You ever see a sign out there that lists a rule no human adult should ever have to be told? "Trousers must be worn at all times." "No blow darts in church." "Refrain from cuddling the alligators."
Well, these signs all exist because some person broke the rules once, and now all the rest of us have to be told.
Of course, it's not always something obvious or silly. Sometimes new rules have to be created because someone found a clever cheat code, or just because the powers that be don't want us having too much fun.
Whatever the reason, these folks from around the world share the rules that exist and are enforced just because of them. Enjoy!
32. Too much research
My high school used to have a health class project where we’d have to give a presentation on a certain illegal substance. There was a little thing on how it’s made, like in a lab or it’s a plant or whatever.
I misunderstood how in depth that part was supposed to be.
Long story short, I spent fifteen minutes teaching the entire freshman boys health class how to cook smack, complete with a PowerPoint presentation.
They don’t have that part of the project anymore.
I still have the PowerPoint too. Fifteen slides. Eight are step by step instructions, complete with pictures.
31. Cuppa Joe
The place I work used to have unlimited coffee for their employees. Three weeks after I started working, there was a sign above the coffee maker that stated that employees were limited to 3 cups a day.
At that point in my life I was newly sober which means the one vice I had left was coffee. No lie, I was drinking 8-12 cups a day.
30. That's just ruthless
My senior year in High School, I had an English teacher who allowed all work to be turned in up to the last week of class. I turned in pretty much every assignment right about then, apart from the end-of-unit projects.
Next semester, all the work for all units was due at the end of the unit.
29. The juice is loose
I recently just beat cancer at 13. When I would stay at the hospital they would have to test my urine. Capri suns made me pee better, and the floor had Capri Sun juice boxes in the food closet. Long story short, I depleted the Capri Sun supply on the whole floor twice. The cafeteria ended up making a rule that you have to order Capri Suns through them.
28. I guess you're no Houdini, kid
So in 4th grade we had this thing called wax museum where you dressed up as a historical figure and gave presentation. So my friend was Harry Houdini and he had handcuffs. So as 10 year olds we were messing with them and my friend put them on me. These were not the cheap plastic ones at the dollar store; they were prop ones made from real metal. Of course, they get stuck and long story short I was in the office with 3 people around me trying to get the handcuffs open with pens and a pumpkin knife. My sister said when she had to do it there was no handcuffs allowed. Thanks, Nathan, for trapping me.
27. I don't think this one is the students' fault
We had a teacher actively encourage a kid to jump out of a window. We were the fourth story of the science building, kid threatened to jump out of the window if we had a test - teacher shrugged and told him to go ahead.
The big windows were all locked and didn't open, only the small ones at the top above the big ones, teacher assumed kid didn't fit.
Classmate got one arm, leg and half his body (sideways so as if he was lying on a bed and was cut in half, half in and half out) out the window before the teacher started screaming for him to get back.
From then on kids weren't allowed to open windows.
26. The expediter
At my old job, my numbers were suffering, and I was told I needed to shape up or I would be done. The way I saw it, there was no possible way to meet the numbers by following the process. It turned out I was right. Everyone else came to the conclusion, but no one challenged leadership. So everyone was doing their own thing, then doctoring up the system notes after the fact to make it look like the established business rules were effective.
So I'm like screw it, I'm getting fired anyway. I documented everything I was doing different, in great detail, showing how my way was faster. Eventually I was found out, and I presented my findings, as well as my evidence of the doctoring everyone else was doing. As a result they asked me to evaluate the processes for the entire department, and I ended up finding numerous areas of waste and inefficiencies, which we implemented to streamline things 2-3 times faster than before.
On top of that I was placed in charge of a special "expedite" team, to whom the rules did not apply, and we were given free reign to accomplish our assigned high-priority tasks by any means necessary.
I've moved on to another division, but the policies are still in effect today, and the expedite team is still a thing.
25. They basically dared you to do it
Not sure this counts, but when I worked at Sears the dress code required men to wear a tie. I wore the same bolo tie every day.
Six months later sears made new dress code "rule" and gave memo to 100 employees: "Bolo ties only allowed with coordinating western outfit."
Next day I war my boots and and spurs with my bolo tie.
24. I probably would've Rick Rolled them, but that's pretty slick
I worked at a big chain store in college. We used to get these displays in for speakers and home theater systems and usually they had a sales pitch and demo loaded on a flash drive that would play when you pressed a button on the display.
On a particularly slow Sunday morning, i took 3 or 4 of these flash drives and plugged them into a laptop. Replaced all the audio files with "Gangnam Style" and set the function to auto run at 3 a.m. Before we closed shop, I cranked all the displays up to max volume and inserted the flash drives. It took the night crew three nights to finally figure out how to stop the entire electronics section from playing that song at 3 am.
So after that, management retained all flash drives that came in and had customers plug in their phone to test out systems.
23. You're the real goat, man (greatest of all time)
One time I got airdrop banned from my school because I renamed my phone to "hot single goats in your area" and airdropped photoshopped pictures of goats in bikinis so much that people couldn't use their school devices. Nobody knows it was me and I won't tell anyone at my school.
22. Technically they followed your rules
The town I live in has a free bus that runs late at night through all the college neighbourhoods and by all the dorms to discourage all the partying college kids from driving home from downtown.
One day me and my wasted buddy were riding home when he discovered he had a bunch of bottle rockets in his coat pocket from a night earlier in the week. So logically we handed them out to everyone on the bus with the provision that they not set them off on the bus.
This turned into a string of fireworks going off all over town right behind the bus for the whole ride. There are now big signs on all the buses that say "no fireworks."
21. So I guess just pee while she sings to you?
In elementary school, 2nd grade I think, I had to pee really really bad, but I was in music class and my teacher was singing us a song and playing guitar, so I went up to her anyways and asked to pee and she got upset. And since then she would remind us all that we can't go up to her while she's singing to ask to pee. I just didn't want to pee my pants, woman.
20. Save the best wedding for last
The winery we had our wedding at no longer allows weddings.
Nothing particularly unexpected, but essentially my groomsmen could/can really drink. Most everyone else - not so much.
There wasn't supposed to be any hard drinks at the venue, so of course my gifts to the groomsmen were engraved flasks. Which of course we all promptly filled with who knows what devil juice they pilfered, distilled, or otherwise acquired. I should note that our wedding planner was pretty uptight in general and especially about this "no hard drinks” thing, which my dudes essentially took as a challenge.
They (ok, ok...we) proceeded to get pretty smashed, and get my old man pretty smashed, and several members of the bridal party, and I'm pretty sure some of the catering staff too. Thank Odin this mostly went down after the ceremony.
Naturally, hammered shenanigans ensue. Best man had to have the mic taken from him after revealing my arrest record to my new in-laws, one groomsman fell into and somehow damaged the fountain out front, another groomsman passed out in the parking lot (big fella, too), and I can't really remember what else. All in all it was really just a heck of a party, but the venue was definitely not prepared for our level of...energy.
Just celebrated our seven year anniversary one month ago today.
19. Give me shorts or give me death
Our office dress code didn't allow men to wear shorts, but did allow skirts. One summer, I decided I would show up in a kilt until the rules changed. Men are allowed to wear business casual shorts in the office.
18. Up in your grill
In high school, my group of friends and me started bringing a grill to school to make toasted ham cheese sandwiches on our lunch breaks. Soon after, more and more kids brought their grills to school. After about a week, the school banned grills on school property completely as they claimed it was a fire hazard. But for a week there… we started a revolution.
17. Somewhere, Robin Williams is smiling
Back in the day, I used to work at a theme park. So one morning I was goofing off with my friend (all of us were teenagers at the time) and just generally horsing around while doing our morning checks and tests. We worked on a rollercoaster in middle of the park that was tall enough to be above the tree line (actually, quite a bit above). Part of our morning operations was to test out the mics to talk to various portions of the ride if necessary.
So on this particular morning, instead of just calmly saying "test" into the mic, I screamed "GOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING VIETNAM!!!!"
As it turns out, the speakers can be quite loud. Couple that with the large amount of pavement in the park, the fact that the lift went above the treeline, and that there wasn't a whole lot of ambient noise at that early morning hour, the sound apparently carried EXTREMELY well. I almost immediately got an angry phone call from my supervisor telling me to never do that again. I then got a second phone call from the manager 2 levels up from my boss telling me to never do that again.
Well, as the day went on, apparently this was SO loud, people in neighboring communities could hear it and called the park to complain. By the end of my shift, I had to have a sit down with three levels of management to discuss the incident.
The next day we got an addendum to our contract that told us we were only allowed to say the word "testing" into the mic and that it had to be a moderate decibel. Part of me feels a bit bad about it, but part of me also still thinks it's at least a little funny to this day.
16. "This dude WANTS to be in jail"
If you walk into any county election office in California you'll see a secondary monitor showing what the central tabulator (main vote counter) is doing at all times, right behind the viewing area window.
I spent a day in the San Diego County Jail to make sure that happened, back in 2005.
Short form: in every state somebody has the right to observe the counting of the vote. Some states it's parties, some it's candidates, California is among the best where it's a stated right of "the people.”
I had formally complained for days that what they were doing violated that right. So I decided to watch myself. It wasn't something they could debate...they were the ones in violation of state law.
They dropped all charges a week later once they read the law on observation.
The comical part was in a holding cell with a bunch of other guys...I think a few pot dealers, miscellaneous others telling "how we got there" stories. We get to me, I explain, and this Mexican guy with a thick accent goes, "This dude WANTS to be here!"
Lost my job over it but got another.
15. Good work, Prometheus
When I was in high school, I lit a girls hair on fire by accident during our National Honors Society induction ceremony. We had to carry candles for the whole induction, and after 30 minutes I tilted my candle a little too far forward without noticing. I've never felt so embarrassed or guilty, but luckily only a small part of her hair burned. Anyway, my younger sister told me 2 years later that at her ceremony they had to use electric candles because years ago a girl's hair was lit on fire. Oops.
14. Wow, you almost put them out of business
When I was 16, I was working at McDonalds. We were allowed $10 for lunch. I used my $10 to get just dollar menu stuff so I feasted like a king. Within a month, I was told that I wasn't allowed to do that and the $10 was changed to a free value meal and a dessert because "someone" was taking advantage of the their lunch credits.
13. Giftcardception
A local pita place had a promo to get $5 off of your order if you purchased a $25 gift card. Pretty good deal so I bought one. The next time I went in they were still running the promo and I got another gift card but this time I paid for it with the previous gift card, a sort of promotional inception if you will. I was able to get away with that for weeks and finally they added an * to the promo poster, stating that you could not pay for a gift card with another gift card.
12. That's just bad luck
A friend and I were skipping state mandated senior-year testing because we didn't have homeroom classes, and were having breakfast at a restaurant (with our parents' permission) when the School District Superintendent and our High School Principal got seated at the booth right behind us.
Some snarky comments and a couple of parental get-out-of-jail free cards later, we both got off with no consequences, but from the next year on the school worked with city and county law enforcement to ensure no one else got away with the same thing.
As far as I know they're still doing county-wide restaurant sweeps 20-some odd year later.
11. You just accidentally created a gang
The school I went to from 3rd to 6th grade enacted a no gangs rule because of a club I started.
My best friend and I made it up, we called ourselves "The Little Fellas." We walked around with our knees up our shirts and propelled ourselves forward with our hands like apes. There were initiation tests for recruits to get in. Such as cross the monkey bars without your legs slipping out of your shirt. Another one was getting your swing moving high and jumping off without your legs slipping out of your shirt. When I ran it with my friend it was pretty harmless and we all just played games and stuff.
I learned years later that after I went to middle school the kids who took it over became bullies and would trip people in the halls and were generally ruffians. The principle confiscated the rule book I wrote up with the different tests to rank up and forbade all gang-like activity from the campus.
Photo by frankie cordoba on Unsplash
10. Two rule changes for the price of one
The high school I attended has a "no typewriters" rule. At least they did while I was there, and because of me.
See, I went to a school that focused on science and technology. I also grew up in a house where both my mother and step-father were IT professionals. I have always been around computers since I was 7 or so, and in high school I had a laptop I brought to school. That was permitted because we did use computers for a lot.
However, being a youth with a laptop, at a school full of fellow nerds who also had laptops, we would often play video games when we were supposed to be doing our classwork. I was the worst offender, though.
One day I was told not to bring my laptop to school again. My instructors figured if they could keep me off my computer, I'd do my work. What they didn't know is that I have a 1960's Remington Quiet-Riter (which is a hilarious misnomer) typewriter, briefcase and all. This is the real deal, old school metal, all mechanical with a cloth tape and everything. It even makes the little "Ding!" at the end of the line and everything.
So me, being the little troublemaker that I was, said, “Yes, I will do my classwork, but I'll do it on my typewriter". Cue one day of me typing up notes to the tune of "takka takka takka takka... Ding!" all throughout the day.
My notes looked great, but it annoyed the crap out of the same instructor who told me not to use my laptop. About three quarters the way through class he told me I can use my laptop as long as I don't use my typewriter. The other instructors agreed that they would rather I fool around on my computer than to distract the entire class.
Sometimes I wonder how I graduated high school.
9. That's some kind of paper cut
"No tossing/throwing receipt paper. It must be passed hand to hand."
I worked at Lowe's, in outside lawn and garden during the summer. We were wal*mart on black Friday busy. My register runs out of tape, and my supervisor tosses me a new roll.
I fail to catch, it hits my in the face. I don't feel hurt, try to continue working, get escorted to the bathroom by manager.
The edge of the roll hit right under my nose and cut through my lip, to my front teeth. It was black and super swollen. My upper lip is almost detached from my face, there is blood everywhere. I am sent to the E.R. and have to have it stitched back up.
I was honestly more worried the supervisor was going to get in trouble than I was about the injury. I'm extremely accident prone.
8. Leave the bird baths out of this!
When I was in college, I had this one professor who was all but universally loathed. Tended to be very condescending to students, was unhelpful, went on convoluted tangents that didn't explain the material, and just generally had no capacity for teaching. Story went that one time, he'd been assigned to teach an intro-level course - not only did most of the students drop it, a third of them dropped out of college altogether.
Anyway, it came time for evaluations, and I wrote a lengthy and rather scathing screed for pages upon pages - I don't remember most of what I said, but I do recall writing to the effect that "a typical birdbath would have made for a more effective instructor."
Next semester, the evaluation forms all suddenly contained a new line specifying that our critiques had to be civil.
7. Mister Cellophane
When I was in high school, I would go to band camp every year about two weeks before school started.
My junior year I brought a lot of food. It was a combination of disliking that camp's cafeteria and being on the high school version of a health craze. Along with the food I brought saran wrap. I don't remember the exact logic. I wanted to wrap something edible though.
Well, every morning we were supposed to clean the cabin between revile and breakfast. One kid a year behind me (we'll call him Jonny) didn't want to clean and went back to bed instead.
Jonny woke up a few minutes later completely immobilized by his saran wrap cocoon. Thus was born the contraband list. The list is about a page now and my family is responsible for about half of it.
Now every year, parents of freshmen especially girls) raise their eyebrows at the words (plastic or saran wrap) near the top of the list.
6. You had enough fun for a few years' worth of kids
This one wasn't me alone, but a group effort. In my senior year of high school ('98), our class trip was a cruise to the Bahamas. Before we set sail, we found out that once we left U.S. waters, we were considered full age of majority and were allowed to drink and hit the casinos. Of course, we had it drilled into us that since this was technically a school function, school rules applied so no drinking, smoking, gambling...
Knee-grow please. We went and lost our little minds. Drank ourselves silly on the boat, drank ourselves sillier once we hit various ports, gambled, smoked, hooked up, the works. A few of us even got video of some of our deeds. Once everyone started getting into it, the chaperones didn't even bother trying to stop us.
As a result of our shenanigans, the school banned out of country class trips to avoid any repeats. A few years' worth of underclassmen were royally mad at us.
5. A fall from grace
In high school, I was on the lighting crew for the spring musical and was the lead spotlight. The spotlights for the show where on scaffolds relativity high above the gym floor. Before the matinee, the wooden bleachers for the gym had been pulled out and the scaffold was in between them.
I was on top of the scaffold doing my pre-show check on the spotlight when the pre-show meeting was called for cast and crew. As I climbed down the scaffold, I lost my grip and fell fifteen feet onto the wooden bleachers. I luckily landed in between two sets of bleacher seats and not on any of the hard edges of the bleachers. I got knocked out cold, got sent to the hospital and subsequently was diagnosed with a bruised left femur.
Because of the accident, now no student is allowed on scaffolds (if they are needed) without adult supervision (i.e. teacher, parent, etc.) and spotlights for all shows from then on were placed on the floor.
4. Sounds like the real problem is the assignment
My high school's freshman students all participate in an "egg drop" project where everyone has to design a carrier to get an egg to fall unbroken from the top of the 4 story science wing with the carrier not exceeding some preset dimension. We were given one trial before the final due date and if your first test was successful, you would get an A on the project and not have to participate during the actual project due date.
Most students went the route of trying to create some form of padded box to protect the eggs with various packing materials and some put a fair amount of effort into making parachutes. I put the egg into the middle of a toilet paper tube with cotton balls packed into the top and bottom of the tube and tied a giant Marshalls shopping bag to the top of it with a couple of pencils of the maximum allowable dimension glued to the handles to keep the bag open and balled the whole thing up to pass the dimension requirement. Comparing my project to other students' it was immediately apparent that I had put in minimal effort.
Because of how easy my design was to replicate, almost everyone whose first attempts failed redesigned theirs similarly to mine and most worked. After my year there was a ban on parachutes for all future classes.
3. Wow, definitely a fair and proportional response from the cop
No snowball fights on campus.
My twin brother and I went to the same community college before university.
I saw him sitting on a bench in the courtyard one day and threw a snowball at him. This started a chain reaction of a 50+ person snowball fight. It was pretty crazy.
Well... an undercover police officer was in the court yard walking by and decided he should detain me then threaten to get me kicked out of school.
The best part was that he didn't show me a badge or anything. He just started shouting orders and then took out a pair of handcuffs and threatened to arrest me for assault.
I'm not sure he even believed I had initially started it. He just saw I was in the corner and couldn't run if I had wanted to.
The dean asked that it not happen again... but wasn't nearly so eager to expel a student for throwing snow at his brother.
2. May as well say "never tell us the truth to our face"
Complaints need to be submitted privately in writing and not verbally.
It wasn't 100% my fault, but it was my complaint that caused it.
Our supervisor was singling people out by name asking why we hadn't recommended anyone to the job when others had. He finally got to me, and I asked if he wanted a real answer, and when he said yes, I answered:
"Honestly none of us feel comfortable risking our relationship with a friend by recommending them to a job we ourselves think about leaving on a daily basis"
It was a 24/7 round the clock job where I felt very secure saying this because they needed us, and frankly all my other coworkers ended up privately telling me how happy they were someone finally said it.
But yeah, the GM was present and did not like his supervisor looking foolish in front of his whole team.
1. Kayaking to death island
No one is allowed to take the rental kayaks more than 100 feet from shore. No, I didn't steal the kayak. I did something much, much worse.
I was hanging around a beach near South Padre with my Grandpa and I decided to do an hourly kayak rental. There was a cool little island like 200 yards from shore that I thought would be cool to paddle out to. The rental shop warned me not to paddle out perpendicular to the shore because I would wear myself out and get stranded. I bet you think you know where this story is going...you don't.
So I'm paddling out perpendicular to the shore. I'm getting kinda close to the island when I stop to check out this orange concrete stationary buoy-looking thing because I could see 2 of them from shore and was wondering what they were...that's when I heard it...
So the thing about Texas is...it's really really flat. Even the beaches are super flat, so that means that even 200 feet away from shore, the water is still really shallow. I'd been looking out at this huuuuuuuge, 80-yard long cargo barge for the last few days that had been just parked out in the water and I was wondering how it was floating on only 8 feet or so of water and not scraping on the shore.
So now back to me and the buoy. I'm looking at this thing, it's all covered in barnacles. I still don't know what it is or what it's for. I'm inspecting it like an idiot when I hear that noise. That noise that I still hear in my sleep. The barge had started up and it was coming for me fast. That thing is cutting through the water at like 20-25 mph. I'm freaking out. That thing has been sitting there for days, possibly weeks, and it starts up the minute, nay, the second that I cross out into no man's land???
So what do you do when you're in a kayak in open water and giant concrete death leviathan is coming at you? My thinking was that if I just hold onto this buoy thing, the barge isn't going to run over it so I'll just hold onto the buoy. I paddle to it, grab on, and watch as that thing points exactly in my direction. I start to lose my nerve as that thing is getting closer and closer, still looking like it's aimed directly at me.
I lose it. I can't hold onto this buoy anymore. But there is another buoy about 30-40 yards away. I gotta make a break for it. I start paddling like crazy towards this other buoy. Surely the driver of that thing has to notice all this splashing and flailing around in a neon orange kayak, right? Well in all of this flailing around, there's this moment where I look down...remember how I said the water was really shallow? Well I look down and it looks like it goes down forever. I start feeling helpless. There's a giant void under me, death hurdling towards me, and the safety I'm trying to get to is a little stationary buoy.
I make it to the other buoy. It's also covered in barnacles. I look out towards the barge, almost on top of me now...WTF??!! It turned! It's still aimed almost right at me! Now that it's closer, I think it might barely miss me. But that thing could still suck me right under and I'd be toast for sure. I grab onto the buoy covered in sharp barnacles, while I'm still in my kayak. My hands are bleeding from gripping it so hard. As that wave of displaced water hits. I keep my grip. Blood is seriously dripping down. I look up at the barge from below as it passes about 12 feet away.
So I manage to hold my grip as it passes but it doesn't go much further. About 100 feet later it stops really suddenly. It had run ashore.
You know those buoy things? They were markers. Markers for the outer edges of the dug-out canal that allows barges to come in and out of those shallow waters. That's why the barge was aimed at them. I'm guessing that the driver saw me in the water, tried to make some kind of adjustment that he was unable to recover from, and thus he went a bit to close to the outer edge of the canal.
I don't know how many thousands of dollars that cost. I was terrified that someone would come knocking on our door because, being the only person to rent a kayak, it would have been pretty easy for them to find out who caused the accident. But really... why wasn't that trench marked with some kind of sign or maybe the barge could let people know when they're going to be running their death machines through a recreational beach.
So I came out of that with some bloody hands, and a few lifetime supplies of nightmare fuel and the barge received God knows what kind of damage (it was stranded for the rest of the time I stayed at the beach, which was about 3 days).
So that's why they don't allow people to kayak away from the shore. Also that little island I was paddling to kinda sucked.
