the pinstripe suits, the fancy espresso machine, and other weird hills coworkers chose to die on

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

Last week we talked about weird hills to die on — people who became so strongly committed to a minor fight that they lost all sight of logic and decorum — and here are 10 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The newsletter

Our Fortune 500 company hosted a weekend company-wide softball tourney, which was won by a team led by a guy known around the office as Hothead.

Monday morning arrives and the company-wide daily email goes out with important company announcements. One of the items included was the results of the previous weekend’s softball tourney. Hothead was livid about the fact that it included only the team name (not individual team members) and that it also included the team name of the runners-up.

He sent a scathing email to the comms person responsible for the newsletter about their “failure to recognize exceptional individual achievements” in the newsletter and demanded they send out a second email identifying each team member of the winning team. The comms person said no, so he made a nasty post on the company’s internal bulletin board; the posting was so snarky that it got removed within a couple of hours of posting it.

That made Hothead even more incensed so he skipped several levels of management and brought “the glaring omission” to the attention of the VP of Comms, head of HR, and a couple of C-level execs via email. He got a call from HR and ripped them a new one. He was brought in immediately for an in-person meeting with HR — with security present — and ordered to undergo anger management therapy. He refused, escalated his behavior, and was escorted from the building. Security cleaned out his desk for him.

2. The pinstripe suits

Many years ago, I worked for a very conservative smaller bank. The CEO was very old school, with a rigorous dress code. For decades (literally), the bank bought all staff four nicely tailored suits every two years. For the men, two were navy pinstripe, two were navy solid, and there were five company-supplied approved ties. For women, they were the same navy, and women could choose skirts or pants. This was described in the employee handbook. The solid suits were to be worn on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, the pinstripe suits on Tuesday and Thursday. I’m not kidding.

Toward the end of my tenure there, they decided to stop buying pinstripe suits. All four suits were the same dark navy. One older gentleman in our mortgage department was livid that they got rid of the pinstripe suits, and threatened to quit unless the decision was changed. He literally sent a resignation letter to the CEO (who he had known for decades).

Eventually a compromise was reached. It was added to the company handbook specifically that while we were not buying new pinstripe suits, if an employee had a pinstripe suit brought by the company, that as long as it was in good shape and looked professional, the employee was allowed to wear it on Tuesday or Thursday.

3. The supplies

When everyone was sent home for Covid, there was a lot of discussion about reimbursement for things like printer ink and other supplies.

But one group got all up in arms about three specific items: paper towels, hand soap, and, of course, toilet paper. On the argument that they got these items for free while working at work, so their at home usage went up for all of these things. They were livid that they were not going to be reimbursed for the toilet paper they had to use while working from home. And since we use the giant industrial rolls, they couldn’t just take some home.

There are a couple of them who still sneak extra office supplies home to “make up” for the injustice of having to provide their own essentials during that time.

4. The walking track

I run a senior center. Our building is laid out in such a way that our internal hallways can be used as an indoor walking track, which many people do utilize. Since we opened the facility, everyone seemed to all walk in one direction: counterclockwise. This went on for about a year, when we had some requests from patrons to switch directions. Not only to shake things up, but also so walkers could better enjoy some large murals we had had installed.

We announced the change at the start of the new year, and you wouldn’t believe the backlash. I had people telling me and my team that they were “never going to come back again!” I had folks telling us, “You can’t make me walk that way! I won’t do it!” and I had one person crying about how this change was too big and too dramatic and he would find somewhere else to walk.

After a week of this, we decided to hang up mirrors at the corners and tell people to walk whichever way they want and just not bump into each other. My colleagues and I still laugh about how we ruined everyone’s lives by changing the direction of the walking track; it still comes up years later in department head meetings.

5. The fancy espresso machine

My office was making plans for renovations, and the director got it into his head that we should have a big lounge area with couches where we could all bring our laptops and work together socially whenever we wanted.* My department head suggested we should get some sort of fancy espresso machine for this space, which the director roundly shut down as an unforgiveable extravagence. Department head was not to be deterred. He brought the espresso machine up at every meeting – department meetings where none of us could do anything about it, all-staff meetings, department head meetings where he reportedly got into arguments with the director each time. Finally he retired (possibly in part because of the espresso machine). We have an annual party where we invite our recent retirees back to make nice speeches about them and hear them make a speech too. He used his speech to bring up the espresso machine.

* This is its own issue but let’s just say not many people were enthused at the prospect of leaving their private offices with dual monitor setups to balance a laptop on their knees on a couch. In the end, the renovation was mych more mundane and mostly involved expanding the boardroom so all the staff could fit in it at once.

6. The microwaved fish

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s seen office drama over fish in the microwave, but a few years back it got to a ridiculous level. We had two microwaves in our cafeteria and someone (don’t know who, we were a decent amount of people in the office at the time) would microwave fish regularly. One day HR put up signs on the microwave doors saying “please don’t microwave foods with strong smells.” Well, the fish cooker must have taken it personally because they lost it. They first wrote a note in red on the sign to protest, then stuck up printouts from websites explaining the benefits of eating fish, all the while continuing to heat up their fish.

7. The pages

I have worked as a graphic designer for various nonprofits (often the only designer on staff). One department head at a library where I worked was adamant about maintaining her own preferred formatting/layout in design pieces that included work from a lot of other departments too (think annual report). So while everyone else was satisfied for me to take their images and text and use everything to make a nice cohesive design, this woman had to have “her pages” just the way she wanted — meaning multiple exclamation points (in a row, like “!!!!!”) and tiny pictures often arranged in an arc with WordArt titles.

I did push back, my boss pushed back, but because she was a department head it didn’t go anywhere. Eventually I just ended up exporting her original submitted Word docs as a PDF and plonking the whole thing into the annual report rather than trying to recreate her bananas layout ideas in InDesign. So if you were perusing our annual report, you’d get through about 20 pages of nicely-designed content, then suddenly a couple pages that looked like a 12-year-old made a flyer in Microsoft Word.

She was happy. I was not, but I was tired.

8. The title

Between college and law school, I took an unpaid internship with a local district attorney’s office. I was hired on full time at the conclusion of the internship as a research and writing assistant for the attorneys, which made the office manager who supervised me lose all her marbles in spectacular fashion. She pulled me out of meetings with the attorneys to do things like move boxes, rearrange files, and sweep floors. When one of the supervising attorneys told her off for it, she retaliated by ordering me office-branded notepads with my name and the title “temporary assistant district attorney intern.” You better believe I still have a few of those notepads hanging around and still laugh at them some 20 years later!

9. The start-up software

Someone in my company’s IT has decided the hill they are dying on is that Adobe Creative Cloud must automatically load every time we log into our workstation. On our already slow work computers that’s connected to an even slower virtual desktop using firewall software known to lag, it means a 15-minute start-up sequence on a good day. There have been many complaints and we’ve begged them to just change the startup settings so CC isn’t a startup app but they refuse to budge. No one knows why.

Every time someone requests this be changed, IT sends an email reply with the subject line “Why Adobe Creative Cloud Will Remain A Startup App” that is a long manifesto over the importance of Adobe CC in computing history without actually explaining why it needs to be in startup. There is not one single CC app we need for our jobs and we’re not even allowed to use Acrobat for PDFs.

10. The dress code

This isn’t mine, but my father’s. I am still proud of him for it, actually.

He was a high school history teacher from the 60s into the 90s. Very well-respected, wrote many textbooks, loved by his students. What he hated – and I mean hated – was having to wear formal clothes while he was teaching. The students could wear jeans, why couldn’t he? He actually organized a rebellion among his fellow teachers who were also sick of having to get dressed up every day – suits, dress shirts, ties, pantyhose, dresses, heels for the female teachers, dress shoes for the men, etc. – so they were quite willing to follow my dad’s lead. He fought with the assistant principal. He fought with his department head. He fought loudly with the principal. He went up against the school board. He declared he would quit over this if they would not relent. Finally, he organized a day of resistance. He got as many teachers as possible to come to work dressed in jeans. I think about 60 teachers did. The principal couldn’t send them all home, so he acquiesced.

From that day forward, teachers could wear jeans. There was much rejoicing. And I think, cake.