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.
The Longest Queue
The universe, it seemed, had a sick sense of humor. The line was longer than it had been on both previous visits combined. It snaked back from the counter, past the aisle of novelty greeting cards, all the way to the passport photo station. Every single person looked tired and impatient. And there, at the sole operational register, was Kyle.
He was in his element. He moved with a practiced slowness, as if deliberately trying to see how much of other people’s time he could waste. He’d make a little comment to one customer, share a conspiratorial eye-roll with another. He wasn’t a clerk; he was the emcee of this miserable, fluorescent-lit circus.
I stood there for what felt like an eternity, my carefully constructed wall of calm crumbling with each passing minute. I scrolled through emails on my phone, trying to look busy, trying not to listen to his running commentary. But I couldn’t block it out. He was a master of the backhanded compliment and the thinly veiled insult.
By the time I finally reached the counter, my nerves were shot. My throat was dry. I felt a familiar dread creep into my chest as I handed him the thumb drive, avoiding his eyes.
“Look who it is,” he said, his voice dripping with faux cheer. “My favorite HR guru. What are we stamping out today? Inappropriate jokes? Fun?”
I just stared at the countertop, a cheap laminate designed to look like granite. “Thirty copies. Same specs as before.” My voice was a flat monotone. I would not engage. I would not give him the oxygen.
He plugged in the drive. The file opened. I could see the reflection of my slides in his glasses as he clicked through them, one by one. I held my breath, waiting for the inevitable.
The Shared Snicker
He found it on page 84. It was one of the slides legal had asked me to adjust. It was an anonymized case study about an employee who had been fired for sharing confidential medical information about a coworker. The slide detailed the specific violation of both company policy and privacy laws. It was dry, dense, and absolutely not funny.
Kyle stopped clicking. He leaned forward, squinting at the screen. Then, he did something that made the air leave my lungs.
He printed a single page.
The printer next to him whirred to life and spat out the sheet. He plucked it from the tray, and without even a glance at me, turned to his coworker, Brenda, who was now restocking paper at the next station.
“Brenda, check this out,” he said, holding the paper up for her to see. He pointed to a specific paragraph. “This lady got fired for telling someone her coworker had, like, a weird rash.”
Brenda leaned in. She read the paragraph, and her mouth twisted into a wide, ugly grin. She let out a sharp, snorting laugh. Kyle joined in, his shoulders shaking. They were standing two feet away from me, laughing at a sensitive, confidential case study from my presentation. He was holding a physical copy of my work, my intellectual property, and using it as a prop in his pathetic little comedy routine.
The line behind me went silent. The air crackled with a sudden, awful tension. Everyone was watching. I could feel their eyes on me, a mixture of pity and morbid curiosity. In that moment, I wasn’t a professional consultant. I was the butt of the joke. And the punchline was my entire career. The gray rock shattered.
The Confrontation
Something inside me snapped. The weeks of stress, the deadlines, the condescension, the public humiliations—it all coalesced into a single, blinding point of white-hot rage. The professional veneer I had spent a lifetime cultivating cracked and fell away.
I took a step forward, planting both of my palms flat on the counter. The sound was a sharp slap that made Kyle and Brenda both jump.
“That document,” I said, and my voice was low, shaking, and unrecognizable to my own ears. “Contains sensitive, personally identifiable information, even in its anonymized state. It is proprietary. Put it down. Now.”
Kyle’s smirk faltered for a second, but he recovered quickly. He was used to annoyed customers, not this. He fell back on his usual defense: dismissive arrogance.
He rolled his eyes, a dramatic, sweeping motion for the benefit of his audience. “Relax, lady. It’s just paper.” He actually waved the sheet of paper in the air, a little white flag of his own stupidity.
“It is not ‘just paper’,” I bit back, leaning closer. My voice dropped even lower, but it carried a new weight, a core of steel I hadn’t known I possessed. “It is a legal case study for a corporate client. Your handling of that file, right now, is a breach of your own company’s privacy policy. You have no right to view it beyond what is necessary to complete the job, and you have absolutely no right to print it, show it to others, and mock it.”
His face, for the first time, lost its smugness. It was replaced by a flicker of confusion, then a flash of anger. He was losing control of the room. “Look, I was just—”
“I don’t care what you were ‘just’ doing,” I cut him off. “Cancel my order. I’m not printing anything here.”
I pulled my thumb drive from the USB port on his console and dropped it into my purse. I turned and walked out, my back straight, my head held high. I didn’t look at the faces in the line. I didn’t need to. I could feel their shocked silence following me all the way to the door. The rage was a roaring fire in my chest, and for the first time in three visits, it wasn’t making me feel small. It was making me feel powerful.
About the Author
