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45 Absurd Rules That Schools And Workplaces Tried To Implement But Tanked Miserably
Rules are as old as civilization itself. The Ten Commandments. The Geneva Convention. The first rule of Fight Club. Humanity has been writing rules, carving them into stone, printing them in employee handbooks, and laminating them to classroom walls since the beginning of recorded history. Some of them are the reasons we have functioning societies.
And some of them are so spectacularly misguided that the chaos they created became more famous than the problem they were trying to solve. Netizens recently asked people to share the rules at their school or workplace that backfired beyond all reasonable expectations, and the thread delivers. Some rules, it turns out, fail loudly, memorably, and with consequences that echo for years.
More info: Reddit
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#1
Boss said if we were 5 minutes late to not show up to work that day.
I woke up and checked the public transportation schedule and it was late, I would never make it on time, I skipped the work day and messaged him about the delays. He called me to say that I still have to go but I would not be paid, I said, see you tomorrow! The rule was dropped.
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#2
My work implemented what they called flexible time off. No more accumulating PTO, no more floating holidays. They allocated so many hours every day for people to take off and expected us to find a day that had free hours, and book whatever time off we needed. They said "in studies, most employees take 2-3 weeks off a year and it leaves extra time for those who need it".
By the first week of January a small group of employees had filled up every available slot. One person in particular took every Friday off for the rest of the year. Another individual booked out 4 months of vacation time. I got one single day off that year, to go to a doctor's appointment, and it was only because my manager overrode it for me. Most other people got no time off at all. The following year they made efforts to police it so people didn't a***e it, but it didn't work well because some managers just let their favorite team members a***e it anyway. After that, they just went to the old system of accumulating PTO that had worked just fine for the previous 15 years.
#3
Had a new boss that wanted us to write up daily logs of how we spent every 15 interval of each work day. We complained to HR. HR said as our supervisor he can require us to do that and it would be insubordination not to.
Cue malicious compliance.
We were very thorough documenting every 15 minutes to the point it ate into our workday. Routine things we did for the VP above him suddenly were becoming late as we were spending so much time on this. After a week or two the VP came to us asking why things were late and we said that unfortunately we have had less time since we were documenting each work day in 15 minute intervals and that HR already told us it would be insubordination if we didn't. Let's just say bossman got a yelling at and we never had to do this again.
Some of the most consequential rules in existence are ones most people have never even heard of. Take the humble piece of misdelivered mail. If you've ever lived in an apartment, you've almost certainly opened your mailbox to find something addressed to a previous tenant and thought nothing of tossing it in the bin. Completely reasonable. Extremely illegal.
Throwing away someone else's mail in the United States is a federal offense carrying a fine of up to $250,000 and a potential five-year prison sentence. For junk mail. For the catalogue from a furniture company addressed to someone who moved out in 2019.
The correct procedure is to either mark it "return to sender" and hand it back to your postal worker, or physically take it to the post office and alert them that the person no longer lives there. Yes, even the junk mail. Yes, all of it. The law does not have a "but it looked unimportant" clause. So, a huge percentage of the population is casually committing a federal offense while trying to find their takeaway menu.
#4
Zero tolerance fighting. Meaning if you were attacked, YOU also got suspended.
So a kid got attacked one day and did nothing, he knew the rules and knew what to do. He sat there and got his a*s beat.
He and his parent sued the school for failing to prevent the attack, and removing the abaility for the student to defend themselves at risk of being suspended and disciplinary action taken.
Parents and student won, dragged the principal and admin over the coals in court, the policy was quietly removed, and fights are now investigated and it’s no longer zero tolerance if you defend yourself from an attack that you could not have prevented.
#5
My primary school banned bringing in drinks one summer because some kids had a water fight with their water bottles; the only drinks we had access to were the water fountains, of which there were two. In a school of 1000 kids, ranging from age 4 to age 11. The big kids ended up hogging the fountains, a few of the little kids ended up dehydrated and in hospital, some people lost their jobs and the new rule became the dinner ladies would bring trolleys of water around every hour and you had to drink at least one cup even if you didn’t feel thirsty.
#6
I was a teacher and, the year before every student at the school was getting an iPad, all of the teachers were given iPads so we would be familiar enough with them to be helpful and have plans for how to use them. The instructions we were given were "treat this like it's your own personal device. Feel free to do your daily, non-work stuff on it, because the goal is that you become comfortable using the tech."
Yeah, the clarifying email came out preeeeeetty quickly.
Perhaps the most famous rule backfire comes from colonial India, and it has been studied by economists ever since as the definitive example of a well-intentioned rule creating a catastrophically worse outcome. The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, set a bounty for every lifeless cobra brought in. End a snake, collect a reward. Simple, incentivized, efficient.
What went wrong is that the residents of Delhi were, it turns out, extremely entrepreneurial. Rather than hunting wild cobras, people simply started breeding them. Cobra farms appeared across the city, snakes were raised specifically to be exchanged for the bounty, and the government was essentially funding a cobra-manufacturing industry while congratulating itself on the programme's impressive numbers.
When officials discovered what was happening and canceled the bounty, the breeders did the only logical thing: they released all the now-worthless snakes. Delhi ended up with way more cobras than it started with. The episode is now formally known as the Cobra Effect, which is the economic term for when a solution directly causes the problem it was designed to fix. It has its own Wikipedia page.
#7
No phones on our desk whilst working. Phones were to be placed on normal volume but face down. Phone calls could be answered.
Management didn't appreciate when one day I made my friend call me repeatedly and the bad boys ring tone would belt out.
The rule no longer exists.
#8
I once worked at a 24/7 factory where on time attendance was critical. It was shift work and the operator couldn't be relieved from their station until until the new operator showed up. To emphasize the importance they had an attendance points system. Enough points and you're fired.
Miss a day, it was 1 point. 15 minutes late, 1/4 point. 16 minutes up to half a day was 1/2 point. The result was that anyone who wasn't going to make it within the 15 minute window would just show halfway through the shift because 16 minutes late was punished the same as 4 hours late.
Michael Largey 53 minutes ago
Surely being 4 hours late hurt the paycheck more than 16 minutes late.
#9
Management posted everyone's name and phone number on a wall and asked everyone to leave a check next to your name to confirm it's your current/active number. So naturally this led to every female getting a d**k pick from the ID dishwasher.
But when it comes to absurd rules, big corporations are usually the main culprit. Amazon has faced significant and sustained criticism in recent years for workplace conditions so relentlessly productivity-focused that workers have reported urinating in bottles rather than lose the time it takes to walk to a bathroom. Diapers have also been reported. In a warehouse. By adults. In the twenty-first century.
The rules that create these are the result of algorithmic productivity tracking so granular that any time away from a task registers as a deficit. Workers have described being monitored to the minute, with bathroom breaks flagging in the system as lost output. The pressure to meet targets becomes so overwhelming that the alternative to a bottle is a warning, a demotion, or a lost shift.
Amazon has disputed some of these accounts, but the reports have come from enough sources, across enough facilities, over enough years, that the pattern is impossible to dismiss. The Amazon story is not funny. It's a grim reminder that the rules institutions write tell you everything about what (and who) they actually value.
#10
Public school system. Superintendent was super Christian and banned Halloween dressing up/parties on any school grounds because it was "satanic". Our school administration worked around that by claiming the day was "dress as your hero" day. Kids came dressed up as whatever they wanted as long as they could justify why that character was their hero. Superintendent was super pissed but we didnt break any rules.
#11
At my current job a couple years ago.
The Directory implemented a policy of no sitting down and took away all chaors. We work 12hr shifts on hard concrete.
At least half of us were Vets and the other half were old timers nearing retirement. We ignored the policy and started bringing in our own chairs. Mostly camping chairs.
When management confronted us about it and threaten to write us up, we pulled an uno reverse and threatened to file law suits for discrimination against disabled vets as most of us had it medically recorded we had knee issues. After a week they caved and gave us back our chairs. The director also got in trouble with HR over it as well as somewhere things involved with that incident, like actually firing someone for sitting down to do paperwork. Dude was rehired by the end of the week.
#12
“You people better still be at your desks at 5…”
As a science oriented production facility, sometimes people stayed very late to save time overall. Not any more. For this among other reasons, business value fell by 90%.
In the summer of 2017, during a heatwave that made wearing full-length trousers a genuinely miserable experience, a group of boys at Isca Academy in the UK made a very reasonable request. Could they please wear shorts? The school consulted its uniform policy, confirmed that shorts were not permitted for boys, and said no. But the boys weren’t having it.
They came to school in tartan skirts. Which were, per the uniform policy, allowed. The boys weren't breaking the rules; they were following them so precisely that the absurdity of the policy had nowhere to hide. Photos went viral, the story ran internationally, and the school was suddenly in a deeply uncomfortable position.
They were either punishing students for wearing an item the dress code explicitly permitted, or admitting the rule made no sense. The following year, shorts were allowed. Thirty teenagers in tartan skirts accomplished in one afternoon what a formal complaint probably couldn't have managed in a year.
#13
I work at an organization that Advocates for people with disabilities and by law has to employ 30% disabled employees. On Monday they are going to announce that staff are no longer allowed to wear athletic shoes. Theres a big chunk of us who do so because of chronic pain and its going to be an ugly staff meeting. .
#14
One way hallways. Missed your class room? Too bad, go down the hall and down the stairs then down the lower hall then back up the stairs to get to it.
What? Your next class is just next door but against the flow of the designated direction of the hallway?...
**TOO BAD** Go down the hall and the stairs and the other hall and up the stairs to get to it!
Edit: I forgot they also banned speaking Spanish cuz they thought we were casting spells. That one got repealed only when they hired a Spanish teacher the next year...
#15
Small town school started implementing a policy that if teachers wanted to use a sick day, they had to have a doctor's note even for things like a cold. The doctor's office in our town became so annoyed, they started writing doctors notes saying that people needed at least three days off to a whole week. For every little cold and sniffle, teachers were getting notes saying they couldn't return to school for several days until there just weren't enough subs to go around and the school did away with the policy.
The through line across all of it is that rules written without understanding the people they govern tend to produce the exact opposite of their intended result. The more rigid and disconnected a rule is from basic human logic, the more creative and determined people become about dismantling it.
The best rules, the ones that actually stick, are the ones that make enough sense that people follow them without needing to be forced. The worst ones become legendary through retellings in online threads, economics textbooks, and staff rooms for years after the person who implemented them has long since moved on. This just proves that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do with a bad rule is follow it.
Have you ever seen a bad rule completely implemented? Share the laughs in the comments!
#16
Went to a strict, tiny, uniformed charter school. One year, they decided that no jackets aside from school-branded/purchased hoodies were allowed. Okay, that’s annoying, but sure, here’s $40 for a school hoodie I can wear. The next Fall, though, they banned all hoodies and would only allow school-branded pullovers (that they wanted us all to purchase brand-new from them, of course, for $60 this time).
That didn’t fly with a lot of parents. We were in a poor rural area, where you wear what you have as long as you can, and most families had multiple kids. So they sent the kids to school in the hoodies they’d just bought a few months before, which turned into a LOT of dress code violations in every class, everyday. Kids who had never been in trouble before were getting punished constantly. Teachers were constantly telling kids they had to take their hoodies off. Many students started just hacking the hoods off of the hoodies (I used the scissors from my teacher’s desk one day when I got fed up) and wearing them as sweaters 285) jagged, raw edges around the collar, which violated ANOTHER part of the dress code about neatness of uniforms. Parents pitched a fit, teachers said it was too distracting, and admin quickly relented a few weeks after.
#17
My school banned hot cheetos so kids started hiding them in hoodie sleeves like contraband. saw a 5th grader do a handoff behind the portable buildings like it was a d**g deal. he had PRICES.
#18
My high school banned dyeing your hair “unnatural colors”. This has two results:
Firstly, pretty much everyone in our class reported our Latin teacher for breaking the rules “since Mr Aurelius predates the modern era, any hair color other than white is deeply unnatural”(he was very popular and the running joke was that Latin was his first language)((this was even funnier, to us at least, because he was the youngest teacher by at least a decade))
Secondly, the rule kicked off a crazy fad for tiger or zebra striped hair, since black, white, and auburn are all natural colors. Way more students dyed their hair, and much more vividly, than the small number who caused the rule change.
Michael Largey 39 minutes ago
The high school where I taught banned "extreme" hairstyles until someone pointed out that the football players all shaved their heads.
#20
Absolutely no concert T-shirts in school. This was at the height of Appetite for Destruction. The whole school started wearing black concert T-shirts daily in protest. Even some staff under their dress shirts would have older concert Ts on.
It was reversed in 2 weeks, and only certain Tshirts were banned, not all.
#21
My daughter's school this year made it a rule that kids could only have clear water bottles after a kid brought whiskey to school.
This was quickly abandoned after all the kids started joking about the vodka in their water bottles, which brand of vodka was best, etc. .
#22
Unlimited sick time, which most people never used, got dropped to 80 hours per person to stop people from misusing it. But now that you’ve quantified it we are using it. I’ve been taking 4 day sickations where I feel s****y all day in the office Thursday, then call in sick Friday and Monday. Great way to get a four day camping trip in without using up the PTO that I can roll over to next year.
#23
Toilets were banned briefly during class times, due to too many cleaning incidents. A few outdoor s***s and used menstrual products scattered around the school quickly changed that rule back.
#24
Wasn't my office, but a coworker told me this story about his job as a laborer on a railroad.
The company had 0-tolerance for d**g use. There was an anonymous tip line you could call to report someone using d***s, and if you were reported it was a mandatory three-paid days off work with a d**g test.
They were all country boys, and when hunting season came around, there was always a flurry of anonymous reports so you could go hunting and still get paid for work.
#25
My middle school principal implemented a new dress code rule -solely for girls!
Skirts and shorts had to be longer than your arms, and the hems were measured against the tips our fingers when our arms were straight down at our side. Of course every girl had different proportions. I had to buy all new long shorts because all my proportions were small, while one girl got away with way shorter because her torso was longer. If you were found to be violating the rule they would make you change into pairs of spare basketball shorts.
I complained how stupid and nonsensical this rule was at every opportunity till I graduated.
I also hated this principle because she legitimately traumatised me but this stupid rule broke my brain in a different way.
#26
Had an instructor in high-school who was clearly on the fringe of naturalist-style dietary ideas. This instructor was touting the healthiness of consuming bee pollen - a product that can be purchased fairly readily but not often at traditional grocery stores.
Well wouldn't you know it, someone with a terrible allergy to bees ate a bunch of the stuff at home and had a terrible allergic reaction. Something that the instructor had claimed was impossible.
#27
New program to eliminate "toil" work, manual drudgery that takes time away from actual productive work that moves us forward. For months now everyone has to enter tickets in Jira for everything they do and categorize what percentage of the work was "toil" or productive. It takes a lot of time filling in those tickets every day.
#28
My middle school banned returning borrowed silverware to the kitchen. This caused an issue where silverware went missing at an alarming rate.
#29
My high school came up with an attendance program where you got points for absences, so many points you were suspended for the marking period. But, you could come in, get your work and get a grade. My senior year I think i may have attended a total of 6 weeks! Made the honor roll last marking period too! Needless to say, that was the last and only year they tried that program.
#30
Idk if this is a rule or whatnot, but I’d like to share it.
When I was in my senior year high school, around 2010, our principal promised us that our senior year students wouldn’t be divided into 4 sections based on from the smartest to the dumbest, and all sections will have diversity based on our junior year grades.
He lied.
I was hoping that I would be placed on 2nd or 3rd section together with my friends, but he placed me with all the smartest students in the 1st section.
There was an uproar between all students as we were separated with our friends and other groups, but it kinda eased out months later as we slowly accepted it.
Our section, the 1st with all the smartest students, quietly pushed back by being the source of most, if not all, of the answers regarding homework, quizzes, and tests for a small fee. We made a decent business with it so where we could order delivery pizzas for lunch for our 1st section, and eventually with other students from other sections.
Our teachers were kinda in on it because they don’t like the principal for breaking the promise. And also we kinda bribed them with pizza party and also funded whatever they need for classes.
After we graduated, I heard from some of my former teachers that the principal was fired by the actual head of the school, our lovely Catholic priest.
Michael Largey 30 minutes ago
When my little sister was in grade school, the students were divided according to academic ability. They gave the groups animal names to disguise which group was which. Some genius decided to call the slowest group the Swimming Turtles.
#31
When the Ipod first came out my school specifically banned that, by name, no other mp3 player. I had a off brand mp3 player that I would listen to during passing time. Multiple teachers sent me to the office, I pitched a fit and pointed out the wording every time and got away with it. The next year it was changed to MP3 players with a For example added in. thankfully i had already graduated though.
ETA: Have a much more impactful one. "All decisions need to go through my self or CTO" 6 days later and after the server in question had rebooted for monthly updates and was lost for good, loosing 1.5b dollars in company IPO "why didnt you say something, or open it up" my boss and his boss both had to step in. A week of 16-20 hour days then get the blame pointed at me when i had been asking twice a day every day.
Then an hour or two after he finally did give the ok, i had to wait for our network engineer to assist so i didnt break anything. "Why cant you do it yourself" "See Job title -> Lead Infrastructure Engineer =/= Network engineer, i havent touched a firewall in almost 10 years, do you really want me trying to recreate a tunnel you deleted or do you want me to wait for the guy whose job it is to do that, Or you could have one of your guys help" They didnt, i had to wait another couple of hours before it was opened up, to discover EVERY SERVER IS GONE. but would have been recoverable if the ok was given when first asked. Unfortunately Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum are both still with that company.
#32
Our high school principal got her position on a zero tolerance policy for bullying. She had all the walls painted with “anti bullying” paint, which was literally just some kind of lacquer mixed with sand or ground up glass. It was worse than sandpaper. Even a slight bump into the walls guaranteed a terrible scraping gash. Her idea was that people would avoid fights because of the hostile architecture, when actually it just meant that bullies had to expend far less energy to just ruin someone’s life by pushing them into a wall.
#33
We couldn't play Red Rover since kids were injured in grade school. Kids everywhere rebelled. Or at least my class did. And by rebel, I meant we loudly voiced our disappointment until threats of calling parents were made.
#34
Our school in the 70s decided to use plastic pouches filled with milk instead of small cartons at lunch. Straws with a pointed end, like juice boxes use (which i don't think even existed at the time).
Cue all of us throwing them halfway across the lunch room, or squeezing them out through the straw WITHOUT drinking, or waiting until the milk turned sour to puncture them. Next semester: cartons came back!
#35
For my school, they banned hats thinking it’d prevent distractions, but everyone just wore hoods instead. like, good job on that one, principal.
#36
I worked at an organization that had a food service training program, along with other training programs. The CEO tried saying people couldn't leave the campus for lunch, thereby creating a captive audience for the food prepared by the food service training program. There was no other reason for forcing people to eat their lunch on campus.
People started talking about things like 'illegal imprisonment' and the idea quickly went away.
#37
My high school introduced a “fizzy juice ban” citing health reasons. Which sounds fine on paper, except they focused unduly on the carbonation as opposed to the sugar content. So sparkling water was forbidden, but sugary sports drinks and milkshakes etc were fine. We had 3 years of that before a new headteacher took over, saw how ludicrous it was, and immediately repealed it.
ETA: I forgot that the same headteacher who introduced this also brought in a “zero-tolerance lateness policy”, which meant you were punished equally whether you were late by 30 seconds or 4 hours. Lateness *did* decrease slightly, but attendance plummeted because people realised there was no point in breaking their back trying to get in when they could just have a day off and be no worse off for it. She really was an idiot come to think of it.
#38
Detailed time reporting at a company. I went from helping out past my normal hours to simply yanking the network cable out of my laptop at 4:59:59.
#39
My office had a horrific 6 weeks where the entire certification and testing engineering department was unable to function due to everyone on that side of the office having COVID. Like zero testing was able to be done due to how physically demanding it was down in the stress lab moving thousands of lbs of test weights onto the fixtures so no reports went out. All because management said “no working from home while you’re sick, you must take PTO” because it “helps you focus on recovery”.
#40
Wasting most of my day filling out TPS reports for my 8 different bosses to let them know what I'm spending my time doing.
#41
At my workplace, they used to allow anyone to take what was called VGH, which stands for Volunteer Go Home. Basically when they have too many hours, people are allowed to leave work early, but they don’t get paid for the hours they miss.
Surprisingly too many people decided to take it. Nowadays therefore it’s only made available for people who manage to get a transfer to our sales team in my virtual call centre role and/or a successful sale.
#42
My high school tried to redo the school dress code but made it so strict that the majority of students walked out in protest and parents bombarded the Education board and school with calls about they'd rather deal with school uniforms than the dress code.
Lasted 2 days from announcement to school and board backing down.
#43
Work. If you are 3 minutes late to work or back from lunch break:
1/2 times - verbal warning
3/4 times - written warning
5/+ times - sent home , no pay (not even PTO/vacation.
Not a punishment for those that can sacrifice a few hours pay or if you need a day off and don’t have any PTO available.
Michael Largey 24 minutes ago (edited)
In fact, it actually encouraged employees to be late four times so they could qualify for the sent-home provision.
#44
This happened almost 30 years go at my work. I worked in a hospital in the kitchen delivering patient trays.
Upper management had the bright idea to combine departments to “optimize” patient satisfaction. They wanted the food and nutrition department and the housekeeping department to be crossed trained to do each other’s work.
In their mind, if one department was short staffed, the other could pitch in to help. Or if on the floor, when we passed a patient’s room, we could do whatever task was asked of us.
I was 19 at the time, stupidly naive, and vocal about the plan: “that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! No patient is going to want to watch the person who just cleaned their toilet to turn around and serve them their dinner tray!” I wasn’t the only one to disagree, I think I was just the most blunt.
Management argued back that we just couldn’t see the vision of the plan. No one, in either department, jumped to implementing their plan. They had resistance from all sectors.
After about a month, management silently shifted to a new plan (that I don’t remember).
Michael Largey 18 minutes ago (edited)
At our local grocery, every floor employee is trained to to the job of every other floor employee. If the lines are too long, the stockers can open up cash registers to help out. It works well, but, yes, this could be disastrous in other workplaces.
#45
I was no longer a student at this time, but my old school system decided to get serious about school shootings back in like 2022 or 2023.
They put out a survey to parents, faculty, and students about whether they’d support mandatory clear book bags for all grade levels. The result was a resounding “no”. Trouble was, they already spent over $1M on clear backpacks, so they announced that they were gonna pilot the program anyway. Well, these must’ve been the cheapest clear backpacks $1M can buy, cause they couldn’t hold *anything* without disintegrating. Kids were churning through backpacks every couple weeks!
Needless to say, parents were pissed, faculty were pissed, students were pissed, the superintendent had to step down, and the program was not renewed the following year.
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