He held up a single page of my proprietary work, pointed to a confidential paragraph, and shared a snorting, ugly laugh with his coworker two feet away from my face.
This was the third trip. The third time this smirking kid at a copy shop decided my career was his personal stand-up material.
He’d mocked my DEI presentation before, tossing out little jabs about microaggressions and unconscious bias for the benefit of the queue.
But this was different.
This was a public dissection of my intellectual property for cheap laughs. The line of customers behind me went silent, a jury of strangers witnessing my complete and utter humiliation.
Something inside me finally shattered.
That little clerk didn’t realize he wasn’t just violating my privacy; he was performing for a security camera, and I was about to use his own company’s employee handbook to write the final act.
The First Unsolicited Opinion: A Crisis of Color Calibration
The deadline wasn’t just looming; it was a vulture circling overhead, casting a shadow over my entire weekend. My consulting firm had landed a major contract with a regional bank, a series of workshops on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It was a massive undertaking, and I was the lead trainer. My slides, all 128 of them, were my life’s work for the past three months. They were sharp, insightful, and meticulously designed. The problem was, my home printer had decided, in a spectacular fit of passive aggression, that the color teal was now a personal enemy.
Every printout of our company’s logo looked like a sad, faded bruise.
Mark, my husband, had tried to help. He’d spent an hour wrestling with ink cartridges and driver updates before throwing his hands up. “Honey, it’s a lost cause. Just go to that Print & Post place down the road. They can do it in twenty minutes.”
He was right, of course. I hated those places—the stale, ozonic smell of overworked machines, the fluorescent lights that made everyone look like a sleep-deprived ghost. But the pilot session was Monday morning, and the bank’s VP of Human Resources was going to be there. I couldn’t show up with handouts that looked like they’d been left out in the rain.
So, I loaded the final PDF onto a thumb drive, the little silver rectangle feeling impossibly heavy with the weight of my career. It contained charts on unconscious bias, statistics on workplace representation, and carefully worded scripts for navigating difficult conversations. It was sensitive, proprietary, and now, I was about to hand it over to a stranger.
A Quip from the Counter
The line at Print & Post was, predictably, a study in quiet desperation. A college kid nervously clutched a rolled-up poster, a frazzled woman juggled a toddler and a stack of wedding invitations, and I stood there, tapping my foot, rehearsing my order. “Thirty copies, 128 pages, double-sided, color, collated, and three-hole punched, please.”
When my turn came, the clerk at the counter barely looked up. He was young, maybe twenty-two, with a haircut that was trying too hard and a name tag that read “Kyle.” He took my thumb drive with a kind of languid disinterest that only someone who has never faced a real deadline can possess.
He plugged it in, and my presentation splashed across his monitor. He clicked through the first few slides, his expression unchanging. Then he paused. His eyes flicked up from the screen, not to me, but to the line behind me. A small, knowing smirk played on his lips.
“DEI training, huh?” he said, his voice just loud enough for the next two people to hear. “Gotta watch out for those microaggressions.”
He chuckled to himself, a dry, dismissive sound. The college kid behind me shifted his weight. I felt a hot flush creep up my neck. It was a stupid, throwaway comment, the kind of thing you hear from people who think HR is just the corporate fun police. But it was about my work. And it was public.
“Just the thirty copies, please,” I said, my voice tighter than I intended.
He shrugged, his smirk still in place, and started tapping at his keyboard to process the order. I stood there, feeling strangely exposed, like he hadn’t just seen my file, he’d seen through me, and decided I was a joke.
About the Author
