This may be a bit long, but bear with me.
As a bit of background, I am a pretty easy going person who gets along well with most people and am slow to get upset and fall out with people. As a teenager I was verbally bullied quite badly - I always thought of a smart come-back to put the bullies down, but could never bring myself to say them. I would rather let things lie for the sake of good relations and to stop arguments escalating, but I think this often leads to me failing to stand up for myself, so hence asking for this advice.
A situation has arisen today at work in relation to a committee that I am on, and I find myself in the midst of an argument with a woman, who I shall refer to as T. T was head of this committee but has just handed the reins to G.
Today T asked that we hold a meeting to discuss an issue to do with promotion (we don't have an HR department and promotion is part of our committee's remit).
There is a complicated situation with regards to one of the applicants for promotion, who I will call S. If S is promoted into role A then we would make informal supervision a requirement of her taking the role and all her work would be subject to supervision. If she is promoted into role B, then she would be within her rights to refuse supervision for her main role but we could make her ability to undertake certain extended tasks subject to her accepting supervision for that work.
In the role that S is performing at the moment, there is a requirement for formal supervision, which has to be registered with our professional conduct body.
I said that our organisation would not need to make a decision right now as to what form the supervision would take as this could be decided once we know whether S will get role A or role B.
In an email exchange that was initially sent out to the whole committee, T said that this was not good enough as we would have to complete certain registration forms at the point of S being promoted. A decision on supervision (and specifically a named supervisor) therefore needed to be made in advance of the decision on promotion.
I then spent some time researching our professional code of conduct, and confirmed that there was no need to register an informal supervisor, so no forms needed to be completed. As things had seemed to be a bit muddled by this point, I set out the situation as clearly as possible and quoted the relevant provisions of the code of conduct. This email went to the whole team and was intended to clarify the situation for us all.
T was not happy about this. She emailed me privately to say that I had been patronising and that she knew what the code of conduct said. She said that I had not properly read her emails and that she had correctly set out the position to the team already. I checked my emails and replied to her, including a direct quote from her email where she had wrongly set out the position regarding the registration of supervision. I tried to keep the tone light and friendly, and apologised if I had been patronising. She then replied, and said that I had missed a further email in which she had clarified her comment, and that she had not got the position wrong. I emailed back quoting from her second clarification email to show that she still had the position wrong in that one. Again, I tried to set a friendly tone of 'it's not clear, we all needed clarification'.
I then did not hear back from her for several hours.
She has just emailed me again saying "It really isn't confusing but glad you have found clarification. I am never not cool with anyone but will tell you as it is. I will call you out on unacceptable behaviour. Your email response was patronising and rude but thanks for the apology".
This is not the first time that I have seen her over react to some sort of public correction. My question is whether I should pull her up on this, and point out that I was not being patronising as she was mistaken, and I corrected her? Or should I let it lie? Personally, I think that her behaviour was rude and unacceptable, but I'm not going to let it bother me.
What would you do?