Lots of things in life are like that. Most of the pit threads on this board, for example. 
Left Hand of Dorkness has reminded me of another. In a game of Settlers of Catan, I got into a literal shouting match over when/if dice should be rerolled. I had been waiting for a certain number to be rolled for at least 15 minutes (it was a rare-ish combination like a 10 or 11 on two six-sided dice) and that number being rolled would have helped all players to at least some extent. I rolled the number but the dice brushed against my non-rolling hand while in the air and someone demands that they be rerolled. I had no chance to influence the dice in my favor while they were in contact with my hand (by the time I noticed the dice had touched me, they were well past my hand) but the other player didn’t care and insisted that I roll again. I argued that the dice had done their job and produced a pair of random numbers and that there had been no agreement in advance about any situation that would require the dice to be rerolled; he insisted that “it doesn’t matter; they touched your hand”. I honestly would have done it just to move on if I hadn’t needed that number to come up so badly but I got what I needed and wasn’t going to give it up. Pigheadedness and shouting ensued. Not my proudest moment.
I’ve been in plenty of pointless D&D rules debates on the internet.
One non-internet related argument was one I had with my old roommate. He claimed that if you plopped him in a residential neighbourhood anywhere in the world, then he could reliably identify where he was based solely on the architecture. For some reason, I thought that was ludicrous and I was incensed that he persisted in his claim. Why I got so worked up about it, I have no idea.
The same roommate was an amateur expert on bears and he got into an argument once with a third roommate.
Roommate 3: “If I saw a grizzly bear, I’d just run away.”
Roommate 2: "That’s stupid; a grizzly bear can easily outrun you and that would provoke its hunting reflex, etc., etc.
Roommate 3: “I don’t care what you say, I’d still run away. I bet I could outrun a bear.”
Roommate 2: “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!!”
This persisted for a surprisingly long time, to the amusement of everyone else present.
When I was a teenager, I had a bitter, bordering on violent, argument with a boyfriend about whether or not there can be Russian Jews. His position was that Russia is an atheist country, so there can’t be Russian Jews.
:smack:
I’ve mentioned it on the board before, but I was a bartender in college and once participated in an argument among the regulars about whether the elf who wanted to be a dentist was named “Herbie” or “Hermy”.
It lasted three days! Oh, those pre-internet days!
I once listened to my dad and my brother, who was about 16-17 at the time, have a rather heated, lengthy exchange of views over the various anatomical properties of unicorns. Pointing out to them that unicorns don’t really exist and thus there is no definitive answer as to the shape or length of their horns, so they could shut up and go do something else, did not make an impact.
I still don’t know what started it. It was really weird.
I witnessed a long friedship implode because the 2 girls were arguing over who got dumped by the better guy. They both insisted that the guy who dumped them was way better than the guy who dumped the other one.
Very similarly to this, my wife and I were on the road once when we got into an argument about NPR’s use of matching-funds challenges during pledge drives. I’m not sure I could tell you today how we let it get so far out of hand, but it also ended up with pulling over and almost having someone walk home.
This, along with our classic “Why are you defending Ronald Reagan?” argument, are things we can laugh about now, but good God!
A co-worker once stopped at one of those peoples houses where they have 20 or more bicycles for sale in the front yard and bought a bike. It was a Schwinn and the model was whatever was one step better than a “Varsity” It may have been a “Collegiate” but I don’t remember now.
Me: Cool! I love those old Scwinns. I always wanted a LeTour.
Her: The guy said this is exactly the same as a LeTour.
Me: No, it’s different. I know, I memorized the specs for LeTours when I was a kid. I wanted one so bad.
Her: He sells bikes, he knows. It’s the same.
Me: Why would Schwinn give two different names to the same model bike?
Her: Same thing!
Me: (Rattles off a list of things that are different like alloy rims, alloy crank, lugged frame, etc.)
Her: I don’t know what those things mean, but you’re wrong. They are the same!
This went on for an embarrassingly long time, in the office, getting more and more heated until we both stalked off fuming.
Some were here in SDMB itself.
I once got into a horrible fight with my husband - for being too easy going! We were traveling and he left it pretty much entirely up to my inclination where we’ll eat lunch, which hotel, bus or train, six days or eight. After a few months, (of pretty much having everything my way!), it felt like traveling with a child. He was driving me crazy. If I asked for his input his response was either ‘whatever you think!’, ‘up to you’, ‘I don’t care!’. If you pressed him, he’d deliver all three together!
When we flew into Jammu I insisted on staying in the cab as we went from hotel to hotel to find a room. I was feeling empowered and liberated when he returned and begged me to come look at the room already! It was such a stupid fight, and lasted two days!
After which we immediately fell back to the way it had always been, and was clearly meant to be!
Lady at Safeway: I want to buy root beer at Lucky’s.
Man at Safeway: But we’re here, and it’s cheaper.
Lady: I WANT to BUY IT at LUCKY’s.
Escalation ensued. I decided to buy soda some other time. By the time I got to the end of the aisle, they were THROWING 2 liter bottles of soda at each other. Security was involved, and an impressive cleanup.
I once overheard two coworkers engage in a lengthy debate over whether pizzas normally have an even or odd number of slices.
Both my parents had hearing impairments that led to a lot of miscommunication. The greatest stupid argument I ever heard was my father telling my mother they wouldn’t visit my grandparents that year.
He: It looks like we’ll be spending Christmas at home this year.
She: Alone? What are you talking about? I’m not spending Christmas alone!
He: A loan? Why do we need a loan for Christmas? Don’t I make enough money for you to live on?
I would have stopped them right there, but I was laughing too hard and it took a few more rounds before I could get their attention.
Two come to mind.
The all-time stupidest was an argument with an ex-boyfriend about paying for Chinese food that was an hour and a half(!) late. He insisted that we still needed to pay, even though a friend was on his way to pick us up to go to a movie and the food hadn’t arrived. I told him to call the restaurant and say it was too late, so we had to leave and weren’t going to pay. He insisted NO! I said he was free to leave an envelope of money for the food guy if he thought it was so immoral, he said No!
Turns out, several years later he admitted that he actually was so messed up about food (he had lost fifty pounds a few years before) that he actually wanted the food so much he didn’t want to go to the movie! As it was we left, didn’t pay of course, and he refused to speak to me, our friend, and his date for the whole movie. So Incredibly Frustrating.
The other one actually resulted in the driver of the car saying, to me, a college senior, and the two other passengers, grad students, that she was going to “turn the car around” and stop driving if we didn’t shut up and stop arguing. That was about whether or not schools should teach about Holocaust denial. I couldn’t believe a history grad student was actually saying that Deniers should have their views taught as “an alternate perspective” and now thinking about it I kind of hope that that wasn’t really what she meant, she was just unable to explain.
I used to have endless circular arguments with my ex husband. They would start with a snafu that occurred because I had got something wrong. “Why did you do that?” he would say “Well because I had the wrong idea about something – eg I was late because I thought the bus was at quarter past when it was really at ten past so I missed it and was late.” Him “You were wrong, the bus goes at ten past.” Me “Yeah I know that now but I didn’t then.” Him “Why were you late? There was a bus at ten past.” Me, well I didn’t know that I thought it went at quarter past." Him “It doesn’t.” and so on. I honestly don’t know why the explanation that I’d made a mistake wasn’t enough for him, nor, for that matter why I was so desperate for him to understand.
A different kind of argument with a friend: We had both just gotten our first internet capable, windows operating computers. I knew very little about them and understood less, a friend had installed all the software and got me set up. He had put a number of shortcuts on the desktop so I could easily access things I wanted to use (as you do of course). Friend came round saw these and mistook them for programs that were open. He began to insist that this was a terrible thing and said he was going to delete all my icons. Now I knew he was wrong but not why (I had forgotten the magic words “desktop shortcuts”) and I was desperate to keep my icons because at the time I had no idea how else to access anything any other way (or how to put them back). By the time it ended I was in tears as I ordered him away from my computer. Funnily enough he never brought the issue up again.
Another one, where I was the bystander. My brother had borrowed Dad’s car to go butterfly hunting, he’d taken it some way up a woodland track. Dad saw at once that the car was damaged (or so he believed) and began bellowing at bro about the “long scratch down the side of the car”. Bro supposed it might have got scratched by a twig. Dad went ballistic about his carelessness. I could see that bro was about to get banned from using the car. That would be terrible – how was he going to drive me places then? I stared miserably at the scratch. It didn’t really look like a scratch… I fetched a cloth and began to wipe it off, revealing pristine car beneath. Once I got their attention dad was still of the opinion that bro shouldn’t take the car to places where it could get streaked with mud but there was no more talk of a ban. I’m still pissed off that neither of them thanked me.
Or, all the leegul-beegul courtroom arguments of them thar Soverinn Sityzinns that we read about, including several recent or current threads right here.
Don’t. . . even . . . get . . . me . . . started . . . on my stories like this. Must. hold. my. tongue. Must. keep. the. peace. Grrrrr…
Real, GENUINE, bona-fide, UNICORN HORN (photo)! Yes, they are really spiraled like that. I saw one myself in an exhibit.
And now: A really stupid argument with a really stupid guy, in which I personally participated: I mentioned to landlord (years ago) that in my bathroom sink, the left knob was the cold water and the right knob was the hot water. (Note to Brits and probably everyone else in the world: Yes, that’s Yet Another Thing that Americans (normally) do backwards from everyone else.) Not that I really cared. His solution: Disconnect the two water pipes at the top of the hot water heater, and re-connect them, each where the other formerly was. :smack: Not that he wanted me to do that. He was going to do it for me. Then I had to argue with him to leave bad enough alone.
I witnessed this one. I was at Fort Knox going through armor officer training. One young lieutenant was arguing that he knew everything about the Bosnian War. Much more than the other officer he was arguing with. The reason? Because he was from Dayton and it was in the the papers a lot. The guy he was arguing with was a foreign exchange officer. Someone who was in the Serbian controlled army when the war broke out, deserted and joined his Bosnian Croat countrymen in the fight for the entire war.
An argument over whether it was Carolyn Jones or Yvonne de Carlo in the Addams Family, that got very heated.