The life of an engineer

I nearly got fired for posting the formula for the circumference of a circle and the area of a rectangle. The company I work for decided to launch an INTERNAL social network, to help people communicate more openly. I actually thought this was a pretty good idea, as most people by now are pretty good at navigating and posting in online forums. I was writing a program to tell the weight of fluids inside our products. Part of our product is a piece of round tubing that gets squashed a bit into a recangulish shape. What they wanted to do is have a volume and weight per inch factor for each style of product we have. I thought it would be better to just calculate it rather than go down and measure things, so that we didn't have to do it again every time we had a new design. So on this social network, I made a post in the application engineers group suggesting that when the tubing is flattened, the perimeter is preserved, we could calculate the internal volume as a rectangle (or even a rectangle with two half circles at the end if they needed the accuracy) since we know what height it has been flattened to. It isn't exact since the edges get rounded, but we didn't need to be that exact for this. So I tried to run it by them in that forum. In the post, I showed how I would get the area of the rectangle from knowing the perimeter of the tube and the height it was squashed to. Extremely simple, middle school geometry. However, HR saw the post and called a meeting with management. Apparently, they got together and were discussing my posting of "trade secrets". They called me and my boss in to chew us out for it. They sat in a room for an hour trying to decide how bad of a breach I had committed, not a single one of these grown adults recognizing the perimeter of a circle or area of a damned rectangle. Not only was it painfully obvious I had not posting anything the world doesn't know already, it was on an internal network, in the engineering discussion group you have to be a member of to see. They could only see because they were given admin rights. They didn't realize any of this, and basically acted as if I was posting our product testing results on twitter.