I'm Not Yelling! I'm Merely Talking To You In A Condescending Manner

Throughout my 16 1/2 years of state employment, I've been yelled at for a myriad of transgressions. Some of those transgressions were serious enough to warrant further discipline beyond the verbal, while others were about as serious as giving a child crust on their PB&J when they specifically asked for no crust, yet the discipline was overly disproportionate to the actual transgression.

In other words, I accuse you of favoritism, you whine to your supervisor, and I get sent to anger management (true statement).

Earlier in the year, I had one such transgression, that although it wasn't an issue, someone had turned it into an issue.

When I get inter-office mail, sometimes I have to use a letter opener and a pair of scissors to open it, 'cause the sender chose to use a half a roll of tape to seal the envelope. The end result is that by the time I get done opening said envelope, it's purty much been turned into scrap paper.

So being the good worker bee, I put said envelope in the recycling barrel. Less than a minute later, a person higher up the food chain (who doesn't work in my department) stooped by to ask why I was recycling an interdepartmental envelope.

I answered the query, and within a few seconds, had an argument over whether or not I should've recycled the thoroughly destroyed envelope. If you think that an argument about recycling was dopey, you would be correct in your assumption.

Fast forward to mid-August '12.

One morning, I strolled over to a copier with the intention of making two dozen copies of a fax cover sheet. When I got there, a flashing error message on the control panel said that the paper tray needed to be refilled. So I proceeded to take four reams of paper and filled the paper tray.

However, being that this is one of those super sensitive new copiers that needed to have the paper aligned just right in order to work, it didn't work. Because I didn't properly align the paper.

Note: the rest of my floor isn't what you call "proactive" when it comes to doing certain things.

Anyways, after making a couple of attempts to fix the problem and failing, I left that copier and went to another to make my copies.

About several minutes later, a supervisor comes by my cube and says, "Did you make these copies?"

Sheepishly I say, "Oh, yeah. Thanks." (I had forgotten to cancel my print job before walking away)

After they had given it to me, they spend the next few minutes berating me for improperly filling the paper tray. Because I did it "wrong", I inconvenienced everyone else who had to use it. So in the future, if the copier needs to be filled, ask for help.

Note: This was a condensed version of the conversation, but you can get the basic idea on how dopey this was as well.

When this person left, two other co-workers who had heard this "discussion" commented on how dopey (there is another word that is a tighter fit, but alas, I'm trying to be Mr. Clean today) this was. My supervisor, who knew about the first incident, couldn't believe it when I said I was involved in a discussion that topped the first one for sheer chutzpah.

So in the course of one year, I got involved in arguments that covered the following topics:

1} recycling
2} filling a copier

So my question to you is this:

"What was the stupidest argument that you were forced to partake in, simply because someone objected to you doing something that you were supposed to do?"