Originally Posted by
gns 
It is hard to not feel guilty and wonder if I am a "team player".
Just being you aren't picking up someone else's slack doesn't mean you aren't a team player. If you are accountable for your work, willing to go the extra mile occasionally, but are clear about what your boundaries are, I think that makes you a BETTER team member than the person who's always doing the work for the others.
Originally Posted by
gns P.S. I did offer to share the project with her, and offered her help for the follow-up work tomorrow and even asked if she had somewhere she needed to be tonight, in which case I would have taken the late project
See, that's a better balance for you. It's so hard, when you're naturally inclined to "help people" to find that right balance where you respect yourself AND still feel "nice".
Originally Posted by
gns It does make me wonder - is it that we are "nice people" and "good -natured" or is it that people see us as having no backbone, and usable?
IMHO, it's a bit of both. There are some people, like my XAH, who seem to be natural social predators, and who can sense how easily others are to manipulate. Whether they do so overtly or not, they will naturally pass their work onto those others just because it's so easy to do so. I'm one of those natural doormats and I struggle everyday to do or say the things that feel right to me.