'The Paper Towel Wars': Annoying coworker battling over shared work area gets a hilariously pettyful surprise

Elna McHilderson • Managing Editor

Jul 19, 2023 7:00 PM EDT

If you have ever had to share a workspace, then you know how annoying and passive aggressive it can be. You might like to leave your sweater on the back of the chair because it gets cold in there, but the other person keeps removing it for some reason. Or maybe your office space buddy leaves empty water bottles everywhere and you end up being the one who cleans them up every time. It's super annoying. So what do you do? Report them to HR? Request a new workspace partner? If you go by Reddit rules, the obvious solution is to get petty.

That is exactly what this one employee did and it sparked a paper towel war. This person works in a company's quality lab and there are three shifts that go through her shared workspace. The machine they work with uses water in its processing, so there are often spills. So it makes sense that there are paper towels constantly around to clean up any potential messes. However, one coworker seems to be anti-paper towel or maybe anti-clean up, and constantly moves the paper towels away from their work area. After months of battle of brining boxes of paper towels back and forth, OP had it. They then decided it was pettyful time. Them and their team decide to take all of the boxes of paper towels out and put them all over their workspace. So now, instead of just one box by the machine with the water, there were 14 boxes of paper towels spread all over their work area. Now, if the annoying coworker wanted to move the box of paper towels, they would have to move all 14. Is this a win? We think so. Read the entire thing below along with others' reactions and decide for yourself.