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.
The Lingering Unease
The drive home was quiet. I placed the two heavy boxes of perfectly printed, beautifully teal-logoed handouts on the passenger seat. The job was done. It was exactly what I needed. So why did I feel so unsettled?
“How’d it go?” Mark asked as I walked in, already setting the table for dinner.
“Fine. I got them,” I said, dropping my keys into the ceramic bowl by the door. “The clerk was a bit of a punk.”
I told him what Kyle had said. Mark made the appropriate sympathetic noises, but I could tell he was filing it under ‘annoying retail experiences.’
“He’s just some bored kid, Halla. Probably makes minimum wage to deal with people’s terrible PowerPoint designs all day. Don’t let it get to you.”
I knew he was right. Logically, it was nothing. A minor annoyance in a stressful day. But the feeling lingered. It was the public nature of it—the way he’d used my work as a punchline for the benefit of the queue. He hadn’t just processed a transaction; he’d taken a piece of my professional identity and held it up for casual ridicule.
Later that night, I was double-checking the collating. The paper was crisp, the colors perfect. But as I flipped through the slides on workplace psychological safety, I felt a knot of irony tighten in my stomach. I was about to stand in front of a room full of banking executives and talk about the importance of creating a respectful environment, yet I’d just let a kid with a bad haircut make me feel small and powerless in a copy shop. I shook my head, telling myself to let it go. It was a one-time thing. I wouldn’t even have to go back.
A Revision and a Repeat Performance
Of course, I had to go back.
The pilot session on Monday went well, but the VP had feedback. Good feedback, mostly, but it required revisions. Several charts needed updating, and a few case studies had to be tweaked for specificity to their corporate culture. Which meant I had to reprint the entire deck for the full department-wide rollout on Friday.
I hesitated, standing in my home office with the updated PDF saved on the same silver thumb drive. I could go to the other print shop across town. It would add forty minutes to my trip, but the thought of facing Kyle and his smirking commentary again made my jaw tense.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Halla,” I muttered to myself. The chances of him even being there, let alone remembering me, were slim. I was being paranoid.
He was there. He was at the exact same counter, leaning on his elbows, looking even more bored than before. A grim sense of inevitability settled over me.
“Back again?” he said, a flicker of recognition in his eyes as he took my drive. He didn’t wait for an answer. He opened the file, and I watched his eyes scan the screen. He clicked through faster this time, as if looking for something. He stopped on a slide titled “Identifying and Overcoming Unconscious Bias.”
He let out a low whistle. “Unconscious bias,” he read aloud, a theatrical lilt in his voice. He glanced over his shoulder at his coworker, a woman busy with a large-format printer, then looked toward the man now waiting behind me. “Better check my privilege at the door.”
The man in line, who was wearing a faded construction company sweatshirt, gave a short, sharp bark of a laugh.
This time, the heat in my face was pure anger. It was no longer a random quip; it was a pattern. He was performing, using my content as his material. I felt my hands curl into fists at my sides. But what could I do? Yell at him? Demand to see a manager and hold up the entire line over a snarky comment? It felt like a massive overreaction.
So I did what I always did. I buried it. I paid the bill, took the receipt, and told him I’d be back in an hour. As I walked out, the sound of the man behind me still chuckling felt like a slap in the face.
The Unraveling of Professional Decorum: The Final Insult
The final, final version. That’s what I told myself as I saved the PDF for the third time in a week. After the department-wide session, the bank’s legal team had requested a few minor but non-negotiable changes to the wording on the harassment policy slides. It was tedious, frustrating, but it was the last hurdle. One more print run, and this project would be, for all intents and purposes, complete.
My son, Liam, called from college in the middle of it all, panicking about a political science paper. I spent twenty minutes talking him down, listening to his frantic outlining, and offering advice. It was a welcome distraction, a reminder of a world outside of corporate jargon and toner cartridges.
“You got this, sweetie,” I told him, the irony thick in my throat. I felt like I was losing my own grip.
The thought of going back to Print & Post made me physically ill. I imagined Kyle’s smug face, his inevitable new zinger. He probably had one chambered and ready. I looked up the other print shop again. They closed in thirty minutes. There was no way I’d make it through traffic. It was Print & Post or nothing.
I grabbed my keys, the little thumb drive now feeling like a tiny silver grenade. I promised myself this would be different. I would be brisk, professional, and utterly ignore him. I would not give him the satisfaction of a reaction. I would be a gray rock. My pulse hammered in my ears, a frantic drumbeat against the wall of my forced calm. This was just a transaction. It meant nothing.
About the Author
