Fred is a very hard worker, does his work well, and always keeps his promises and deadlines. He works with Joe, Bill and Kvetoslav. These three guys are all lazy, do very sloppy work, and you never know if they’re going to do what they promise to. Instead of disciplining Joe, Bill and Kvetoslav, or firing them, the company managers just let them sit around and be lazy. Their solution to the problem is to pile more and more work on Fred, because they know he’ll do it all, even if he ends up having a heart attack. So Fred has to do most of the work in his department, while the other three guys sit around talking about football, cruising the Internet, talking on the phone, and taking long lunches. (If the group is women, there often seems to be one who spends most of her day at work on her own wedding planning.)
Does your language have a term for such a situation, or a proverb?
My mum has helped me with this (like many elderly people, she’s a specialist in proverbs) and suggested the following saying, which – if not exactly custom-made – might apply, at least in part, to the situation you described:
Del ?rbol ca?do todos hacen le?a.
Literally: everybody gets firewood from a fallen tree.
The only one that I can think of to describe a person like Fred is Pak turut
Pak is the way the Malays address a man, like Pak Jamie=Mr. Jamie while turut is to follow/to go along.
But if I were to translate it correctly I would say Mr. Yes to all.
As to the act/situation itself, I found these 3 sayings from the internet.
Agih-agih kungkang:To distribute kungkang(i think it’s a type of animal)
Meaning: To be too giving that you sacrifice too much and you end up destroying yourself.
I’m sorry I don’t know what kungkang is :oops: .I’ve looked up the dic too.
Nasib penyapu banyak jasa turun darjat:It is a broom’s fate to have done good offices only to be degraded later on.
Meaning:same as #1
Angkat batang keluar cacing gelang: To lift a tree trunk up only to find worms.
Meaning: To do work that are left by others and nothing useful can come from it.
Although I don’t understand why a person wants to lift up the tree trunk in the first place.Maybe there’s a period where people do this tree lifting to find food or any goods.
And thanks for starting this thread.I had a marvelous time reading and exploring malay proverbs/idioms.
