling around in his head as self-doubt. Some people vent, some people quit, some people confront. He logs it, quietly, and that's how he keeps his grip. Honestly, of all the coping mechanisms, it might be the sanest one on the team.