#1
So a kid got attacked one day and did nothing, he knew the rules and knew what to do. He sat there and got his a*s beat.
He and his parent sued the school for failing to prevent the attack, and removing the abaility for the student to defend themselves at risk of being suspended and disciplinary action taken.
Parents and student won, dragged the principal and admin over the coals in court, the policy was quietly removed, and fights are now investigated and it’s no longer zero tolerance if you defend yourself from an attack that you could not have prevented.
#2
I woke up and checked the public transportation schedule and it was late, I would never make it on time, I skipped the work day and messaged him about the delays. He called me to say that I still have to go but I would not be paid, I said, see you tomorrow! The rule was dropped.
#3
Cue malicious compliance.
We were very thorough documenting every 15 minutes to the point it ate into our workday. Routine things we did for the VP above him suddenly were becoming late as we were spending so much time on this. After a week or two the VP came to us asking why things were late and we said that unfortunately we have had less time since we were documenting each work day in 15 minute intervals and that HR already told us it would be insubordination if we didn't. Let's just say bossman got a yelling at and we never had to do this again.
Some of the most consequential rules in existence are ones most people have never even heard of. Take the humble piece of misdelivered mail. If you've ever lived in an apartment, you've almost certainly opened your mailbox to find something addressed to a previous tenant and thought nothing of tossing it in the bin. Completely reasonable. Extremely illegal.
Throwing away someone else's mail in the United States is a federal offense carrying a fine of up to $250,000 and a potential five-year prison sentence. For junk mail. For the catalogue from a furniture company addressed to someone who moved out in 2019.
The correct procedure is to either mark it "return to sender" and hand it back to your postal worker, or physically take it to the post office and alert them that the person no longer lives there. Yes, even the junk mail. Yes, all of it. The law does not have a "but it looked unimportant" clause. So, a huge percentage of the population is casually committing a federal offense while trying to find their takeaway menu.
#4
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#6
The Directory implemented a policy of no sitting down and took away all chaors. We work 12hr shifts on hard concrete.
At least half of us were Vets and the other half were old timers nearing retirement. We ignored the policy and started bringing in our own chairs. Mostly camping chairs.
When management confronted us about it and threaten to write us up, we pulled an uno reverse and threatened to file law suits for discrimination against disabled vets as most of us had it medically recorded we had knee issues. After a week they caved and gave us back our chairs. The director also got in trouble with HR over it as well as somewhere things involved with that incident, like actually firing someone for sitting down to do paperwork. Dude was rehired by the end of the week.
Perhaps the most famous rule backfire comes from colonial India, and it has been studied by economists ever since as the definitive example of a well-intentioned rule creating a catastrophically worse outcome. The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, set a bounty for every lifeless cobra brought in. End a snake, collect a reward. Simple, incentivized, efficient.
What went wrong is that the residents of Delhi were, it turns out, extremely entrepreneurial. Rather than hunting wild cobras, people simply started breeding them. Cobra farms appeared across the city, snakes were raised specifically to be exchanged for the bounty, and the government was essentially funding a cobra-manufacturing industry while congratulating itself on the programme's impressive numbers.
When officials discovered what was happening and canceled the bounty, the breeders did the only logical thing: they released all the now-worthless snakes. Delhi ended up with way more cobras than it started with. The episode is now formally known as the Cobra Effect, which is the economic term for when a solution directly causes the problem it was designed to fix. It has its own Wikipedia page.
#7
#8
By the first week of January a small group of employees had filled up every available slot. One person in particular took every Friday off for the rest of the year. Another individual booked out 4 months of vacation time. I got one single day off that year, to go to a doctor's appointment, and it was only because my manager overrode it for me. Most other people got no time off at all. The following year they made efforts to police it so people didn't a***e it, but it didn't work well because some managers just let their favorite team members a***e it anyway. After that, they just went to the old system of accumulating PTO that had worked just fine for the previous 15 years.
#9
But when it comes to absurd rules, big corporations are usually the main culprit. Amazon has faced significant and sustained criticism in recent years for workplace conditions so relentlessly productivity-focused that workers have reported urinating in bottles rather than lose the time it takes to walk to a bathroom. Diapers have also been reported. In a warehouse. By adults. In the twenty-first century.
The rules that create these are the result of algorithmic productivity tracking so granular that any time away from a task registers as a deficit. Workers have described being monitored to the minute, with bathroom breaks flagging in the system as lost output. The pressure to meet targets becomes so overwhelming that the alternative to a bottle is a warning, a demotion, or a lost shift.
Amazon has disputed some of these accounts, but the reports have come from enough sources, across enough facilities, over enough years, that the pattern is impossible to dismiss. The Amazon story is not funny. It's a grim reminder that the rules institutions write tell you everything about what (and who) they actually value.
#10
Yeah, the clarifying email came out preeeeeetty quickly.
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#12
In the summer of 2017, during a heatwave that made wearing full-length trousers a genuinely miserable experience, a group of boys at Isca Academy in the UK made a very reasonable request. Could they please wear shorts? The school consulted its uniform policy, confirmed that shorts were not permitted for boys, and said no. But the boys weren’t having it.
They came to school in tartan skirts. Which were, per the uniform policy, allowed. The boys weren't breaking the rules; they were following them so precisely that the absurdity of the policy had nowhere to hide. Photos went viral, the story ran internationally, and the school was suddenly in a deeply uncomfortable position.
They were either punishing students for wearing an item the dress code explicitly permitted, or admitting the rule made no sense. The following year, shorts were allowed. Thirty teenagers in tartan skirts accomplished in one afternoon what a formal complaint probably couldn't have managed in a year.
#13
What? Your next class is just next door but against the flow of the designated direction of the hallway?...
**TOO BAD** Go down the hall and the stairs and the other hall and up the stairs to get to it!
Edit: I forgot they also banned speaking Spanish cuz they thought we were casting spells. That one got repealed only when they hired a Spanish teacher the next year...
#14
The company had 0-tolerance for d**g use. There was an anonymous tip line you could call to report someone using d***s, and if you were reported it was a mandatory three-paid days off work with a d**g test.
They were all country boys, and when hunting season came around, there was always a flurry of anonymous reports so you could go hunting and still get paid for work.
#15
ETA: I forgot that the same headteacher who introduced this also brought in a “zero-tolerance lateness policy”, which meant you were punished equally whether you were late by 30 seconds or 4 hours. Lateness *did* decrease slightly, but attendance plummeted because people realised there was no point in breaking their back trying to get in when they could just have a day off and be no worse off for it. She really was an idiot come to think of it.
The through line across all of it is that rules written without understanding the people they govern tend to produce the exact opposite of their intended result. The more rigid and disconnected a rule is from basic human logic, the more creative and determined people become about dismantling it.
The best rules, the ones that actually stick, are the ones that make enough sense that people follow them without needing to be forced. The worst ones become legendary through retellings in online threads, economics textbooks, and staff rooms for years after the person who implemented them has long since moved on. This just proves that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do with a bad rule is follow it.
Have you ever seen a bad rule completely implemented? Share the laughs in the comments!
#16
Miss a day, it was 1 point. 15 minutes late, 1/4 point. 16 minutes up to half a day was 1/2 point. The result was that anyone who wasn't going to make it within the 15 minute window would just show halfway through the shift because 16 minutes late was punished the same as 4 hours late.
#17
This was quickly abandoned after all the kids started joking about the vodka in their water bottles, which brand of vodka was best, etc. .
#18
That didn’t fly with a lot of parents. We were in a poor rural area, where you wear what you have as long as you can, and most families had multiple kids. So they sent the kids to school in the hoodies they’d just bought a few months before, which turned into a LOT of dress code violations in every class, everyday. Kids who had never been in trouble before were getting punished constantly. Teachers were constantly telling kids they had to take their hoodies off. Many students started just hacking the hoods off of the hoodies (I used the scissors from my teacher’s desk one day when I got fed up) and wearing them as sweaters 285) jagged, raw edges around the collar, which violated ANOTHER part of the dress code about neatness of uniforms. Parents pitched a fit, teachers said it was too distracting, and admin quickly relented a few weeks after.
#19
Firstly, pretty much everyone in our class reported our Latin teacher for breaking the rules “since Mr Aurelius predates the modern era, any hair color other than white is deeply unnatural”(he was very popular and the running joke was that Latin was his first language)((this was even funnier, to us at least, because he was the youngest teacher by at least a decade))
Secondly, the rule kicked off a crazy fad for tiger or zebra striped hair, since black, white, and auburn are all natural colors. Way more students dyed their hair, and much more vividly, than the small number who caused the rule change.
#20
