rSlash - r/Askreddit What Stupid Rule At Your School/Work Backfired Beautifully?

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

r/Askreddit in today's Askreddit thread, we check out times when terrible rules at a person's school or work has backfired terribly! For example, one student threw his bully out of a school window because of his school's zero tolerance policy on violence. His perspective was, "If I'm going to get punished for defending myself, I may as well make it worth my while!" We also have stories of employees showing their bosses just how incredibly stupid the new company policies are. If you like this content, hit the subscribe button for more daily Reddit videos! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After review, the call on the ice is a whole new season of NHL action with Skip. Every order earns you a shot at winning one of over 200,000 prizes, including NHL Shop.ca and Skip Gift Cards, Skip Game Time Tires, and the Grand Prize, a trip for two to the 2024 Rogers NHL All-Star Game in Toronto. Order, shoot, win, with skip, no purchase necessary, and at your work or school backfired beautifully. Our first reply is from Constable Blimey Chips. Our school zero tolerance policy ended shortly after a bully got thrown through a window. Because, according to the guy who did it, if I'm going to get suspended for defending myself, I'm going to make it worth my while. So obviously school violence is bad, but is it still okay to give props to the guy who threw

his bully through a school window? I guess that's one way to stop getting bullied. Beneath that, we have a similar story from Jacks on Space. There was this one time back in middle school where I was being really mean to another kid. In fourth grade, this other kid already stood taller than most of the teachers. This kid was a giant! Meanwhile I was probably under 5 feet tall. Let me tell you, that 12 year old kid touched me into a crowd of second graders and I

f'ing flew. I absolutely deserved it and I'm glad he knocked some sense into me. And then another similar story from Kripspib. A coworker of mine said a previous job counted the number of later rivals you had, not how late you were. He went to clock in one day as the clock ticked to 801 and said, if I'm going to get an incident, I'm going to get an incident and left without clocking in and went fishing for three days. Our next reply is from Varvato's Vex. Back in 2014, our human resources made a rule that people couldn't go into other buildings.

We had three buildings within a block of each other. All three had shipping areas, and the warehouse employees had to go to each building to work. We were told to stay in one building. I mentioned that we may deliver these to all three buildings, so who's gonna do the work? Some genius said, oh, it'll be taken care of. The next day, $500,000 worth of shipments didn't go out. The following day we have a meeting. Why didn't you ship this? Uh, two days ago we were told to stay in our building and

someone would take care of it. That rule was quickly changed. Our next reply is from Quipkimmer. They required every employee to use electronic time clocks to punch in and 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 by cutting the cords or something, but wiser heads prevailed. Everyone arrived several minutes early and left late. Every single day to avoid getting into trouble. their heads prevailed. Everyone arrived 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 of overtime in the first month.

Beneath that, we have a similar story from Alien Sheep. I worked in a call center and we had a similar clock system, except we were allowed to arrive five minutes early thinking on the phone at our schedule time. One girl figured out that they would pay for those five minutes. She started clocking in earlier and earlier until she was arriving an hour early and sat around for an hour every day. Five extra hours of overtime every week for close to a year more until she quit with none of the management catching wind.

Then we have a similar story from Softer. One of the first jobs I had as a trainee in a big corporations office, my supervisor noticed I came in a few minutes late once and he told me off for it. I did arrive at 903 or whatever, but a few minutes later my computer was booted up and I started working. That same day, close to 930, I saw several co-workers coming out of the kitchen with coffee still in their hands and chatting, getting to their desk and just booting up their computers.

The boss didn't say a word. So I took up joining my co-workers for a 30 minute coffee break every single morning for the 2-3 months that I continued to work there. Man, I don't understand why bosses have to be so toxic about this. If you show up one minute late, they lose their freaking minds. But if you stay 30 minutes late, they don't even bat an eye. Unless, of course, you tried to get paid for that time. Our next reply is from a narin ori.

Every shift there's a quote we have to fulfill. And then, even if you do fulfill it, you have to keep working until your 8 hours are up. Cue everyone crunching for 4 hours, having a 3 hour lunch or coffee break, then slowly moving their butts for an hour. There was no rule about us taking necessary breaks if we're still capable of reaching that quota. Now, we're allowed to stop once we're done. So, the job that I had before I became a YouTuber was the proposal writer. Basically, I worked for a company

that did business with other companies and whenever one of these other companies was thinking about working with my company, it was my job to like write up a proposal about whatever services we offer and then send that to the client or the potential client so they would want to hire our services. As a result, the work I did was basically project based. Sometimes we had a lot of projects.

Sometimes we had no projects. So there would be like a week where you would just have nothing assigned to you because no clients expressed interest recently. But still, you were expected to be sitting at your desk, and I guess just look busy even though everyone knew that you had no work to do. And if you got up from your desk to talk to people who also didn't have a project, you'd get chewed out for it. Sometimes it seems like bosses care more about you looking like you're busy than you actually being busy. Our next replies from Core Hook Master.

When COVID started, our boss demanded that our entire team sit in our group Zoom calls, even if the topics in the agenda had nothing to do with their roles. She felt it would build team unity. Productivity dropped, negative Google reviews came in, and staff became more stressed. When the boss demanded answers on the next Zoom call, one of my co-workers bluntly said, well, I would reply to this one customer's complaint, but I'm stuck on this Zoom call. Man, I will never understand why bosses are so obsessed with meetings. You have to pay for that time, and when someone's in a meeting, they're not doing work,

so logically, wouldn't you want to have as few meetings as possible? Actually, that was something I used to do when I got bored during group meetings at my last job. I would multiply my hourly salary by the number of people in the meeting to estimate how much money this company was wasting on this pointless meeting. And beneath that, we have a similar story from Jisego.

After a round of needlessly offset my old company, one of the sea level people had us on a call and asked us why things weren't getting done. One of my co-workers said, um, I think the person who would have done that particular job no longer works here. Our next reply is from young little big slim homie. I worked at a Starbucks for like five years before and during undergrad and at one point or district manager thought it was a good idea to implement a just say yes policy where we literally weren't allowed to tell a customer no. It lasted about three months and during those three months our product waste went up over 300 percent because when

the register didn't have a way to punch in a customer request we had to just do it anyways. We also got complaints from stores and surrounding districts because they had angry customers who were requesting things that were against local food service code. And the customers told them, but the other stories do it that way. 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 funny thing about that policy is that you know that it was made by someone who's never worked a brisa job in their lives.

Yet, somehow they managed to get a high level executive position at Starbucks. Looking for bright, even glowing skin? Then harness the brightening power of vitamin C and get your glow on with Garnier vitamin C brightening serum. A highly concentrated serum formulated with German gradients such as vitamin C, niacinamide and salicylic acid. Visibly smooth skin texture, even out the look of skin tone and boost glow. All in just two weeks with Garnier vitamin C brightening serum like Garnier naturally.

Shot now on Amazon.ca Why do I love getting my last minute gifts at Shopper's Drug Mart? Well, lots of stores, many open late, great selection of gifts, and let's not forget the PC Optimum Points. I get gifts for them and points for me. And so can you. Go to Shoppers, Exclusions Apply. Our next reply is from Frozen Please.

The bottom floor of my secondary school was a big square that had a hallway all the way around it. 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 at the bottom floor. Our next reply from

SkirvyNave. Of all the employees, I'm the one who lives closest to work, so if the building alarm goes off at night, I'm the first one on the list to get a 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, then we could tell them not to summon the police and just ignore the alarm. I can access the building cameras from home. The most common alarm was the cleaning crew setting off the alarm. Then, a sister-side ignored an alarm that turned out to be an actual break-in. And the facility 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, give the police to give the all clear, then reset the alarm. This was a pain in the butt, but rare enough because I lived literally two minutes away. Then we hired 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 our old process. Each time he said, no, we can'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 companies 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 I 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 a can of 4 Doriska break in, and then beneath that, Bliat 56 says what I was thinking.

Every manager seems to love, just call someone in as their solution to every problem until they're the person who actually has to wake their butt up in the middle of the night and go in. Our next reply is from Wayward Rider. 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 did not go well for them. Beneath that, we have a similar story from Sarrange of Bulgaria's plume.

My principal banned pink silicone bracelets. They were being sold in town to raise money for breast cancer. Six months later, the principal had to have chemo to treat her breast cancer. It's not really funny, but it is kind of ironic. Our next reply is from Low Jet Fuel. My spouses 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 fireable 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 unrelated and they decided to send their whole management team a graphic sexual image, then reported using the anonymous tip line. IT got the report, concluded that they did, indeed, receive sexual content and did is required. They suspended the email accounts of everyone involved, including the senior VPs. The policy has since been re-worded. What a stupid policy!

This is like coming up to some guy who's got his head chopped off and be like, hold it right there! You're under arrest for murder! Our next replies from Flight 19 Navigator. A place I used to work had a rule that executive-level staff had to be contactable when on leave. So they had a section on the leave form for the address of where you'd be staying in the contact number. Some knuckle-shoffler in HR decided that this rule should apply to all staff, and then

shenanigans began. People would put down the address and phone number of sex shops, sports grounds, medical clinics, etc. I gave the latitude and longitude to the place I was going camping, and the UHF channel my radio would be tuned to. Then we have a similar story from Blue Mooner. My company used to be a small startup. In my first year, I was a project manager and architect for a global systems role-out. I put in my vacation days for Burning Man 6 months ahead of time, and my time off was approved. Then a few months later, my boss got a new boss. With a month to go until Burning Man, the new boss told me that my project rollout was too important for me to be uncontactable at

all, and that I would have to take a satellite phone to Burning Man or my vacation would be cancelled. We were still three months from go live, but he decided that we were at a critical moment and I had to be available. However, neither of my bosses wanted to carry out the daily $18 a minute satellite phone calls with me. Probably because I knew it was violating some labor law. So instead, they get one of the guys in the London office to call me in the Black Rock Desert each day. I warned them that I would not take calls before 1 p.m., which

was 9 p.m. for our man in London. Every day that he called, he'd had a few beers and didn't give a flying f-about project updates. He just wanted to know what parties had been to and what art I'd seen. And then we have a similar story for Monocats. I once had a manager tell us that we couldn't hang out with each other outside of work unless we invited what art I'd seen. And then we have a similar story from Monocat. I once had a manager tell us that we couldn't hang out with each other outside of work unless we invited everyone. Uh, no. And to clarify, her name was not Michael Scott. And then, beneath that, we have this contribution from Tastes like Fail. I once got chewed out by the manager because I invited one coworker to go get ice cream and didn't invite another co-worker. The uninvited co-worker complained that I didn't

ask her to get ice cream. What the f? You know, this reminds me of one of the greatest injustices that I faced as a kid. I remember that when I was really, really young, I had some sort of daycare and I must have been like 8 years old or something. Anyways, the people in the daycare had a policy that if you brought in candy, you had to bring in enough to share with everyone or else you could need it. Well, one time I don't remember why I had a bag of candy and I wanted to share it with a few of my friends, so of course, I had to go through the annoying process of giving every single kid there one piece of candy.

Which yeah, I guess is fair, but the thing that pissed me off is that the teachers came and took candy too. It's like, come on people, you're adults. How low do you have to be to take candy from kids? Then they would bring in food like candy bars and just eat it by themselves in front of us. And me being a smart, me eight-year-old kid called one of them out on it one day and I was like, hey Mrs. A, the policies that you're not allowed to eat candy unless you give

some to everyone. So how come you're not to eat that Snickers bar but we can't? So what do you think happened to Little R Slash? If you guess time out then you'd guess correctly. Even though I was eight years old, I was still old enough to know that they were complete and utter hypocrites. Our next reply was from Spellflinger. This was late 80s high school. The rule was no shorts. A girl classmate came in for an exam with basketball shorts on that were below her knees.

The teacher made her go home to change. She came back in a micro mini script and wrote her exam. And then beneath that a similar story from Puff Dottie. My high school principal was known for sending girls home to change if their braw straps were showing. In my sophomore year, he tried to send one of my classmates home, but she was like, nah, I've got to change a clothes. No need to send me home. So she went to the bathroom, took her braw, and made a show of putting her bra in her locker. The principal was pissed, but he couldn't do anything about it since the student was technically

following the dress code. It became a thing. Like, hundreds of high school girls removed their bra at school or just showed up brawls is a big F you to the principal. Our next reply is from Vloken and Viltiren. You couldn't buy drinks at lunch with cash money, you had to buy some voucher. They were just cheaply made laminated pieces of paper. This was in 2001, and I was 13 and bored. I scanned the vouchers and printed them out on paper that kind of matched the color of the vouchers and laminated them myself. They were horribly made, not even the right color, and crudely cut out.

I tried paying with them for myself and encountered no problems, so I made about a hundred of them and passed them out. I made some new friends and up to production. It took them about three weeks to find out, but by then, the fake ones had intermingled with the real ones, and had already been resold to students by the student office. About half of all vouchers sold were fakes. Drinks were cash only from then on. They had no choice but to accept the fake ones for a little while longer though, because they had already sold and charged for some of them.

Our next replacement was an anthropomorphic mango. 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, package during distribution increased drastically, causing them to eat a lot more damage product. It caused such a large loss in profit that they quickly changed course. Our next reply is from Latuvias. Some of the students used to smoke in the bathrooms.

So the headmaster decided to lock all the men's toilets except for one. Now my school had about 300 male students. Everyone realized that it became impossible to get to a toilet quickly. The result? Some of the guys went in one of the bathrooms and pissed and defecated in the trash cans. It was a lot. No one found out who they were, but all the other toilets opened up immediately.

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