I used to work at a semiconductor lab, looking for defects in computer chips with an electron microscope.

The work is complicated, precise, and easy to f**k up. One wrong move, and the sample is toast (a LIP - Lost In Processing, as they say in the biz).

Management got really angry at LIPs and started clamping down really hard on technicians who did them. If you f**ked up a sample, you got written up.

The problem is that not all jobs are created equal. Some jobs are really easy, and other jobs are really hard and risky. So, the smart technicians started taking all of the easy jobs, and the idiots who didn't know any better started taking all of the hard jobs.

The LIP rate then went up, and it created a really contentious atmosphere in the lab of people screwing each other over to take the easiest jobs. Morale plummeted, and people started leaving to go to other groups that weren't s**t sandwiches. This drove lab output down even further.

POGtastic Report

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"No cards game at school"

When I was in elementary/middle school Magic The Gathering and the Pokemon card game were pretty popular. Almost all of the guys played and would get together after lunch to play before classes started again.

Here is where it's important for me to mention that this was a Christian school. It probably didn't take long for a teacher, administrator, or helicopter parent to wonder what all the fuss was about. Sure enough, one of them probably got a hold of an MTG card, saw art depicting a demon, and decided that this had to be the work of Satan to warp our young minds.

Almost over night, all trading card games were banned from school. Any cards would be confiscated until the end of the school year.

Well, you now have several dozen pre-pubescent boys with about 30 minutes of free time and nothing to do. So we did boy s**t. Ran around, pushed each other, went places we weren't supposed to, just overall got into mischief. All this time they had a free babysitter that was keeping us all engaged, quiet, and civil, all while reinforcing quick math skills and teaching multi-level problem-solving.

The next year we got a new administrator and card games were allowed at school again.

JohnyUtah_ , Ryan Quintal Report

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Worked for a marketing firm that often locked you out of the building if you weren’t back in your cubicle by the second your break was up. They revoked your break the next day as punishment. This is not legal here in New York State. They got into a lot of trouble.

TunaCroutons Report

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My company eventually blocked all the well-known music streaming sites, Google Play Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, iHeart Music, etc. However, they didn't block YouTube. So instead of the network having a bunch of employees streaming about 15 MB per song of music only now the same employees stream the same songs but with video on YouTube which can be 10 times as much give or take.

jimillett Report

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A zero-tolerance "knife law" was implemented in Denmark a couple of years back to hinder knives from being carried in the city, and you would get fined even if it was in your car. This meant that carpenters, electricians, amateur fishermen, grocery store workers with box cutters, etc., were fined when leaving work/hobbies and having their equipment either on them or in their car. This law was fairly quickly changed.

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The infamous housing project Pruitt-Igoe had a policy of supplying housing to single mothers. However, if they stopped being single they would lose their tenancy to their homes. This meant that fathers or step-fathers of children in these poor homes had to stay away. Pruitt Igoe is a legendary social disaster and it was demolished after twenty years.

brainburger , wikipedia Report

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In Kenya, our governor in Nairobi banned public transport from getting to town so people had to walk long distances to work. And since we don’t have enough pavements, people ended up walking on the roads (like 3000) and there was a traffic jam that lasted for more than 5hrs. The next day the ban was removed.

NoonLooney , ConstantCap Report

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Worked for a warehouse four days a week. 11am-930pm Monday to Thursday. They reiterated many times during the interview process that overtime was optional. My first day my supervisor told me that overtime is indeed optional, but if you don't stay for overtime then everybody else has to stay even later. "So if you do leave on time, don't come back."

Eh whatever. I didn't mind the extra hours too much (although a 10.5 hour shift is already long) but the bonus was that we could go early if all the orders were done. As you can imagine, the good workers busted their a** from start to finish cutting as many corners (good and bad ones) as they could in order to get out early. Normally this ended up with us being able to leave around 15 mins early or on a really good day where the stars aligned (re:everybody showed up), we could leave as early as 7:30 or 8. However.. leaving that early only happened once or twice a year at most.

Overtime was every week. Every single Monday we would work until 2am. 11am-2am isn't ideal when you have no idea when you're off. At around 7pm we'd start to get an idea if we're in for another hour or another 6. One of the genius new hires mentioned to the boss in the office how he was hoping to get out by 6. Oh good. Apparently the boss was thinking us leaving early was a common occurance now and decided that nobody was going to be leaving early any more. Sweep or dust or whatever, but nobody leaves until 9:30.

All of a sudden we were late every single day without fail. Why? We were working our asses off to get out early but failing every day and ending up on time (or still late). By taking away our ability to leave early, everybody gave up working hard. "Slow down! We've got another hour left anyways. I'm not sweeping.". Went from about 45 hours a week to 55. 13 hours every day. Nobody ever left early anymore... but nobody left on time either. Losses for everybody involved because the boss didn't realize that us leaving early for 2 days out of a year actually gave us the daily motivation to work our asses off the other 360~.

tl;dr Boss put a stop to leaving early. No incentive to work our asses off anymore means paying overtime every day.

Fuglyducker , CHUTTERSNAP Report

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Well, Harvard implemented a rule that bars students who are members of single-sex campus organizations from being leaders in other student life aspects (captains of a sports team, student government, etc.) as well as stops them from being able to receive a letter of recommendation from a college dean for a post-graduate fellowship.

Harvard claimed the reasoning behind the to curtail the power of secret societies (like the skull and bones group) and because all-male fraternities have issues with sexual assault.

Except for the rule now discourages students from joining ANY single-sex organization. Panhellenic sororities, the multi-cultural Greek organizations (namely the Black fraternities and sororities), a "women in STEM" club, an all-male acapella group... those all count as single-sex organizations. Members of groups that have no outstanding issues are being punished for the poor behavior of a few (all-male) groups.

They're now being sued by a number of sororities and fraternities.

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Universities love to mess with alcohol-related things. My University decided to pull over campus busses on weekend nights and give out tickets to drunk passengers, as well as a lookout for walking drunks. The following month had more DUIs than the entire previous year. Everyone's excuse was they were scared to walk or take the bus, so they drove.

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Back in the early 1990s, AOL banned offensive words on their service. You couldn't search for certain things on the internet.

That's bad enough as it is, but one of the words they banned was "breast," and it massively backfired, as a number of breast cancer patients and the American Cancer Society took AOL to task for banning the word.

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The outgoing Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker implemented a stricter election law that candidates could only demand a recount if the candidate was losing by 1.0% or less of the vote. On election day this year, he lost by 1.2% of the vote. Had he not changed the law last year, he would've been able to ask for a recount.

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In Indiana, they stopped providing needles for druggies; bam, instant HIV outbreak.

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I had a friend in sales who had to fly a lot. The company decided that since they were paying for the tickets they should own the frequent flyer miles. He then decided to only fly during working hours, rather than catching an early flight out or coming home late, or even sometimes flying on a weekend. After his number of sales calls dropped by a third they reversed the policy.

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Spill-proof gas cans... I have spilled sooo much more gasoline by trying to figure out how to use the complicated spill-proof containers than I ever have with just your "old style" gas cans.....looking at you California!

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Not sure if it is still the case as I graduated many years ago.

But where I went to college, the hospitals had a thing where if someone came in with alcohol poisoning, and they were underage, then they'd also call the cops. So of course what happened was when underage kids really should have gone to the hospital, their friends wouldn't call and ambulance because of fear the cops would punish people. Luckily, while I was there there weren't many deaths due to alcohol poising, but there were more than 0.

Edit: For clarity, I wasn't saying the people calling would get punished by the cops. I was saying the person with alcohol poisoning would be punished. But people still didn't want to call for fear that their friend may get in legal trouble

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I worked at a contract agency that works with Child Protective Services. CPS policy is to never tell the parent who called CPS on them, but my agency’s policy was to always inform the primary caretaker if one of our social workers called it in. Obviously, this irrevocably destroyed our rapport with our clients. Imagine telling a parent you called cps on them only to knock on their door the next week to “listen to their concerns.” The agency made an asshat out of us, and all potential for case progression was out the door. Stupid rule, if you ask me.

reddit Report

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More of a minor thing, but a previous boss was extremely particular about everybody clocking in and out EXACTLY on time, not a minute before or after. Under threat of writing people up for not being on the minute.
As a result, everybody completely ceased being productive towards the end of their shift and just stared at the clock.
“Hey, can you go do X for me?”
“Nope sorry, I only have 20 minutes left and that might take longer and push me over.”

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When I worked for immigration, some bright spark decided that we weren't going to remove people who had been caught smuggling drugs from certain countries. They believed it was too risky to deport people, who had failed to complete their jobs, back to pissed off gangs.

News traveled quickly and within a few weeks, there was a huge spike in smuggling. People were smuggling drugs and immediately handing themselves over to authorities to guarantee that they wouldn't get deported. In addition, dealers found it much easier to convince people to attempt to smuggle drugs because it was a win-win for all parties. The whole idea was scrapped pretty quickly.

reddit , Greg Bulla Report

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My institute banned p**n sites from its WiFi. Most people weren't tech-savvy enough or bold enough to ask how to bypass it. Then the institute banned Facebook. Everyone learned to use proxy in a matter of days.

Let's just say the servers were under heavy pressure from then onwards.

logicalsilly , Misha Feshchak Report

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A hotel I used to work for decided they were having an alcohol-free holiday party. This didn't sit well with the people who'd been working there for years and were accustomed to a full bar at the party.

The staff parking lot ended up being full of people drinking in their cars trying to get a good buzz to carry them through the party and most people ended up getting way drunker than they would have so the party was a s**t show.

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My old high school made a rule that whenever a Lockdown was initiated, everyone had to put their phones in a bag that the teacher kept locked up until it was over. This happened after some kids took pics of swat and texted about the situation to parents causing worry.

The school was trying to be the only news source for parents to keep worried down but this only led to a huge backlash from parents, and the PTA told kids to hide their phones when they try to take it. It was rolled back after the first Lockdown test.

zg1012 Report

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At my old job, some people abused lunch so they made a few of em text in when they started and finished lunch. One guy specifically would text the start time, a place he got food, his order in detail, the address, price, etc. Even when he bought a snack while out. That stopped a week later.

Tenshotshad , S O C I A L . C U T Report

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The school I go to has a rule that says if you come late 3 times, you get an unjustified absence, which lowers your grade quite a bit. So if someone is late they pretty much always skip class so they can get an absence that can be justified by simply signing it...

Ermellino , Kenny Eliason Report

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My agency just implemented this yesterday. We had recycling wastebaskets at each desk for paper and a regular one for trash. My floor has about 75 people on it (on floor 25 of a 32-floor building), floors below us have about 170 people. So they removed the individual baskets from each desk, and now if I want to dispose of a sheet of paper, I have to walk to the lunchroom area or the copy room. This will be a huge waste of time, as people are just going to throw the paper out in the trash. This is their way of being "aggressive" in terms of recycling. I don't see how this makes things easier, or more conducive to recycling. People are going to just put more paper in the trash.

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So I go to a school that’s considered a pretty heavy partying school. We had our homecoming in September traditionally, and it was a huge party with much drinking. However one year the administration decided to move our homecoming into midterm season in an attempt to cut down on partying. Us being the smart students that we are decided instead to party on the old date of our homecoming and the new one. So now the admin has two parties on their hands instead of one.

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A salon I worked at one day decided to drug test the hairstylists. Out of 12 stylists, 11 failed.

The manager texted everybody the next day and told them to come to work.

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My company had an injury (in a facility in a different country no less) that resulted in lost time. The guy was hammering on an adjustable wrench because the nut was too tight... instead of on banning stupidity, they decide to ban adjustable wrenches in every facility. All fine and dandy except we don't have wrenches at our machines because everyone just uses an adjustable wrench. About three weeks into buying thousands of wrenches they decided adjustable wrenches were safe again and stopped buying us regular wrenches.

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Had a new manager, her first gig as the boss. One night we ran out of wine at the bar and it takes a while to restock, so someone was missing from the bar staff for almost an hour.

Because I was bar manager she ripped me a new one and said the bar must he fully stocked as soon as I begin my shift. Well, on weeknights I was often the only bartender on duty. So before serving the wait staff I spent 30-45 Minutes stocking. She was livid! And she was too stupid to realize it makes far more sense to have the day shift do it in advance.

The other manager said she got even madder because she had absolutely no basis to reprimand me for not serving the wait staff. B**ch didn't last too long there thank the gods.

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China's Four Pest Campaign

It turns out taking out all the sparrows isn't a good idea, probably contributed to the starvation of 25+ million Chinese

elbobo19 Report

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The beach club I worked as a cabana boy at decided one summer to buy $40,000 worth of "club umbrellas".

The old system was that you as a cabana boy had 30 to 60 families who you took care of in exchange for tips. One of your responsibilities was to carry whatever heavy beach equipment they bought (Tommy Bahama chairs and umbrellas) from the cabana to the ocean and set it up, and then carry it back up to the cabana at the end of the day. If you left chairs or umbrellas on the beach, the club supervisors would charge you a dollar per item because they would have to carry it to avoid the stuff from getting washed away, broken or stolen by locals. It was a pretty fair and workable system.

The new system was that members still had their own chairs, but would request a number of umbrellas from the cabana boy. Obviously, they requested way more than they would ever need or buy themselves, and the club umbrellas were extra heavy and exhausting to set up. We complained to management about this and a lot of other stuff, but they basically just said "f**k you" to us. Well, that didn't exactly inspire us to do them any favors, considering most of our pay came from the members.

Since all the umbrellas looked the same, we would just take the chairs and leave the umbrellas on the beach and no one would know who was supposed to be responsible for picking them up. The supervisors simply couldn't get them all and almost all of them wound up broken or missing by the end of the summer. Whoops.


TLDR: Beach club got new equipment that caused a lot of extra work without giving us any additional compensation or tools to deal with the work. All the new equipment ended up getting trashed.

F**kYeezy Report

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Brother's friend works at a large company where safety is a "top priority", even in corporate offices, to the point of absurdity. After an employee fell down some stairs, the company instituted a rule that all employees must use the handrails at all times. Signs were posted in stairwells, and reminder emails were sent out. The idea was scrapped after a record number of employees came down with the flu.

Nightnurse1225 Report

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I worked as a researcher for a real estate software company. I had to call commercial tenants and find information on their properties. Instead of requiring us to quickly harvest the info, the company required us to keep them on the phone for 2 mins. This led to people just bulls**tting on the phones for 2 mins instead of harvesting quality data.

My trick was to research the tenant's last name before calling them and talking to them about it. This worked until I talked to a man with an English name, and I asked "so were your ancestors from England?" He said, "the people that owned my ancestors were from England."

Sofa_Rat Report

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My company went to a smoke-free campus. All ashtrays were removed and the smoking area was closed. You can only smoke off the property or in your car with the windows up. They don’t enforce the windows up a rule so now when anyone comes on site they a dozen people standing at the road smoking and then you have to walk through the parking lot and secondhand smoke to get into the building. Oh, and there are cigarette butts everywhere.

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My high school was laid out with the lunch area and offices in the center and long halls of classrooms shooting off from it in all directions.

In order to reduce shenanigans, the already difficult 5 minutes between classes was reduced to 2.5 minutes.

Your locker could be a total of 250 yards walk from your current class if you were unlucky. The same could be true for any two of your classes. Obviously, no running or leaving the school building.

About 95% increase in student lateness and consequent shenanigans.

24keepsthelight Report

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Work hours are restricted to 11 hours a day including overtime while traveling. That means if I drive 3 hours to the client, spent 6 hours there, and drive back for 3 hours, I need to get a hotel for the night 1 hour away from home. Don’t get me started about flights from Germany to Japan.

MaxMustermannYoutube Report

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Some municipality in the northern US decided they would save money by installing LED bulbs in the stoplights. Not only would they use less electricity, they would be changed much less frequently, saving a lot in labor

Then it snowed. And it turned out that the incandescent bulbs melted the snow. But LED bulbs aren't hot enough to melt snow. So they needed to send work crews to clean every stoplight.

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Not exactly a rule, but just last week my job thought it was a good idea to take away our electric cart pusher machine bc they felt that we didn't need it. The very next day, the place was absolutely packed and we couldn't get carts in fast enough.

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I work in manufacturing and we get paid piece rate, so the more I run the more I get paid. We also have a base hourly pay rate of $10/hr, so whichever pays more (the hourly or the piece rate) is what we get paid for the day. On bad days sometimes they bump us to $12/hr for the day and when we train new people we get paid $15/hr to compensate for having to slow down or stop our machines to teach the new people.

The big boss, my boss' boss' boss, came in last week. Now he used to work on the line like I do now, but you can tell he's living comfortably in his corporate life and has forgotten some of the bad parts of this job. He told my boss that we are to no longer receive training pay because, by his logic, if we are working with someone we should be making more than $15/hr, anyway. And these past 3 weeks or so we have been doing a LOT of training. So a few of us got together at the end of the day and agreed: if they aren't paying us, we won't train people. We will teach the new people enough to make us some money and leave the training to the designated trainers (2 people split between 15 or so new hires, but they make $17.50/hr)

The policy lasted 4 days.

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One company we do security for changed their policies and decided we shouldn't be getting into conflicts physically with people anymore and will actively push termination on my company to violators because they want to keep their places of business family-friendly. This past week alone there's been 8 different instances of security staff being requested for termination by this because there was someone assaulting people be they guests or employees in their building and security did nothing because it would have cost them their jobs if they started fighting with them. The worst part is that when upper management is confronted with the paradoxical nature of their policy change and their requests they seem to think everything is working as intended

Like have we really become this G rated that we can't see when s**t makes 0 Damon sense

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My work implemented a “no conference calls after 3pm” rule. It worked for one week, then people realized that everybody’s schedule was clear after 3 PM so they would set up these “one time only” calls. Enough people set up calls and pretty soon everyone’s schedules became jammed between 3p and 5p. Nothing like a full afternoon of conference calls at the end of your day....

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I guess laws count as rules, so here are a few good ones from the UK:

The Poll Tax in the UK in the early 90's. It had massive opposition and riots on the streets and was culled in favour of the Council tax. In operation for a very short time.

The Window Tax in the UK where the amount of tax you paid was dependent on how many windows your house had. As a result, people just bricked up their windows. In operation for ~150 years.

broken-neurons Report

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Super-injunctions. In the UK a few years back a famous person was rich enough to be able to take out an injunction, meaning that no one in the press could report on his affair. Not only that, but no one was allowed to talk about it, or even acknowledge that the injunction exists. Not the press, not the media, nor the average man in the street.

It backfired when everyone just spread the person's identity on Twitter, and it caused a far bigger (we’re talking massive nationwide coverage) s**tstorm than your average kiss-and-tell tabloid affair would have done.

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When roundabouts or traffic circles were created in the 30s the right of way was given to the person entering the circle. This obviously caused major problems. It took 30 years before it was switched so that the cars in the circle had the right of way. But since it took so long and the traffic that it caused was so bad, the US was resistant to adding in new ones which is one of the main reasons why here in the US roundabouts aren't very common.

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This goes back 10 years, but at work, anything bad was based on a point system. Calling in sick = 1 point. If you called in a second day, still just the same 1 point. So, if you wanted to go on a weekend getaway, you take your 2 normal days off, were willing to get a point, and you had 4 days off in a row.

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My school implemented the rule that if you were late or didn't have your books with you, you weren't allowed in class. I don't know whose bright idea it was, but it resulted in a lot of kids chilling outside in the hallway because they would rather chill with their friends than/then learn about the difference between then and then. I still can't remember!

Needless to say, that rule was fairly quickly lifted

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