let’s discuss the weirdest hills to die on you’ve seen at work

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Over the years, we’ve heard about people who chose some pretty odd hills to die on — people who became so strongly committed to a minor fight that they lost all sight of logic and decorum. To wit:

“Our break room has a giant whiteboard calendar in it. Last year the company sent us a new one and asked us to start using it at the first of this year. Not really sure why … the other was perfectly usable and there was no differing info on it, but hey, whatever! The new calendar is slightly smaller than the previous one – as in the previous calendar was 36×48 inches and the new one is 32×44 inches. The woman who updates this calendar was FURIOUS about this change. Oh the campaign this woman has waged to get the old calendar back – she sends emails, complains to every single employee at least once a day, has started tours of our branch in the break room (she points to the board and announces ‘this is the piece of crap calendar they expect us to use’), and holds that fury in her heart. Recently a few big wigs in the company were visiting and she started her tour as usual and then she paused as if expecting them to agree with her. They didn’t, she sighed heavily and moved on with her tour. Before they left she made sure to send them back to the home office with a list outlining why the new calendar sucks. You know they just crumpled that crap up into a ball the second they got into the car.”

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“When I started an office IT job, one of my first assignments was to clean up and update everyone’s computers. The first time I worked with this one coworker’s computer, it was a complete mess. He had some kind of add on for IE that added a little animated Olaf (from the movie Frozen) that would dance around and occasionally have animated snowflakes fall down the screen. Needless to say, it slowed his computer to a crawl, and he was always complaining about how slow his computer was. So, among general scans and cleanup, I removed the add on. He was LIVID. Went to my boss, to HR, to the head boss, because his animated dancing snowman that messed up his computer was gone. Phrases like ‘she has no right’ and ‘how dare she’ were thrown around. He made a big show of downloading some other hideous animated nav bar add on instead, and kept trying to flaunt it whenever I was nearby.”

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“Upon being told that it was now mandatory to wear your badge on a lanyard (no, not a clip, not on your belt, it had to be a lanyard), one woman completely lost it. She stood up (this was a meeting) and ranted about how lanyards were UGLY and they RUINED her outfits and WHY OH WHY was this a rule because EVERYONE hated it (no, the rest of us were fine) and so on. She compared it to ‘papers, please’ and how this was the slippery slope that would lead to robot workers and oh there was so much more but I can’t remember it all. Over the next few weeks she tried wearing her lanyard inside her blouse (no, the point is that the badge is visible) and claiming she just forgot until she got written up… and SHE QUIT. Well, took early retirement, but still.”

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“When I worked at a Scout camp, we would usually get two shirts each summer specific to the year: a polo shirt in that summer’s color, and a t-shirt listing what area of the camp you worked in. For years we wore the polo shirts on Mondays and the area shirts on Wednesdays, when families came to visit. Then one year management decided we should switch that, so campers could see who worked where at the start of the week and we’d all look nice and fancy when Mom and Dad showed up.

There was a minor uprising. Yelling arguments. Flat refusal to cooperate. We had staff for YEARS after the change who would wear the wrong shirt and say “oh — you didn’t tell me we were doing it different this week from how we’ve always done it.” We had staff members going so far as to carry two shirts with them all day Monday and Wednesday so they could put on the correct shirt when management was around, then change back to the other shirt when nobody was looking. Some of the worst offenders were our old retired guys (who are like gold, it’s hard to find adults to work at summer camp, so they weren’t disciplined over minor shirt disobedience) and carried the torch for their preferred shirt rotation for a literal decade after the change.”

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In the comment section, let’s discuss the weirdest hills to die on you’ve ever seen at work.