30 Weird Office Rules That Made People Say ‘You Gotta Be Kidding Me’

This is a million years ago when I was young and working as a secretary (pre admin assistant days) in a firm where the management was all male. The non management staff was about 50/50 male and female. In the coffee room there was a rota on the wall showing which woman employee’s turn it was to clean the coffee room up at the end of the day, make the coffee etc. I was only 22 but I immediately said to my (male) boss, why are only the women on this list? The men use the coffee room too, why don’t they have to take turns cleaning it up? There was a lot of kercluffle because no one had ever objected before. The men were indignant, THEY had to do ‘women’s work’??? Finally the rota came down and the new policy was in place: everyone cleaned up after themselves. The women refused to clean up the men’s coffee cups, so if they left them dirty in the sink, that’s where they were next morning.

Small victories, decades ago.

In 1967, heyday of the tiny miniskirt, writing on the chalk board above eye level meant holding the back hem of the skirt down wth one hand.

Most of the younger female teachers solved this by wearing pants.

We got a new, young, male principal, who announced at a staff meeting that all female teachers were to wear skirts.

The next day, every single female teacher showed up in pants, even those who had to go out to buy a pair. This wasn't even a planned group action.

Not another word was ever said.

"'Outside a formally scheduled meeting, employees are not allowed to talk to anyone for more than two minutes.' This ended quickly after the staff started maliciously complying by just turning and walking away abruptly from managers and executives at the end of two minutes anytime they stopped to talk to them."

When I was promoted to a senior manager at a major public accounting firm, it meant a new office, a piece of wall art, and a plant. Our ‘plant service’ gave me a plant that I discovered liked a bit more light and a bit more water so I moved it closer to my window and gave it additional water beyond what the plant service gave it in their weekly visit. The plant thrived.

One day the plant service showed up with a measuring tape, and then started to take my plant away. I asked why and was told only Partners could have a plant over 30 inches tall.

I worked in college athletics and we had an athletics director that was literally a control freak nutjob. One day she sent the staff an email saying: “Effective immediately, if you leave the building for ANY reason during the day, you are required to email me prior to leaving, telling me where you are going, why you’re leaving, and when you are returning.” Wait, what? Do we work in a prison? Fed up with the totalitarian state, one of my coworkers decided to answer fire with fire: “I’m leaving to go up to the library to take a [poop]. They have the cleanest toilets on campus. This might take a while. I’ll be back when I’m done.” The next day, the new rule was revoked.

Not quite an office rule, but…

In my early days working in a lab we were told we had to put expiry dates on all of our chemicals. As the most junior this task was given to me.

One month later we had an inspection. The report came through that I’d not put an expiry date on the bottle of sand. This is used for heating baths (you fill a container with sand and heat that container - it spreads the heat evenly) so it was irrelevant how old it was. However, anything to keep the peace so I put an expiry date on it.

The following month’s report had another complaint. About the sand. “But it’s got an expiry date on it! Was my plea.

“Yes, but October 15th 65,000,1978 isn’t realistic.” Came the reply.

“But that sand is already 200 million years old. It’s not going to go off before then.”

The powers that be issued an edict - nothing was to have an expiry date more than 3 years hence. So I was told I had to order new sand every three years in case the old stuff had gone off. You gotta be kidding me.

One day I’ll tell you about the edict they issued saying that pi was exactly 3.14

The office manager decreed that only detectives could have lined paper pads as she believed they needed them. As a prosecutor I used such pads in court. When told I couldn’t have them anymore I simply made a template of lined paper on the pc, with nice wide gaps between lines, photocopied off 500 sheets to staple them as pads. She saw me stapling the pads and had a hissy fit at the cost - we got lined pads!

A friend at work used to like to make herself a cup of instant oatmeal when she came in, using the boiling water tap. Then she would sit with the cup on her desk and have a spoonful here and there while she worked.

Then a supervisor told her she was not allowed to eat at her desk.

But others in the office often had their own mugs that they sipped, so she asked, why could she not have a cup at her desk while everyone else did? Well, coffee, tea, hot chocolate, that is different, because it’s not food. It’s drink. But some people made cup-o-soup or ramen noodles in their cups; wasn’t that food? Well, yes, that was food, but it didn’t need a spoon.

What? That’s right, you can drink ramen noodles or instant soup without a spoon, but oatmeal requires you to lift it to your mouth with a spoon. Mugs without spoons? Ok. Mugs with spoons? Verboten.

I would have just made my oatmeal with more water so that I didn’t need a spoon, but she went to HR and complained. HR told her she could only have food at her desk (food defined as being needed to be eaten with a utensil) if she had a medical condition that required her to eat throughout the day. So she got her doctor to provide a note that she had low blood sugar and required food at her desk.

Can we all just take a moment here and realize how ridiculous this is?

Banned all coffeemaking devices. And all outside coffee from home, restaurants or coffee shop. Charged $1 per generic Keurig pod and $.50 in a coin operated machine.

The machine provided only enough water for about 2/3rds of a cup.

In my experience, nothing is a clearer indication of a company's character and culture than their coffee arrangements.

This was one of the most aggressively toxic workplaces I've ever seen. Truly horrible.

I worked at a place that instituted a new policy where if you were 10 minutes late, you were docked an hour. I have no idea if this was legal as it was in the early 80s and I didn’t know what the rules were then.

Anyway, I mentioned to a manager that if I was going to be more than 10 minutes late to work, I wouldn’t bother showing up until I was an hour late as I wasn’t going to work for free. He didn’t grok what I was saying. Naturally, no one was even less than an hour late after that. It didn’t take management long to realize their error and change the policy.

There was one rule that I could never get behind at the place I worked around 2007.

"The playing of games on company equipment is strictly prohibited."

I never really understood why they had it in my contract. I didn't like it. I didn't agree with it. In fact nobody on my entire team agreed with it. So much so that we frequently broke it on multiple occasions, and we didn't care. Some times, at times of high stress (like when a major deadline was looming) we felt we “just needed a bit of play time”. D'you know what I mean? In fact, we probably broke this rule even MORE when deadlines were looming! Clearly my employer either didn't notice, or chose to let it slip under the rader, because they never raised it in the 3 years I was there. I've never been much of a rebel, but I really felt like one then.

The company was called Bandai Namco. My job was as a Video Game Programmer.

When I was working as a television anchor and reporter in local news in the 1980s, our general manager set a dress code rule. Anyone reporter on camera in the studio or in the field had to be in business attire — suit and tie for men, business suit for women.

Fair enough.

But one day I’m doing a stand up from the scene of a breaking news story. It’s recorded — not live. I’m halfway through my spiel when my videographer slowly leans away from the viewfinder, shaking his head.

“It ain’t working, is it,” I asked.

“Nope,” Chad said. “Nobody wears a suit and tie to a forest fire.”

The rule was rescinded that afternoon.

I worked at a place that made everyone sing happy birthday once a month to all the people who had a birthday that month.

If you didn’t show, you got disciplined. And you had to sing. The HR Director scanned the room to make sure everyone was singing. If you didn’t, you got spoken to.

It was the most assinine, morale-back-firing policy I have ever experienced. That place was a nightmare.

Bonus “you gotta be kidding me”:

The boss there tried to make an employee get rid of their car because it was nicer than his, and that didn’t “give the right impression”.

My husband went out to the food truck to get a soft pretzel. Others took smoke breaks so he thought he was entitled to a pretzel break. Human Resources told him if he wanted a break, he needed to take up smoking

“To be on time you must be in the building 15 min before your official shift start. You must be downstairs ready 10 min before.” Which meant prepping your area, getting things ready, all off the clock. If you were a supervisor or was be on the floor 15 min early. If you didn’t adhere you were marked late, 2 or more in a 30 day period you were written up.

it seemed kind of fishy and all the management had “it’s just how things are” attitude.

me and a few others formally complained to home office about it. After a few weeks we got an email saying “You may clock in and begin your shift at its planned start time, but we’d sure appreciate if you showed some care and prep work ahead of time to ensure blah blah blah.” Yeah I’m sure they’d appreciate it, that’s free labor.

At a company many years ago (early 1980s), I used post-it notes to mark comments on computer print-outs. A supervisor saw me doing this and admonished me by stating that post-it notes were reserved for management.

I responded with the fact that I had not known about that rule. He told me to stop and return the rest of the booklet to the supply cabinet.

I stated that I had actually purchased the pack at the UofMinnesota bookstore and they were actually mine.

…..crickets.

Finally, "One company I worked for required the window blinds remain at a prescribed distance from the floor, and be at a specific angle. They literally had 'office décor police' go office to office and measure the blinds to ensure that you were following the rules. I had the audacity to try to do work by closing the blinds one day to prevent glare on my computer screen. The CEO saw it and threatened to demote me."

We had an “office manager” in my early days in a government office role. One day, I snagged a pen from the supply room and was using it to write notes at my desk. It happened to have green ink, which was atypical but I didn't care.

The OM wandered by one day and started chastising me for using green ink in my notes. I said, “a” who cares if it's green, and “b” I got the pen from the supply room that she managed. She started raising her voice, causing a scene, repeating “Green ink is only for Auditors!”.

I calmly asked “Why do you stock green pens in the supply room when we have no auditors in this office, in fact, no auditors on staff in the entire department?” She went silent. At that time, there was a Department-wide anti-waste/efficiency initiative underway, so I said “I think I'm going to file a submission to the “Paydirt Program””!

She turned on her heel and left. “Mysteriously” all the green pens disappeared from the supply room. I never learned why we had stocked green pens that nobody was allowed to use. Gotta love government bureaucrats.

One place I worked temp at told me I could only go to the bathroom at break time. WTF?!

I told the manager my bladder is not on their clock and I will not risk a urinary tract infection or an embarrassing accident holding it in for hours at a time. He insisted. I got my purse and jacked and went to the bathroom and right out the door. Turned out I was in the early stages of pregnancy which is why I was going so much, but I didn’t know that yet. All I knew is I had to go and bad, and holding it was not an option! lol

At the time this happened I had worked for the same company for over 20 years. Following a remodeling of the area, I was assigned an office in the renovated sector. About two weeks later some construction workers show up with 2x4’s and sheet rock. The issue? They had measured my new office and it had 20 square feet too much space for a manager at my level. So they were going to build a 2 foot wide by 10 foot long “dummy wall” to deprive me of the 20 sq feet.

i appealed the decision, but the wall went up! The only concession they made was to put a door in the wall so I had a “closet” of sorts.