The Office is tied for my favorite show of all time. Few other shows blend humor, emotion and memorable stories as well as this show. It has so many memorable characters and plot lines that a fan can't help but go back and rewatch old episodes. One thing I enjoy very much about the show is its detail. For a comedy show, many minute details constitute every twenty minute episode. Unfortunately, even the greatest shows, like The Office, have continuity errors. These are when events on the show conflict with what happened earlier in the series. Whether it be "Chuck Cunningham Syndrome," or merely changing details, these are usually caused by changes in writing staff. Especially on a comedy show, writers tend to pay less attention to detail. There are some exceptions, like Community and Arrested Development and others that pay a scary amount of attention to detail to the point that the show consists of mainly inside jokes, but most comedy shows focus on making one episode funny over keeping it in line with the events of earlier episodes. I know I should be using the knowledge displayed in this article to be doing important things, like learning math, history, new instruments, or the history of the aglet, but these are the kinds of things on which my mind fixates. Here are my top five continuity errors on The Office.

1. Michael and Phyllis can't be the same age.

One of the running jokes in the early part of the show is the boss Michael Scott referring to his employee Phyllis as older than him. Phyllis always softly shoots Michael off his high horse by saying that she is the same age, despite the actress being about ten years older than Steve Carell. However, there is not much in the show to indicate a difference, as they were evidently in the same graduating class in high school. This is contradicted when in the episode "Dunder Mifflin Infinity," Michael mentions that he was held back in second grade at least once. This would mean that Michael would actually have to be older than Phyllis. Unless Phyllis was also held back the same time as Michael, which doesn't seem so likely, Michael must be older than Phyllis. I still like to ignore this and pretend that Phyllis is older, if just to pretend that Michael is younger than he actually is.

2. Dwight's mom is a zombie?

Dwight Schrute, arguably the most consistently funny character on the show, is an unpleasant beet farming outcast with strict adherence to the rules. He has some of the shows greatest lines, like "I now have the strength of a grown man, and a little baby" and "There's too many people on this Earth. We need a new plague." He has so many great lines that the writers must have focused more on him saying amusing things than actually looking at what he says. During "Fun Run" Dwight tells his love interest Angela that he has the will to have the cat he killed buried "in the east field, by mother." Aside from showing Dwight's insensitivity to the one thing that Angela loves, her cats, it demonstrates that he is trying to empathize with Angela's unhealthy ardor of felines. This is all changed when in a later episode, upon hearing Michael is dating Pam's mom, Dwight tells him "I really wish you told me you were into dating mothers. I would have introduced you to mine." I really have to hope for the sake of the show that this is poor continuity because this sounds like the beginning of The Walking Dead or something like that. It is possible that he meant a step mother or grandmother, but Dwight didn't mention his parents divorcing and his grandmother would be much too antediluvian to date anybody, as Dwight is in his late 30's. It looks like The Walking Dead didn't begin on Breaking Bad as some speculate, it began on The Office. Who knew?

3. Jim owns Call of Duty, but can't play it?

Jim is such a well written and well played character that there isn't much messed up on his continuity. This one is a small and meticulous detail that I only noticed thanks to my selective Shawn Spencer like ability to notice tiny details, if only on TV shows. One of the funnier scenes on the show is the whole Call of Duty game on "The Coup." It's one of the episodes where Karen's romantic interest in Jim buds as well as blessing the world with Andy's hilarious line "I'm going to kill you for real. The game's over, I'm seriously going to kill you now." This is all due to the fact that Jim is laughably awful at Call of Duty he has no idea what buttons to press or what weapons to use. Jim is essentially like me at video games in general. What makes this suspicious is a minuscule detail in the earlier episode "E-mail Surveillance" where Jim invites everyone to his house for a party. Pam eventually finds his room and starts lightheartedly going through it and enjoying everything. On his desk (along with a small doll in a Dunder Mifflin warehouse uniform with a noose around its neck. Is it Roy? That's creepy, Jim) is a copy of Call of Duty. This means that, unless Jim was holding it for a friend, he had the knowledge and ability to play Call of Duty. Even if it was a different game system than the one he owned, he would have at least had an idea of how to play the game.

4. Disappearing characters are in the first two seasons.

This isn't a reference to the characters like Sea Monster and Michael's corporate assistant from "Booze Cruise" that disappear merely to be forgotten about. This is a reference to the characters that were never even introduced to the show's cannon and just seem to disappear almost into thin air. It unnerves me watching earlier episodes just seeing random black haired white guys and old ladies standing at random places in the office, only to disappear from existence before the episode even ends. Where did these characters go? What were their names? Where did they sit? There weren't even any noticeable extra desks at which people could have sat. It's almost like the office was haunted and these ghosts of past office workers just wandered onto the set. It is mentioned that a past Dunder Mifflin Scranton worker committed suicide. I'm getting too dark here, this is a comedy show. That's why there's this deleted scene from "Business Ethics" where Phyllis, in a talking head interview, stoically and nervously talks about running over a young soccer player in a foreign country and just driving away as fast as they could, with Phyllis trying to convince herself it was just a raccoon, when the horror plastered in her eyes tell us she knew full well it was a human life. Funny stuff, kids!

5. The office is affected by time warps?

One of Michael's most impressive feats in the show was getting Hammermill to sign with Dunder Mifflin to supply all office supplies. This gave the company millions of dollars and showed what a brilliant salesman Michael was despite being a completely inept manager. This happened in season three, and of course, this would be negated in season five. In the episode "Business Ethics", Meredith admits to Holly Flax that she has been sleeping with the Hammermill rep for Dunder Mifflin for the past six years in order to get discount prices for the company as well as coupons for free steak. This is basically prostitution, but Meredith is later shown to be justified as it was greatly benefitting the company at a difficult financial time. This whole scenario is wrong, in that it has only been two or three years at most since Dunder Mifflin has acquired Hammermill products and unless Meredith had access to the TARDIS or the Delorean from Back to the Future, there is no way that she could have been sleeping with the guy for that long. Of course, Meredith is also a notorious alcoholic, so time could be greatly lost and distorted to her alcohol damaged mind.

So there's a list of five of the continuity errors I caught while watching The Office. I still love the show very much as it is equal parts hilarious and emotional. There are people who complain about it being inferior to the UK original version, but I disagree. The US version is superior in every conceivable way, except that the UK version is better at not making me laugh, have emotional reactions, or stay awake. Despite the US version being so remarkable, it still has its small mistakes. I think that the best thing to do is to forgive it and enjoy the show anyway. Try not to pay attention to the small parts and pay attention to the larger parts instead. That's what she sa..., never mind, I'm not Michael Scott.