Someone Asked, "What Rule Was Changed Because Of One Stupid Person?", 40 Delivered

We are not allowed to wear trash bags as rain coats since someone forgot to cut arm holes and couldn't catch themselves when they fell down.

We used to play our own music at the store. Well, someone plays explicit music with customers on the floor. No more music at work.

Worked for a pub that didn't have a specific rule about not drinking (alcohol) on shift, but it was well known that you didn't do it. After an event, when we cleaning down, the boss would buy us a drink and we would drink it whilst finishing up.
Then one day one of the younger staff members (above legal drinking age, but still young enough to be stupid), decided to drink on shift, get hammered, and f**k up at his job. Boss tries to discipline him, but the fact there was no rule about not drinking on shift meant co worker got away with it. Cue new rule being added to say drinking on shift was forbidden, and there goes our 'reward' drinks from our boss. And due to the staff member betraying his trust, the boss became a lot more stand-offish and the whole atmosphere of the place changed.

I worked as an English teacher in South Korea for a few years. It used to be that if school was off, you didn't have to go in. It made sense. What happened was a vocal person decided it was not fair that certain people didn't have to go in because their school's calendar was different. They started complaining about it and the result was that everyone has a set number of vacation days and you have to schedule your days off. That person was not very popular and ended up leaving before long. They ruined it for future teachers though.

This happened before I joined the company but dress rules were very relaxed, including shorts (which if I could I would wear shorts ALL THE TIME, even in blizzard conditions).

So one idiot comes in on Friday with his bike and his racing bike gear including those nylon biker shorts which show off his junk and a*s. He was surprised when he was sent home to change and the rules got a lot stiffer after that. So now we don't even get regular shorts for casual fridays (They allowed it one month during the summer when sales were amazing).

We used to have little wine and food mixers in the office every month.

Then f*****g Jessica had to bring vodka. Next thing you knows she’s running around the office with no shoes trying to play tag, flirting with bosses, calling a female co-worked a b***h, eventually passing out in her cubicle and we had to call her husband to collect her.

No more wine and appetizers :-(

A restaurant I worked at changed a policy just weeks after I started.

Old rule: Employees may drink up to 2 alcoholic beverages after their shift, provided they change out of work clothes.

New Rule: No employee of 'Hoover Street Cafe' may drink ANY alcohol at ANY location. Period. EVER. Or you're fired.

What happened? A soon-to-be ex-GM came in after serving hours, made a sh*t-ton of drinks for her, her husband, and her friends and then comped the tab.

Yep, that'll do it.

Phones were removed from break rooms in the building because one guy decided to use them to call his family overseas.

Zero tolerance on being late for work because several people decided that because there was a 15 minute buffer before being considered late then they actually didn't have to be there until 15 minutes after the hour, and some of them couldn't even handle that...

We had a cube farm at work. Many people had things like cup warmers and coffee pots in their cubes. I myself had a coffee grinder and coffee maker. I'd fresh grind the beans and set the timer on my coffee maker, and have fresh coffee waiting for me when I arrived in the morning.

Then one guy left a crock pot on when he went home. It smoked out the whole building. Fire department was called, building was evacuated, etc.

Suddenly we were not allowed to have anything other than normal office stuff plugged in.

I used to work at a therapy farm for people with mental health issues/learning difficulties. Never had any problem until we had an open day for the general public when, after a panicked rush to the hospital, we had to put up huge signs telling people not to put their whole hands into the pigs mouth when feeding them.

(These were BIG pigs with enormous tusks, most of our clients were wary even going near them not sure what that lady was thinking. She was lucky she kept all her fingers!)

Used to work in car sales that sold all kinds of second hand cars. If you needed to take a car to another branch in a different town you used to be able to take the car home that night and have it ready at your house in the morning to head straight there without going into work and swapping over. One guy at another branch faked a move request on a high end Range Rover so he could use it that night on a date which would have been fine really but he got drunk and wrote it off on the high street by rolling it over.. goes without saying no one was ever allowed to take cars home again after that

Some dumbass burned up a bag of microwave popcorn and set off the fire alarm in the state psych hospital, on 3rd shift (around 2-3 am). The entire building had to be evacuated, which involved about 15-20 staff and 150 psych patients being herded out in the middle of the night. After that, there was a ban on microwave popcorn.

Edit: Also, the city fire department showed up. They weren't happy.

At my undergrad university TAs are no longer allowed to answer questions about the problems during exams if medical students are taking the exam. Apparently somebody complained that answering questions during the exam gives some students an unfair advantage. I have to add, though, that the questions that are answered by TAs during an exam are usually about unclarities/ambiguities/missing information in the exam problems. They will not give the students hints on how to solve the problem.

Our company had to buy all office staff steel toecap shoes as one woman in the office decided to wear flip flops to work and dropped a full box of paper on her foot. Everyone else already wore sensible shoes and carried one ream at a time because it was safer.

One year in high school they instituted a "no dunking" rule.

It was because some guy dunked and decided to hang on the rim like he was Shaq, and that might have been okay, but dude did chin ups on it and wriggled around as he swung like he was being tasered.

A rain of 'glass' or fibreglass or whatever the hell the backboard was made of came down as the guy screamed louder.

So of course, game was over, and the bused us back to our school and we were all pissed at the guy.

Then next day in praise, they tell us our league - high school basketball for a large region - decided just 'f**k this' and immediately there was a rule that dunks weren't allowed, were a technical and immediately disqualification and suspension.

Thanks Ben!

This one guy in my school got into 4 wrecks in the parking lot. They implemented a 5 mph speed limit. Everyone was angry and the guy got into a another wreck 2 weeks later anyway.

We were given work from home access so we can login and work, in case of emergencies. However, management didn't bat an eye if one day a week we logged in from home instead of coming to the office.

One idiot, when working from Home, was clearly stating "I'll work on it when i'm back in the office." during email and IMs. They immediately stopped all work at home requests and all work had to be done in the office.

It was clear that nobody was really "working" from home, but work was reasonable enough where as long as we showed face and addressed issues as they came up, we were fine. They didnt expect somebody to be that stupid....

We weren’t allowed to play dodgeball at school anymore because some kid was domed in the head and bitched to his parents. They suspended the game, so being supportive young kids, we threw those hard leathered basketballs at him the next day.

At a store i used to work at there is a no employees under 18 can use a ladder without supervision due to a ladder jousting tournament i hosted while working there involving all 6 under 18 employees

We're doing 12 hour nightshifts in China, and normally we would sneak off to our empty office and take a 40 minute nap. It was great and left us refreshed until our moron coworker kept falling asleep in the control room loudly snoring. Now we have received some very stern warnings about sleeping on the job.