One Worker Deleted the Files. The Next One Sits Bored at Work.

A letter published in Slate's Good Job advice column this month came from someone bored at work in the most literal sense: hired to fill a seat, then handed almost nothing to do. The writer, who signed off as "Bored," was brought on because head office requires that position at every branch. The title arrived. The actual job never did.

Here's the detail that makes the story stick. The person who held the role before them tried to sabotage the operation on the way out by deleting files. The supervisor absorbed the duties in the aftermath and has refused to hand them back — not to the saboteur, who is long gone, but to the replacement who had nothing to do with it. So the new hire spends most days watching YouTube while colleagues nearby work flat out. The side-eye is building, and the reason for it is a secret.

It reads like a niche office comedy. It isn't. Statistics Canada, in figures released on April 7, 2026, found that 29.1 per cent of Canadian-born workers aged 25 to 54 with postsecondary education say they have more skills than their job actually needs. Nearly three in ten. The empty desk in that Slate letter is an extreme version of something a lot of Canadians recognize.

Why Being Bored at Work Wrecks People

Occupational psychologists have a name for this: boreout. It's the mirror image of burnout — not too much pressure, but too little purpose — and the symptoms overlap more than most managers expect. Exhaustion, low mood, anxiety, the creeping sense that you're becoming unemployable. As Employee Benefit News has reported, boreout is quietly expensive, because a disengaged employee looks fine on the org chart right up until they quit.

The scale is not trivial. A 2025 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, widely cited in coverage of workplace disengagement, put the cost at roughly US$5.04 million a year for an average 1,000-person American firm — about US$5,000 per employee, per year, in lost output and turnover. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, published in April, found only 21 per cent of Canadian employees are engaged at work, against a 31 per cent average for the U.S. and Canada combined.

The Canadian Numbers Behind the Idle Desk

The Statistics Canada release, drawn from the Labour Force Survey in September 2024 and September 2025, is worth reading closely. Among core-aged workers with postsecondary credentials, 19.1 per cent of those born in Canada described themselves as overqualified. For immigrants who arrived in the past five years, it was 32.6 per cent. And 25.6 per cent of recent immigrants were in jobs requiring a high school diploma or less, versus 13.2 per cent of Canadian-born workers.

That gap matters here. Being underused is not evenly distributed, and the people most likely to be sitting on unused skills are often the least able to walk out and find something better.

How to Claw Back a Job That Was Taken From You

The advice from columnist Laura Helmuth was to stop waiting and start proposing. That's the right instinct, and it works better when it's broken into small, specific asks.

Ask for One Piece of the Job, Not All of It

A supervisor burned by a departing employee is protecting the operation, not punishing you. Requesting the entire portfolio back triggers that fear. Requesting one contained task — a weekly report, one client file, read-only access to a system — gives them a low-risk way to say yes. Do it well, then ask for the next piece.

Borrow Work From Another Branch

If your own manager won't delegate, peers elsewhere in the company might. Shadowing someone at another location, covering a colleague's vacation, or mentoring a new hire all put your name on real output without threatening anyone's turf.

Put the Empty Hours on Paper

Keep a plain log of what you were assigned and what you completed each week. Not as a weapon — as a record. It turns "I feel useless" into evidence you can raise in a review, and it protects you if the role is later cut for underperformance.

When Losing Your Duties Becomes a Legal Issue

Canadian employment law has a concept most workers only hear about too late. Under common law, a unilateral and substantial change to a fundamental term of employment — including stripping someone of meaningful responsibilities — can amount to constructive dismissal, even if the pay never changes. Employment lawyers generally treat sustained removal of duties as a live risk for employers, not a favour to the employee.

That is not a reason to storm out. Resigning on that theory without advice is how people lose severance claims. It is a reason to document the situation and, if months pass with no change, get a consultation before making any decision.

What to Watch for Over the Next Six Months

Give the small-ask approach a real trial — say, one concrete request a month for three months. If the answers are still no, the problem is structural, and no amount of initiative fixes a role that exists only to satisfy a headquarters checkbox. Update your résumé now, while you have time and a paycheque, rather than later, when a restructuring decides for you. And tell one trusted colleague the truth about your workload. The side-eye you're getting is built on a story your co-workers invented to explain the silence. Give them a better one.