People who want things from you are the enemy

I worry a bit about how adversarial I'm getting about the doomed project.

I'm putting passwords on documents and not giving them out to most people. Those documents were recently obsoleted. I don't want people ignoring the e-mail about that and editing them, in which case either their edits would be lost or I'd have to do extra unnecessary work to find them.

When someone asks me for something and it's not really totally clear, I ask for clarification and either do it my way or don't do it at all until I get it. In one sense, that's just conscientiousness. But I'm not doing it because I really care about getting everything proper right now, I'm doing it because I don't want to take the blame when it's not.

If I don't agree with or can't do all of what they're asking, I'm very careful to point out the parts I have problems with, and I might do that in ways that come across as snotty or missing the point. For example, when the unhelpful guy suggested substituting one paragraph in a document for another, and his version had one substantive change that looked reasonable but at least two formatting mistakes, I sent him back an e-mail saying basically "Why should I do this? Or that? But the other thing looks reasonable, so sure, I'll do it." But it feels important to point out how they're wrong. I've done something like that by e-mail at least twice over the past week, and more times in spreadsheets tracking status or similar documents.

Actually, no, I don't worry about getting adversarial. (I shouldn't be openly rude to people, of course, and I think or at least I hope I don't come across that way, but worrying about that isn't the same as worrying about adversarialness.) I do find it funny, and a sign of the sad state of the project and/or my job in general. But I'm pretty sure everything I mentioned above is rational in the circumstances and in some cases overdue.