In my first job after college, I shared a cubicle with another worker. For whatever reasons, our desks were next to each other, rather than spaced out. I wanted to rotate my desk 90 degrees and had mentioned this to my manager. In a near panic, he asked if I'd moved anything. I hadn't moved anything, so he told me the proper procedure to move the desk.
I put in the request and about 3 weeks later, two people came to move the desk. I'd already unplugged any wiring, so one guy simply picked it up and rotated it. At that point, I found out my network cable (this is in the days before WiFi) for my PC was too short to reach the new desk location. I had to put in another request for wiring, and had to wait a week and a half for someone to come with a longer cable. During that time, I sat on the floor, with my monitor sitting on my chair. While installing the new cable, he asked if I'd unplugged the previous cable before the desk move. When I told him yes, he told me not to worry and that he wouldn't note that, but that I shouldn't do it again.
While I totally understand work rules that exist to ensure that workers aren't being made to perform duties that they're not contracted for AND to prevent companies from simply doing end-runs around them, when things reach this level of absurdity, it really sours things. Of course, the nature of "contract" is that common sense is hard to dictate and it does open the slippery slope. "I was just moving the desk in my cube" becomes "I was just moving the desk to the cube next door" to "I was just moving it on the same floor" etc.