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From strict dress code regulations to senseless time management techniques, there's plenty of rules to follow at work or school. And while some of them give our life order and direction, others are... just stupid. But don't waste your energy thinking about how to break or change them. Sometimes you can just wait it out. If the rule is as ridiculous as you think, there's a big chance it will backfire. And there's plenty of examples to back this up.

If you want proof, redditor u/TabblespoonFarmer3 asked “What stupid rule at your work/school backfired beautifully?” and the people of Reddit delivered. The post got more than 56.5K upvotes and received 13.4K comments.

Have a read through this list of comments that Bored Panda compiled and make sure to upvote your favorite ones!

This post may include affiliate links.

#1

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Boss bitched and complained that we all (welders and millwrights) took lunch and breaks whenever we felt like it (actually just when we got the chance) and implemented a rule that if you didnt take your break/lunch at the right time you didnt get them. Myself and another welder got sent to do a repair that was about a 2 hour drive from the shop first thing in the morning, boss said it was going to be a quick fix so we didnt bring our lunches. We needed the machine running ASAP because it was costing a quarter of a million an hour for down time. Turns out his quick fix was a pretty major welding job, and required us to completely rebuild a motor mount. The operator knew this and had told the boss that was when needed to be done. Well guess what boss man, if you just let us take our lunches and breaks when we wanted or had at least told us what the actual job was we wouldnt have driven 2 hours to the job, done 1 hour of work, driven another 2 hours back to the shop, ate lunch at noon like we were supposed to, and then driven 2 hours back to the job to finish it.

TLDR: Bosses power trip cost over $1,000,000 in a single day so that we could eat our lunches on time.

Snakebiteloo , Marcel Heil Report

Final score:
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Rules should make your life simpler, not more complicated. So the more rules we create, the happier we should be, right? Well, according to this survey, the abundance of rules at work does the exact opposite. After receiving more than 7000 responses from Harvard Business Review readers, the researchers found out that organizations had become more bureaucratic over the past few years. And the issue is even more serious at bigger companies. “'Bureaucratic drag' slows work down, wastes time, stifles innovation, and causes employees to focus too much on internal matters rather than their customers,” the results show.

Schools are also falling for the same bureaucratic trap. A Secret Teacher told the Guardian that endless rules can do more harm than good for the students. The school where the Secret Teacher works punishes them for listening to music, wearing a coat in class or having ties too short. “It has become almost too easy to remove a student from a class to the hallway or to senior management. Many of my colleagues take this approach,” the teacher said.

And while the educator understands the need for rules in general, he or she rarely uses military-style discipline for things this minor: “Relaxing some of the rules has helped me treble one class’s output since the start of last year.” Students should not miss large amounts of school due to unnecessary rules and teachers should be the ones who help and support them.

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#2

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Zero tolerance ended shortly after a bully got thrown through a window because "if I'm getting suspended for defending myself I'm gonna make it worth my while."

ConstableBlimeyChips , Jerry Zhang Report

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Ryan Deschanel
Ryan Deschanel
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3 years ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

"zero tolerance" just means "we are just evil and we protect bullies." I had to threaten to sue them so they change their mind.

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#3

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Required every employee to use electronic timeclocks to punch in/out for work including lunch. Punching in late or leaving early would cause your pay to be docked and getting a discipline letter.

Multiple people wanted to sabotage the clocks (cut the cords, etc) but wiser heads prevailed...

Everyone arrive several minutes early and left late, every single day, to avoid getting into trouble.

Unfortunately, this created unimpeachable evidence of hours worked. The employer had to pay out thousands of dollars in overtime the first month.

The clocks disappeared exactly five weeks after they were installed with no notification.

qpgmr Report

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Caro Caro
Caro Caro
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Why companies can't just trust their employees is beyond me.

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However, if such rules make your work life miserable and there's nothing anyone can do, here's a few ways how to cope with them. First, do your research. If the rule is as pointless as you think, you should find some information to prove it and form your argument to your manager or HR.

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Second, there's still a lot of meaningless policies in a number of workplaces, like strict dress codes or tattoo bans. You can try a little rule-bending to show that it's completely irrelevant and that your employer should move with the times. The more people oppose them, the faster they're going to change.

And lastly, one of the best ways to get rid of an unwanted regulation is to suggest a better alternative and put a human face on the issue. If you take the time to invite your higher-ranking colleagues to discuss the issues with you and your coworkers, you might be able to think of a better solution.
#4

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Late 80’s high school- rule was no shorts. Classmate came for an exam with basketball shorts on that were below her knees. Teacher made her go home to change. She came back in a micro mini skirt and wrote her exam.

Spellflinger2019 , Lensabl Report

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wendillon avatar
Monday
Monday
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Exam dress codes are pretty stupid in general...you're there to stare at a piece of paper for several hours, who cares what you're wearing?

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#5

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired There was a very strict "no visible bra strap" rule at my school (even if you were wearing a tank top with thick straps, even if it accidentally fell to the side as bra straps do). Being the smart ass I was, I just took my bra off whenever I got yelled at lmao

frqntfly3r , Quianna Richardson Report

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#6

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Back in 2014 our HR made a rule people couldn’t go to other buildings. We had 3 buildings within a block of each other. All 3 had shipping areas and the warehouse employees had to go to each building to work.

We were told to stay at one building. I mentioned we ship out of all 3 who is going to do the work? The genius said oh it’ll be taken care of.

Next day $500k shipment didn’t go out. The following day we have a meeting.

Why didn’t you ship this? Uh, 2 days ago we were told to stay in our building and someone would take care of it.

The rule was quickly changed.

[deleted] , Mak Report

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Paul Davis
Paul Davis
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

This is a sign of incompetent top management -- you don't let your accountants and HR make operational business decisions. Happens way too often though.

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#7

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired I worked for a consulting company, traveling monday-thursday somewhere in my country. We had a pretty good hotel allowance (enough for 5 star hotels) and a great rule: if you stayed with a friend, you got an allowance (about a third of the hotel allowance) to buy gifts for the host.

I got the rare treat of a 6-month project in the town of my best friend from childhood was going to university. We made a great arrangement: I would crash at his place and spend the evenings drinking beer, watching movies and play videogames. In return, I used the gift allowance to order dinner for the two of us.

After submitting my first expense report, I was told by some HR drone that the gift allowance was supposed to be used seldomly and not for food for myself.

So I booked a room in a five star hotel, was upgraded to a junior suite because of my rewards status and invited my friend to evenings of beer, video games and room service.

After my second expense report, the project manager asked me about the tripling of the expenses compared to the first report. After explaining the situation and pointing out what sum of money it would mean over the 6 months, he got in contact with HR...

Two days later, the rule was recinded. The project even got my friend (the then newly released) PS3 as a thank you for letting me stay with him.

alphager , Nikita Kostrykin Report

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#8

A long while back, but my school banned the color pink because a bunch of students were wearing it one October and they thought it was a "gang" thing.

It was for breast cancer awareness month. The rule didn't go well for them.

WaywardWriter Report

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ZAPanda
ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

another case of not understanding popular culture by ignorant older conservatives. Get out of education, you are not helping the world move forward, you're dragging it back.

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#9

My company decided to “Save Money” by eliminating our staff messenger, a sweet older guy, who drove to each of our 5 local offices daily, to pick up and drop off mail. In the afternoon he would sort outgoing and inter office mail to be delivered the next day. They told us to send any inter office mail overnight by UPS. This could mean sending out 4 different shipments, one to each office. After the first month the UPS bill was 5 times the guy’s monthly salary. They scrapped the plan and hired him back.

Jealous-Network-8852 Report

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ZAPanda
ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

never underestimate how useful a "little guy" is. Covid taught us that. Suddenly cleaners are essential staff.

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#10

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired When COVID started our boss demanded that our entire team sit in on group zoom calls, even if the topics on the agenda didn't have anything to do with their roles. She felt it would build team unity.

Productivity dropped, negative Google reviews came in, staff became more stressed.

When she demanded answers on the next zoom call one of my co-workers bluntly said "well, I would reply to this woman's voice mail, but I'm stuck on this zoom call".

kor_hookmaster , Chris Montgomery Report

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ZAPanda
ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

this isn't about team spirit this is about monitoring you to make sure you are working / visible. AKA presentism. The most useless form of work.

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#11

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Working at Home Depot I asked for a long weekend off I was denied. Later on I got in a bit of an argument with one of my supervisors, who reprimanded me by giving me a 3 day suspension...over the long weekend. Success.

smooth-opera , Oxana Melis Report

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#12

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired The bottom floor of my secondary school was a square that had corridor all the way around. After some incident where a kid got knocked over, they implemented a one-way system. Unfortunately, they were Very Strict on enforcing it. If you accidentally walked past your class, you couldn't just turn around. They seemed very proud of their new rule... until everyone started showing up late for class because they had to do extra laps of the bottom floor.

FrosnPls , Rubén Rodriguez Report

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A B C
A B C
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3 years ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

"whoopsies, one step too far, guess I'll saunter around another lap. What a dire shame I miss the first ten minutes of history class."

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#13

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired My spouse's workplace realized they didn't have a policy about sending sexual images or jokes as part of their email acceptable use policy, so they added it.

Except they made it a firing offense to send or receive sexual content (I think the intent was to stop people from subscribing to such content). They also said that your access would be immediately revoked until a determination was made.

So someone got fired for something else and decided to send their whole management chain a graphically sexual image, then report it using the anonymous tip line. IT got the report, concluded they did indeed receive sexual content, and did as required—suspended all the involved email accounts, including the SVP's.

The policy has since been reworded

loljetfuel , Brett Jordan Report

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wendillon avatar
Monday
Monday
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

It's like the "zero tolerance" policy many schools have. If I'm going to receive the same punishment for being punched by a student as I would for punching a student, I'm sure as hell gonna fight back and do as much damage as I can.

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#14

I was working as a medical assistant at a private practice medical clinic. Our clinic manager wouldn’t allow the new receptionist to drive to the bank to deposit cash. Made her walk carrying the money bag so that she couldn’t “drive away with the money.” Bizarre. I know. That went on for a few weeks. Then the receptionist was mugged and over $1000 in cash was stolen. She was allowed to drive after that.

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MilaFi
MilaFi
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Yes, because the risk of the employee driving away with the money is far greater than the employee being mugged while walking to the bank with a bag full of cash. /s

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#15

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired They stopped paying for extra hours because the "only reason we needed extra hours was because we didn't organize our work properly". First people stopped working late.

Some tasks were just impossible to perform within working hours.

They ended up having to pay 4 Saturdays in a row (150% of the income) to 2x times more people just to get back in schedule.

gollour , Firmbee.com Report

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#16

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired You can't speak a foreign language at work unless you're a certified translator in that language. We had a guy in a customer service position that spoke Spanish as a second language. Yeah, his regular Spanish speaking customers were confused as to why he could no longer speak to them in Spanish, because they knew he was fluent. Eventually J explains to them (in English) that they made it against the rules for him to speak Spanish. They weren't happy about that.

[deleted] , Arlington Research Report

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#17

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Couldn't buy drinks at lunch with cash money, had to buy some voucher. They were just cheaply made laminated pieces of paper. This was 2001, I was 13 and bored.Scanned the vouchers and printed them out on paper that kinda matched the colour of the vouchers. and laminated tem myself. They were horrible made and not even the right colour on the backside. Also crudely cut out. I 'made' about a hundred of them of passed them out after I tried paying with them for myself and encountered no problems. Made some new friends and upped production. Took them about three weeks to find out but by then the fakes ones had intermingled with the real ones and had already been resold to students via the student office. About half of the vouchers sold were fakes.

Drinks were cash only from then on. They had no choice to accept the fakes one for a little while longer though, as they had sold and charged for some of them.

VloekenenVentileren , Erik Mclean Report

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#18

My mother was an elementary school teacher. For years the teachers' "be quiet" signal was holding up one hand in a peace sign. Well, the principal decided that this didn't have enough meaning and invented her own.

At a staff meeting she explained that her new sign stood for "ears Listening, eyes Looking, lips Locked". She then made an "L" with her index finger and thumb and held it in front of her forehead.

This principal didn't take criticism well, so none of the staff members were willing to tell her that she was making the Loser Sign. And so the new sign was taught to the children. Most of them made fun of it. Some of the more sensitive ones got upset by it. Overall it was a disaster and within a few weeks they went back to the peace sign.

JugOfVoodoo Report

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#19

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired I am the one who lives closest to work, so if the building alarm goes off overnight, I'm first on the list to get the call from the alarm company. It used to be that if we had good reason to believe the alarm was not an actual break in we could tell them not to summon the police and ignore the alarm. (I can access the building cameras from home. The most common alarm was the cleaning crew who were always messing up the disarming.)

Then a sister site ignored an alarm that turned out to be an actual break-in, and the facilities director decided that no matter what, if there was an alarm we should have the alarm company summon the police, then go to the building, get the police all clear, and re-set the alarm. This was a pain in the ass but rare enough and I lived literally 2 minutes away.

Then we contracted for the alarm company to come in and replace all of our panels and sensors. It was a nightmare process that ultimately ended up taking months, and the whole time there were phantom alarms, sometimes multiple times a night.

Each time I had to go out in the middle of the night, I'd prepare the required report, send it to the facilities director, and request to go back to the old process. Each time he said no, we couldn't afford to miss a potential real break-in.

After about three weeks of this nonsense, I was due for some time off. I was going out of town, and the protocol for that was for me to ignore calls from the alarm company so they moved to the next person on the list... which happened to be the facilities director.

In the five days I was off, I must have ignored at least four overnight calls that all would have gone to him next. Then suddenly, nothing. When I got back I was informed that for the duration of the alarm update, we just weren't going to arm the building at all.

So much for "can't afford to risk a break in!"

scurvy_knave , Oxa Roxa Report

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ZAPanda
ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

yup it's all fun and games till the boss has to do it. My policy with my team was to reward them for every false alarm they responded to.

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#20

A boss was worried we were "stealing time" by using the bathroom for too long. So being the nutjob he is he locked all the bathrooms in the building except the ones he could see from his office door, shut of water to them, put out of order signs on them, and he would sit there with a stopwatch timing us between walking into the restroom and walking out (these are all one-at-a-time restrooms) and then would call out the time. This was STUPID over the top and almost positive is illegal but he never made a policy officially restricting bathroom time... he just wanted to make everyone feel uncomfortable if they took too long.

I discovered that with my height it was really easy to go through the drop ceiling and over the half wall and I was the only other person using the men's besides my boss, who is short... so I went in... locked it from the inside and did my business and climbed out the ceiling leaving the door locked so my boss could not get into the bathroom when he needed to go and was forced to use the ladies... which led to our female employees complaining that he was taking too long in their bathroom.

To this day I don't know if he ever figured out how I was doing that.

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Mohsie Supposie
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

What about someone who suffered from IBS? I have IBS. If I even get a thought that someone is monitoring me, it makes it worse, and it takes me EVEN LONGER. They started doing this at my last job, and I had to straight up quit!

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#21

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired I went to a strict catholic school with uniforms. The kids in 4th-8th grade had to wear belts until we got a new principal who made it mandatory for all the kids in the school to wear belts. Many bathroom accidents from kindergartners, 1st and 2nd graders later (and complaints from parents, of course) the principal rescinded her addition to the dress code.

More recently, this principal was fired for embezzling money from the school.

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whodunnitfan2013
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Ah, Christian schools...

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Scarlett
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Good ol’ Catholic schools. I remember in middle school I got yelled at for wearing a headband that was the wrong shade of blue (we could wear navy blue, black, or white headbands, I wore bright blue)

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Jaybird3939
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Great "Squirrel!" use though. Have people focused on wet pants instead of her embezzling money

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april jenkins
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

i am even more surprised you could find a belt that fits 5~8 year olds?? do they even make them??

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#22

At my old school you could get suspended for most minor infractions. This included smoking. However if you were a witness to other people smoking then you would get suspended along with them. So this ended up with everyone constantly working together to hide the smokers at all cost otherwise just about everyone would be suspended.

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wendillon avatar
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Monday
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

We would have gone the opposite route at my school....the smokers would have stood somewhere public where we could all witness them so we could all be suspended and go home

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#23

I remember my brother wearing a skirt to school for a while when they changed the dress code so boys could no longer wear shorts.

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#24

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Every shift, there's a quota we need to fulfil. And then, even if you do fulfil it, you have to keep working until your 8 hours are up.

Cue everyone speeding for 4 hours, having a 3-hour lunch/coffee break, then slowly moving their ass for an hour. No rule about us taking necessary breaks if we're still capable of reaching the quota.

Now we're allowed to stop once we're done.

InariNoroi , Alessandro Bianchi Report

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#25

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired I worked at Starbucks for like 5+ years before and during undergrad and at one point our district manager thought it was a good idea to implement a "just say yes" policy, where we literally weren't allowed to tell the customer no. Lasted for about 3 months and in that three months our unaccounted product and waste went up over 300% because when the POS didn't have a way to punch in a customer request we had to just do it anyways. We also got complaints from stores in surrounding districts because they had angry customers who were requesting things that were against local food service code, and told them that we did it for them at our store. I knew exactly how that policy was going to play out and I just laughed every time management was freaking out about the problems it was causing.

yunglilbigslimhomie , TR Report

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ZAPanda
ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

This nonsense is a result of having a menu that is too complex. If you reduce your selections then the customer can't make too many unreasonable demands.

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#26

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired At school, no going to bathroom during lunch...I think you can imagine how many teachers got mad about students always needing to go to the bathroom during class...

Btw the reason they made the rule was because someone stole a stall door during lunch so they thought that the students couldn’t be trusted. Idk how making them go in class could have possibly gone any better though

LEGEND7140 , Sung Jin Cho Report

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Allan Breum
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Fun fact; According the The Human Rights Convention, you are not allowed deny someone if they have to "go".

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#27

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired No more swipe cards to get in the building. From now on, it's going to be fingerprint sensors. That was 2 weeks before COVID-19 happenned

ghostFromTheBog , u_h0yvbj97 Report

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Big Blue Cat
Big Blue Cat
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

This would be a disaster for me. My devices don't recognize my fingerprint if I have been in the shower recently, if it's too hot or cold or whatever. I have to use pin more often than I get in with fingerprint.

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#28

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Not really a “rule,” but a change in policy. I used to work for a major beer distributor as a delivery driver. They decided to start using less glue in the packaging to save money. We’re talking a few cents per package. As a result, breakage during distribution increased drastically causing them to eat a lot more damaged product. It caused such a large loss in profit that they quickly changed course.

AnthropomorphicMango , BENCE BOROS Report

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Penelope
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Wow. That plan wasn’t thought through at all! “We deal in breakable glass and spillable liquids.” “I know, let’s save money by making the packaging useless at preventing spills and breakage!”

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#29

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired To make moving between classes more efficient, they had designated up and down stairways. But they didn't take into account that the stairs were located at the ends of the very long corridors , which meant it was impossible to get to your next class on time. Because of this, no one bothered trying to get to class on time and just blamed the stairway rule.

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Jayne Kyra
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

What happened to "keep to your right-hand side" thing?

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#30

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired No more back packs or bags. Teachers were mad when you didn't have any supplies. What were we supposed to do stuff it all in our shirts or pants? Also as a girl yikes...they did not think that one through I can remember getting in trouble for carrying my purse when the rule initially took place, they eventually lightened it so we could carry small bags.

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ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

where was this? usa? I assume the reasoning is to stop people sneaking guns into school. I suppose you can solve it by banning guns you know...

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#31

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Back in the early 00s, my high school implemented a policy that you had to wear your ID tag at all times. If you didn’t have it on, you were sent home. So many students “lost” their ID tag to go grab food or skip a class. We were the only graduating class to wear them all four years. The policy ended soon after.

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Paulina
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3 years ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

We had similar policy at my high school! They made us show school ID to security guard at entering the building. Supposedly to prevent trespassers and monitor people potentially going out for a smoke... The problem was this school had TWO buildings and most language classes were in one of them, while other subjects were at the main building. Since every one was taking at least two foreign language classes, it created a lot of traffic in and out, every single period. New ID rule meant super long queue at the school entrance and many people routinely late for classes. And ofc smokers mixed with the crowd easily, making it impossible to determine who was going to other building for classes and who was coming back from a smoke 🤷‍♀️ Soon security started to just let people go to speed things up and ID rule, while never officially revoked, became a thing of the past.

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#32

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired If you wear socks that aren’t black you get sent home to change them and they mark you as present lol

Most people started wearing different color socks just to go home and chill, I actually miss high school lol

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#33

I worked at a language teaching center where the lessons are pre-planned by the curriculum and on weekdays we often only have 2-3 hours of classes sporadically spread out through the afternoon/evening. The management were pretty chill when I started, and people just planned their lessons in bulk (which basically entailed checking your schedule and printing out the required unit/session worksheets) and just showed up 10 mins before to deliver the lesson. On weekends we'd have full 10 hour workdays. Apart from that we'd have the odd training session or faculty meeting but otherwise you could basically go home or go do whatever you wanted between lessons. All the provided apartments were within 10 mins walking distance of the center so this was pretty ideal.

The nice managers left, and the new management were assholes who started scheduling mandatory 'office hours' where we had to be in the center with absolutely nothing to do. There'd be a 12:00 staff meeting and my next lesson would be at 4-6pm, and then 3 and a half bullshit 'office hours' in the middle. When we asked them what we should do they said 'think about your teaching methods'. Basically bullshit dickwaving.

A bunch of the other teachers starting watching movies on the projectors in the spare classrooms, I brought in my Switch, some people would just straight up go nap on the beanbags in the reading nook. The thing was there was literally no busywork they could generate and soon it was apparent to everyone (especially prospective new students and parents) how unprofessional and awful it made the center look. The managers embarassingly just stopped scheduling and enforcing these office hours.

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#34

People who were caught wandering the halls or skipping classes were sent straight home.

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#35

When The University of Texas at Austin started allowing campus carry in 2016, a huge protest was organized among the student body called Cocks not Glocks where everybody was openly carrying dildos around for like a week or so. It didn't exactly "backfire" because the campus carry law is still in effect, but man that was a fun moment to be a student there.

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#36

In Las Vegas the fire departments had a policy that if someone called out and you covered their shift, you get paid overtime. Eventually ever firefighter at every department was trading shifts so that they were always making overtime. Went on unnoticed for over a year. It was a HUGE scandal and the ones in charge who let it go on and effectively cost the city millions had the book thrown at them hard.

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Felix Feline
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

In NYC, your NYPD pension is determined by what you earned in your last month of work. So for that month everyone "works" 168 per week.

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#37

This one is great. we had a no dating at work rule then the director started seeing someone and other people had their hidden relationships as well. that rule was nullified when the director announced his engagement and so about 6 other couples came out. we no longer have that rule, however people are to let the admin know of relationships now.

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3 years ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Is it an american thing? Because, I never saw or heard such rule in my country (Switzerland). And before dating app, it is know that 75% of couple are from professional environment (coworker, client,...)...

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#38

Not mine, but an old roommate of mine was a senior developer for a small company. It was an open secret that one of the other senior devs, a guy who had been there since the beginning, would sometimes spend time looking at plastic surgery photos--before/after shots, photos of active procedures, etc. He did it enough that people would poke fun at him about it, but he didn't seem embarrassed about it, and it wasn't harming anyone.

Well, one day a project manager said something to the CEO about this guy's ongoing plastic surgery obsession, and the CEO flipped. He said that, going forward, no one was allowed to use their work computers to access external websites AT ALL.

Anyone who's ever been a developer knows that half the job is googling stuff, so this policy pretty much halted productivity in its tracks. It only lasted a day before the CEO retracted the rule, but let everyone know that their browser history would be monitored going forward. After that, no one really changed their behavior, they just started remotely accessing their home computers to browse instead.

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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Trying to outsmart IT devs in their field of expertise... what could go wrong? :D

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#39

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Christian school, so there was always the morning prayer before classes started. Our principal decided that people who wouldn't get there on time (8am) for the prayer would stay outside for the first period. Literally backfired from the first days because basically everyone came in late and there were barely any students.

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Kim Shannon
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I went to a parochial school, which my husband calls "prison school." Started the day four days a week with religion class, church on Wednesdays, mandatory participation in choir, church on Sunday and were pressured into joining the Youth Group on Saturdays. During Monday morning attendance, when your name was called you had to stand up and say "Church, Sunday School, Both or Neither" to see if you were going to church when you should. God have mercy on your soul if you said "Neither." The teacher would grill you in front of the whole class as to why you didn't go, and wouldn't stop til the whole class was jeering you (encouraged by the teacher) and you ended up crying. And my parents wonder why I don't want to go to church anymore. This was a Lutheran school. It's where I learned to lie and bully

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#40

New IT contractor implemented monthly password updates and a long list of exclusions in the passwords (no recognizable words, multiple numbers/symbols, etc).

When the CEO stopped by our branch, his first question was why everyone had a post it on their monitor with their current password.

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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

yep. If you do this then people start making predictable systematic passwords, which lowers security. The policy that is CURRENTLY recommended is english / other language sentences (ie pass phrases). With spaces etc. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is 31 novemdecillion years according to howsecureismypassword.net. However, QWERT!@#$%, which LOOKS harder, would only take a computer 3 days to break.

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#41

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Back in 2011, a company I worked for had the bright idea to block all social networks because, you know, employees should work instead of slacking off on Facebook.

I could write volumes of books on the toxic culture in that place, but the Owner/President who lived in a different country and visited about once every few months was universally feared by everyone and a few days before his arrival the whole building went into panic mode.

So a few weeks after the social network ban, his royal highness shows up, and 5 minutes later half of IT department is scrambling to his office. Apparently there was an issue with the Wifi, or at least that’s what he figured since he couldn’t log onto Facebook.

It was fixed in seconds.

A few years and three promotions later, I make a joke about it with him. Instead of a laugh, I get a confused look. Turns out he still thinks it was “some internet problem” since whoever decided to ban social networks didn’t have the balls to tell him about it after the incident.

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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

At my job, you can't access social media on the work computers. But you can access them on your smartphones, using the work wifi, for some reason.

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#42

I’m a teacher at a middle school. The teachers in my grade level decided that we as an entire grade should make it a rule that students can not bring their laptop charges to school and charge their laptop. Yet we are not allowed to do paper work because of Covid. So I wrote on my board for my classroom “bring chargers to class” and then they hide them in their book bags so other teachers don’t catch them with it.

All my students are turning in their work and having a great time In my classroom, but their laptops are dead in the other rooms.

I told the teachers how stupid they are for getting angry over a bunch of cords. Who cares if it isn’t pretty. It’s necessary. We are in the middle of a Effing pandemic.

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ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

bizarre. I mean if you have any laptop with an intel processor it will last max 3-4 hours before it dies.

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#43

A place I used to work had a rule that executive-level staff needed to be contactable when on leave, so they had a section on the leave form for the address of where you'd be staying and a contact number.

Some knuckle-shuffler in HR decided it applied to all staff and the shenanigans began. People would put down the address and phone number of sex shops, sports grounds, medical clinics. I gave the latitude and longitude of the place I was going camping and the UHF frequency channel my radio would be tuned to.

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WilvanderHeijden
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

No one needs to know where I am when I'm on leave. In my last job I got paid an extra bonus to be on "stand by". But that was on a voluntary basis, and management knew no one would come flying back from Italy to reset a printer or push the caps lock button when the CEO had problems logging in.

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#44

Control-freak Boss says : "All rescheduling of a lesson with a client should be run through a secretary, who will do the room reservation update, and keep me updated." Implicit threat : "If you let clients reschedule too easily, you are a worthless wimp that I don't want to work with."

Old version: client contacts you directly, you work it out together quickly and inform the secretary of the new date/time so she can change the room reservation. Boom and done.

New version: Secretary receives change request from client, but doesn't know your availabilities. Contacts you. Gets your availabilities. Sends them to client when she has time, because it's frankly a low priority for her. Clients eventually picks a date, and sends it back to the secretary, who sends it on to you, you send confirmation OR.....Calendars often have changed in the meantime due to new circumstances so.... Back-and-forth a few times before a new date/time is chosen. Secretary reserves the room for that time date.

This chews up so much time that the secretary falls behind with her other work, slowing down the process, which increases the chance of a calendar change obliging another run-through.

The new system lasted about four days. Then an overloaded secretary went on stress-related medical leave. The work-load was shared in equal parts between the other secretaries. So... three days later, another secretary went on stress-related sick leave. When the Boss tried to re-apportion the workload again, he got a immediate face-full of "WTF is WRONG WITH YOU?!" and the next-to-last secretary stormed out in tears to go on stress-related sick leave.

The new system died right there and then.

As the French say "When you chase away the easy way, it will come galloping back."

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Ryan Deschanel
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

No. We don't say that. We have "when you chase away the natural (eg your tendencies that are part of your nature) it will come galloping back" and the sarcastic "why do simple when you can do complicated?".

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#45

My school banned people from carrying their bags around during the day, so we had to rent lockers to keep our books in.

One kid got around this and brought his books into school in a microwave, which he carried round for the day.

He ‘left’ the school within the month

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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

"huh? Oh, this is my pet microwave. Name's Dingus. Dingus, say hello" - Dingus: "*ding*"

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#46

I work for a furniture store, the recently came out and said that everyone had to download a super invasive app and that it was 100% required. When they realized nobody was doing it they said that's fine but no cell phones allowed in the delivery vehicles. It's working great because if we can't find a place "oh well" it goes back, we're out and just fucking off? Can't call us and ask us where we're at because we don't have phones. Wanna send us on a really long store trip? No clue where that is. They refuse to get us a GPS and send us out to bumfuck who knows where.

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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

bizarre. How about at least supplying mapbooks then? you know, if you want to go back to the medieval ages?

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#47

30 Times Someone Tried To Enforce A Stupid Rule And It Backfired Students used to smoke in the toilets. So headmaster decided to lock all male toilets except one (5 places in one). Now my school had around 700 students, out of which around 300 were male. Everyone realised, that it became impossible to go to the toiket quickly. Result? Some guys went in one and pissed/defacated in all trash cans. A lot. No one found them, but all the other toilets opened up immediately

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ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

wow that is pathetic. Surely it's easy to tell who is smoking? you can just sniff them when they come back to class...?

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#48

When I was in elementary school, we had a stoplight in the cafeteria. It was green when we were the correct volume, yellow when we were getting too loud, and red if we were way too loud. If it turned red, we lost our post-lunch recess. Well whenever it turned red and we knew our recess was gone, we’d all just count down and keep yelling at the same time to see how many times we could turn it red

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Kim Shannon
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I was once denied recess because I was laughing too much at lunch. In first grade, we weren't allowed to leave the cafeteria until we took our empty milk carton to our teacher so she could shake it and make sure it was empty.

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#49

My highschool had one big hallway that was in the shape of the outline of a square, with classrooms either side (there was a big courtyard in the middle). Because of this the hallway was just the one loop. A 'one way system' was introduced to prevent anarchy in the hallways, but this meant if you had your first class in classroom 1 and your second in classroom 16, which was just around the corner, you had to walk the long way around which would take forever.

Teacher's however, didn't have to follow this rule, so students began walking behind teachers breaking the system when needed. When the teacher would turn around and go to tell the student off, they wouldn't be able to without sounding intensely hypocritical.

Students would also do a few laps around the school before going into class and when caught would just blame the one way system forcing them to take ages.

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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Counter productive stupid ideas at their most obvious. Plus the hypocritical double standards are pathetic.

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#50

I would say zero tolerance.

Before that kids would get in fights and one, maybe both get suspended. Today, kids get sent to the hospital because what's the point of going easy when you can best the shit out of a kid and have the same results?

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WilvanderHeijden
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3 years ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

When you punish the victim for being attacked and bullied, you're creating a environment where everyone beats everyone because it doesn't matter if you're the predator or the prey and the best defense is attack.

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#51

People were wasting time/hanging out in the bathroom during class. Solution? Only unlocking bathrooms in between classes (for a LUXURIOUS four minutes)! By the time the door was unlocked and the line queued up, 10-15 extra minutes of class time was lost. They had to allow students to use the restroom during class again- the horror!

ETA- wow! Seems like my school was not the only one. I bet this is an American thing though.

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#52

Daycare started charging people for picking up their kids late..

As a results more kids were picked up late..

To the admins made it a lot more expensive

Now it was a status symbol and even more kids were picked up late.

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#53

My workplace originally allowed 5 payed sick days and paid out a small bonus if employees had perfect attendance. They did away with the bonus now people treat the sick days like vacation days.

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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

That's still plain stupid. If you have, say, a severe cold, you stay at home five days, then you're forced to go back to work whether cured or not, so if not, you infect everyone else, cascading into way more sick days then if they'd just leave it at your or your doctor's discretion on how long you should stay at home.

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#54

My calculus teacher (happened to be my girlfriend’s mom but that’s another story) was a stickler when it came to being fully engaged in class so she banned all food and beverages except water. Unfortunately what she didn’t consider was that her class was right after the football and wrestling teams’ joint weight training session which resulted in 6-10 protein crazed athletes slamming down protein shakes and unreasonable amounts of meat immediately before class. As you may imagine this resulted in all of us getting the protein shits 30 minutes later and had to leave class to use the bathroom every single day. One day eventually she had enough and read us the riot act so my sorry ass had to go to my girlfriend’s house to look her mother/my strictest teacher in the eyes and explain that her no food policy was causing student-athletes to have violent protein shits during her class.

To provide some closure here she was not a flexible woman but she was pragmatic, so once I put things in terms of letting us space out the eating to avoid 1/3 or her class disappearing for 15 minutes every day she relented. I stayed away from her house for a good two weeks afterwards though, just to be safe.

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3 years ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

"violent protein shits" seems perfectly healthy (/s). I don't get this sports shake crap anyways, sounds absolutely disgusting, unneccessary and unhealthy to me.

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#55

My HS had a smoking in the bathroom problem and to solve it, rather than having a teacher outside the restrooms during hall time, they locked all the bathrooms except one. This made it so you had to wait in a stupid long line with 1200 other students trying to use 3 stalls for each gender in the 10 mins between classes. During class time they had the assistant principal sit outside the one open bathroom and they would check your ID and sign you IN and OUT and only 1 student in at a time.

Major health code violation

Kids would be holding it all day.

Girls on their cycle needed the restroom and would often have to get a pass from class to go use the restroom bc the lines were too long during breaks.

Smokers still smoked in the gym lockerooms during changing time.

This rule didnt solve anything but made it very unhygienic and rather annoying to just use the restroom.

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ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

again, stupid conservatives who do not understand the problem. It's about teenage identity. Create a useful outlet instead. Iceland implemented phys ed classes to resolve bad behaviour issues. Find something that appeals.

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#56

No cellphones while on duty or instant dismissal. But now I frequently use my personal for work purposes and receive calls all throughout the day from superiors.

They tried to fight the age of technology.

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Kanuli
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I had to fight almost a year for a portable phone. When I was elsewhere for 2-3h, and production needed immediate support, well duh...

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#57

My daughters high school have a one way movement policy. So all pupil traffic walks one way around the entire school. So if she comes out of one classroom and her next classroom is literally one door back, they can’t walk the 5 meters to that door. She has to walk around the entire school, including up and down three flights of stairs.

FOR EVERY BLOODY LESSON!!!

And then they get disciplined if they’re late. Imagine how high the anxiety was on the day they all started at the school and didn’t have a clue where they were going for any class! And imagine if they went around the entire school, only to mistakenly miss the door - they have to start the process again!

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WilvanderHeijden
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Since this is written by the parent, they could have confronted the school with their idiotic policy and demand a better way to handle the traffic in the school. Like instead of students changing classrooms, let teachers change the room. Not many courses need a special class room.

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#58

Halfway through the school year the school banned bookbags from classrooms. "school safety" thing. this caused students to show up late to class regularly, as many classes required us to bring school assigned textbooks every day, along with supplies, binders, etc. that year the school had record high tardiness, along with record low attendance, since students decided to just skip instead of showing up to class late.

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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

this is the third post about this. BAN GUNS amurikkka. It is much simpler than having kids living in fear of their lives. Sincerely, the rest of the planet, which is sane by comparison.

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#59

The dealership I was working at decided they wanted to save money by not having the cleaning crew come in after hours. People started leaving the dealership to go home to go to the bathroom because they were disgusting.

I lived pretty far away so I would just go use the GMs private bathroom.

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#60

In chemistry class we had plastic bottles of distilled water which could be squeezed to produce a small jet of water.

We used to spray one another’s crotches to make it look like you’d peed yourself. To counter this, our teacher introduced a punishment to anyone caught spraying OR HAVING BEEN SPRAYED. Hence, if you could spray someone and get away with it- they would have wet trousers AND have to write excerpts from a Martin Luther king speech.

Needless to say the punishment for being sprayed was quickly abolished.

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Ryan Deschanel
Ryan Deschanel
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

What do you call a teacher who punishes the victims? Another bully.

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#61

I worked as a carpet cleaner and we weren't allowed to clean anything with moisture already there. We had these moisture meters that were super sensitive (they would go off from the steam accumulated on the top of a pizza box or from touching your hand) so if we didn't want to do a job we'd test the living hell out of their carpet. Sometimes it'd go off and we could go fuck off and do something else. But I heard stories of guys doing fake readings by touching the probes with their fingers as they poke the carpets to set them off. I never did that, but I completely understand the desire to.

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ZAPanda
ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

why not clean something that is damp already? what does the problem represent?

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#62

in middle school my school system decided to switch over to a system with id cards (they were basically cheap lanyards with an id badge).



first of all, the whole point of the id cards were to get in and out of the school, "eliminate school shooters," and buy lunches. our school system didn't have enough money at the time to actually buy the scanners because they didn't realize how much just the ids themselves would cost. so we ended up all getting issued id badges that had no use and we were required to wear them.



after a while, this started to get old and kids would have "badge fights" at recess. getting slapped by an id card is more painful than you may think. the last straw was when just about everyone began hanging them in this one tree in the courtyard and eventually kids also began posting pictures of their ids on instagram and snapchat.... the principal loved that.

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ZAPanda
ZAPanda
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

omfg. You have ID cards to eliminate school shooters??? you know what else would eliminate them? BAN GUNS. Provide free mental healthcare. You know, like NORMAL fing counties. Jesus.

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#63

In my highschool if you were late for a class they would not let you in the door. They would send you to the "tardy center" to get a "tardy pass." You get so many of those and you were assigned detention or Saturday school.

But, while you were going to collect your pass was also the time in which they took attendance. Not being there, you would be marked absent. The attendance was recorded on scantron cards, placed on a clip outside the classroom, and was picked up early in the period by a member of student government who took it to the office for processing. They would then rectify the attendance records with those of the tardy center and, if you had checked in with the tardy center, your attendance was counted.

So, if you were late to class you might as well not bother going.

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#64

Assigned lunch tables

every one would not stop arguing

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Ryan Deschanel
Ryan Deschanel
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3 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Because misery is mandatory in school. Hanging out with friends? Unacceptable!

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