People of Reddit, What stupid rule at your work/school backfired beautifully?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Edit: for clarification, this happened in Eastern Europe
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.
Edit: since everyone is making guesses about which company I worked for, it was Anheuser-Busch.
But it seems this is a common trial period for many beverage distributors.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 beep 'office hours' in the middle.
When we asked them what we should do they said 'think about your teaching methods'.
Basically beep 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.
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."
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 **L**istening, eyes **L**ooking, lips **L**ocked".
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.
People who were caught wandering the halls or skipping classes were sent straight home.
My catholic school told us to leave space for angels while dancing at middle school dances.
The theology teacher then told us angels have no physical form.
Cue lots of kids gleefully defending their attempts at dirty dancing.
Assigned lunch tables
every one would not stop arguing
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