Core Responsibilities

For six months, Arjun had been doing the work of two people.

When the senior developer left, the office never replaced him. The empty desk became a quiet monument to optimism, and the workload simply drifted onto whoever was still standing. That turned out to be Arjun.

He was patching ancient code that nobody seemed to understand, training two nervous interns who asked a question every ten minutes, and preparing the weekly client reports that made the department look far more organized than it actually was. None of it had been part of his original position. None of it had come with extra pay.

He kept doing it anyway, because the alternative was watching the whole place wobble apart.

Eventually, he asked for a market adjustment.

His manager, Gregory Vale, leaned back in his chair and gave him a polished little speech about budgets, constraints, and difficult times. Then he closed the conversation by telling Arjun to focus on the core responsibilities outlined in his contract instead of worrying about money.

Arjun had sat there, hands folded, face blank, while something settled into place inside him.

All right, then.

The next morning, he stopped touching the nightly build errors. Those weren’t in his contract. He stopped answering the interns’ constant messages after hours. Also not in his contract. And when the weekly client report was due, he let the deadline arrive without him.

At 8:17 a.m., his phone began to vibrate.

At 8:18, it started to buzz continuously.

By 8:20, Gregory was sending messages marked urgent, asking where the data was for his 9:00 meeting.

Arjun stared at the screen, then opened his contract and found the section Gregory had been so eager to quote. He copied the line about core responsibilities, attached a screenshot, and sent it with a brief note: This morning’s tasks fall outside my role as written.

By 9:30, the building was in motion.

The meeting had gone badly. Gregory had apparently walked into the director’s office expecting the usual polished presentation and instead found himself explaining why the client figures were missing. He tried, according to office rumor, to shift the blame onto Arjun in front of everyone.

That didn’t work.

Arjun had already been called into a separate meeting with Human Resources and the director by the time the accusation landed. He arrived with receipts: the earlier email, the exact words Gregory had used, the list of tasks he had been performing for months without promotion or compensation.

When the director asked why the work had stopped, Arjun answered calmly.

He had been told to prioritize the core responsibilities in his contract.

The room went quiet.

Later that afternoon, management tried a different angle. They pointed to the phrase other duties as assigned, as if those five words could magically justify an entire second job. Arjun listened, then explained that “other duties” did not mean permanently absorbing a departed senior developer’s workload for no extra pay.

He said it politely.

He meant it exactly.

Nobody fired him. They couldn’t, not really. The department was already running on two interns and one overworked employee who knew where all the broken pieces were buried.

Instead, they scheduled a role re-evaluation for Monday morning.

For the first time in months, Arjun felt something close to relief.

The place was still a mess. The company still looked like a sinking ship. He was still applying elsewhere, because he was not naïve enough to mistake panic for change.

But as he left the office that evening, he had the strange, satisfying sense of having finally stepped back onto solid ground.

He would do the job he was paid for.

Nothing more.