“What’s A Rule At Your Job That Exists Purely Because One Idiot Ruined It For Everyone?” (83 Answers)

I was self-employed for 35 years. Finally, a Fortune 500 recruited me to come on board. Hey, what wasn't there to like? Easygoing boss who respects my abilities, steady pay, and fantastic benefits. Plus I was 100% WFH. I'd only make the twenty-minute drive into the office for the occasional meeting.

It was great. Because I spent a huge chunk of my life as self-employed, nobody ever had to supervise me. I knew what I was supposed to do and just got it done. I typically was at my desk at 8 a.m. and worked until I'd gotten everything done. And, in truth, it was a snap. I was typically done by 2 pm, chiefly because I'm efficient. Rave reviews, raises, you name it.

But there were people who [used] the hell out of the WFH policy. As in they'd do nothing all day and collect a paycheck. The C Suite began demanding that employees show up in the office three days a week. Maybe not stay all eight hours, but swipe in.

So, here it is, a perfectly fine Thursday morning. I am caught up on my assignments through September. There is literally nothing I need to do at the moment, pending approvals and my supervisor getting back to me on a couple of assignments. But I am about to hop in the shower, drive downtown, sit in my cubicle, and wait until lunch so I can drive home again.

One place I worked at used to do BBQs every quarter as long as we hit certain metrics. That was until one day my boss saw 3 different members of the same family taking ALL the steaks being cooked for one shift and Saran wrapping them between two plates to take home for later.

After that we only got 75/25 ground beef burgers and we were only allowed two each and they had one of us managers policing the break room the whole time.

In one of my previous jobs, it was common for us to forward our phone lines to reception during lunch. One employee decided to just forward all his calls to reception, all day, every day. Our receptionist was swamped and rightfully annoyed. 

Moving forward, our team wasn’t allowed to forward calls to reception anymore. We had to institute a rotating lunch schedule so that only one person could be on lunch at a time, and that person had to forward their calls to another team member. I remember the employee in question tried to pull the same stunt (forwarded his calls even after he had returned to his desk). The coworker he had forwarded his calls to marched over to his desk, hit the call forwarding button on his phone, and turned it off. 

Strangely, he only ever did this to his female colleagues. He eventually resigned, to everyone’s great relief.

Two from our school board:

1. High school teachers used to be able to leave early on exam days and complete their exam marking at home. One teacher used that time to do some home renovations and injured themself. They decided to file a workers compensation report since it happened during school hours. That was the last time we were able to leave early to mark at home.

2. Not every course had a final exam and students in those courses were told to stay home on exam day. A student at one of the schools got in trouble with the police and was arrested. Mom was outraged that they were not in school at the time and used a lawyer to make a complaint about the fact that their child was supposed to stay home. The following school year, the policy changed and teachers in courses with no exams still had to provide some sort of evaluated activity during the exam. Teachers now had to do pointless busy work and students were forced to come into school on a day that could be used to study for other courses or just to sleep in.

My job used to give a stipend if using your cell phone was part of your job duties. The stipend was a flat $75 a month. My cell phone plan was $45 a month so it was a nice extra $30.

Then they had to investigate some employees in another part of the company. Text messages were subpoenaed. They had to sort through personal and work messages.

Now everyone has a company phone. Its an iPhone 15 even though all our work apps are Google. I hate iPhones and I hate having to carry 2 phones.

No massage gun use on coworkers.

Now that probably sounds like an ok rule at first. Massages on coworkers is sketchy territory. Here's the problem. Hand massages are fine. If you use a massage gun which separates the giver and receiver. Thats the problem.

We had someone who had a literal sign up list for massages during downtime. 50 people would sign up daily. There was a waitlist. Massages only given when all work was done. They were professional and taking care of fellow Healthcare workers backs.

One person who didn't even get a massage. Got offended that there was someone using one. No incident. No problem. Literally just didn't like it.

Now only hand massages are allowed.

Individual webcams must always be on during meetings at all times whether you are in office in a conference room full of other people in the meeting, or working from home. I understand wanting work from home people to have on webcams, but I have a few issues with.
- If you have a meeting with 100+ people and everyone has on their webcam it can get laggy as hell.
- It can be overstimulating and distracting too when people are sitting there with kids and pets on their lap and I'm just sitting there like 'this is a regular occurrence can a manager say something?!' Also can be distracting when everyone in a conference room has their individual cameras on and are huddled together just lots of movement going on.
- If the meeting isn't super pertinent to me and I have to go to the bathroom everyone has to watch me walk away to the bathroom in my own house.

Now why do we have this rule? Because people were taking their kids to the pool or going to get their nails done. The worst offender though was a girl who started her own business going live on Tiktok and walking around Marshall's auctioning off popular products and live shopping while she was at work and on meetings on her other phone.

No summer barbecues at work anymore because someone referred to it as “meaty man day”. Dinged as both sexist and anti vegan.

The person that called it meaty man day was a woman. And vegetarian (but not vegan).

(And she was just being funny, not throwing shade or complaining).

We have to clock in and out for lunch now become one guy kept taking 2 hours lunches.

My old QA job had an explicit "no samurai swords allowed at work" rule. Yes, beer was involved.

I used to work at one of those huge destination liquor stores way back in the day. After the yearly inventory audit, they would take all the bottom shelf wine and mixers that weren't selling, put them in a cart at the front end, and let the employees take whatever they wanted. I never drank any of it, but I'd give stuff away to my more boozy friends.

Then one day Linda decided it wasn't fair because she wasn't in the first day it was all set out. Mind you, there was never anything good in there, we're talking about stuff that didn't even sell at-cost. It was all ridiculous wine brands nobody had ever heard of and pre-mixes that tasted like 100% sugar. And it would sit there for days. But Linda made such a stink that management decided it would be better to huck everything into the trash compactor instead.

For years my corporate card was paid by the company after I submitted my expense report with my receipts. Then we had a major change. The employees would submit expense report and then get cut a check and they had to pay the bill. This was annoying and slightly scary given I didn’t know if I was late due to reimbursement time if it would affect my credit score. I set a meeting with our finance head to ask what’s up….

Turns out a scheme in our Chicago office ruined it for all of us. At Super Bowl time several employees went to stores and bought giant TVs for their respective parties. Afterward they reboxed the TVs and returned them for a refund to the corporate card. They figured they’d just cancel out the transaction and delete it and nobody would be the wiser. Not so.

Management would get a person a birthday card, $20 gift card and cupcakes for the department all paid for by the company. Of course everyone in the department would sign the card and that is an important part. You see, the employees were never asked to chip in for the party stuff - it was a company morale booster paid for completely by them with no desire to be paid for by employees. But one person felt that since they circulated the card that the management **could** have asked for a donation and that he felt he shouldn't have to donate to the celebration so he complained to upper management.

New rule: birthday celebrations are banned.

No using glass pipette.

In a chemical lab.

Because some stupid idiot on *another site on another country* have a glass pipette broke and it scratches their finger.

No one is allowed to use the disposals any more because some idiot backed up a sink and flooded the floor below.

Our CEO was fine with people coming the office once a week. The official rule was twice, but many people only came once and everyone was fine with it. Especially since our offices are in a new location since covid and are in an annoying place to reach by car or public transports. There wasn't really any checking on whether or not you came in or not and most people did come in once or twice a week.

Turns out two people from customer services came in maybe once a month for a day and those were also the only days they actually worked. When they were "working" from home, they were actually just not doing anything and just regularly connect to Teams from their phones to show "look, I was online". It came to light when they were dumb enough to post pictures of them having drinks outside in the middle of the day on Fecesbook.

They were fired and the CEO was so angry, the new rule is now that everyone must come at least 3 days a week at the office.

Had 2 of em

1. No birthday cakes. We used to have 3 people make cakes for all 200 employees. Someone went to HR cause theirs was store bought.

2. Someone decided not to go onsite for 6 months. It's now no longer self managed but required 3x a week (different company from above).

My favorite ever. An actual company rule on paper.

No drinking before lunch and only 2 drinks while on the clock. 

It was a property management company. The entire job was a complete fever dream. But the office had a stocked beer fridge and one guy would literally drink 6-10 beers a day starting right when he got there.

Worst one was from a job like 20 years ago:

No taking your work truck home when on-call.

Had a fun telecom job supporting a utility control network (large SCADA system, today we'd call it an Operational Technology Network but the company didn't use that term back then). We had telecom gear spanning multi-hour drives in any direction from our city, and on-call meant if something was down we'd likely have to drive a couple hours into the mountains to go troubleshoot gear and punch/re-punch down wired circuits.

This one idiot stopped at the grocery store on his way home, didn't put his truck into park, and while he was talking into the store his truck rolled into a Porsche (don't remember what kind of Porsche).

After that we weren't allowed to take trucks home anymore. Which meant when we got paged we had to spend 30-45 minutes going to the office to grab a truck before making a long drive out to whatever site was having issues.

In the late 80s/early 90s, 2 of my cousins worked at the same grocery store. One of them dared the other to like the inside of the freezer section. His tongue got stuck. 10 years later, when my brother and sister were getting jobs, siblings were not allowed to work at the same store.