Article created by: Mantas Kačerauskas

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!

#1

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.

Image credits: Snakebiteloo

#2

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.”

Image credits: ConstableBlimeyChips

#3

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.

Image credits: qpgmr

#4

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.

Image credits: Spellflinger2019

#5

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.

Image credits: [deleted]

#6

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.

Image credits: alphager

#7

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”.

Image credits: kor_hookmaster

#8

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.

Image credits: smooth-opera

#9

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.

Image credits: FrosnPls

#10

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

Image credits: loljetfuel

#11

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.

Image credits: gollour

#12

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.

Image credits: [deleted]

#13

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.

Image credits: VloekenenVentileren

#14

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.

Image credits: [deleted]

#15

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.

Image credits: yunglilbigslimhomie

#16

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

Image credits: LEGEND7140

#17

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

Image credits: ghostFromTheBog

#18

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.

Image credits: AnthropomorphicMango

#19

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.

Image credits: hmfiddlesworth

#20

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.

You might also like: 38 Times Teens Got A Taste Of Their Own Medicine As Their Parents Hilariously Roasted Them On Twitter

Image credits: Patient_Z_