Some rules exist for some very good reasons.
Here, people reveal a rule that DEFINITELY exists because of them.
1. No impresonators, please.
At my work, we have a WRITTEN rule that we cannot do any voice impressions over the drive thru headsets. Specifically, Skeletor, and Spongebob Squarepants.
NerdDeity
2. No fireworks.
The town I live in has a free bus that runs late at night through all the college neighbourhoods and by all the dorms to discourage all the drunk college kids from driving home from downtown. One day me and my wasted buddy were riding home when he discovered he had a bunch of bottle rockets in his coat pocket from a night earlier in the week. So logically we handed them out to everyone on the bus with the provision that they not set them off on the bus. This turned into a string of fireworks going off all over town right behind the bus for the whole ride. There are now big signs on all the busses that say “no fireworks”.
mowsquerade
3. That’s not a good place for a pencil.
I put a pencil in the microwave. Bang. No more elementary school microwaves.
Saysanddoesstuff
4. Theme park prankster.
Back in the day I used to work at a theme park. So one morning I was goofing off with my friend (all of us were teenagers at the time) and just generally horsing around while doing our morning checks and tests. We worked on a rollercoaster in middle of the park that was tall enough to be above the tree line (actually, quite a bit above). Part of our morning operations was to test out the mics to talk to various portions of the ride if necessary, which included to lift hill (story continued on the next page…).
Continue onto the next page for more!
So on this particular morning, instead of just calmly saying “test” into the mic, I screamed “GOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING VIETNAM!!!!”
As it turns out, the speakers can be quite loud. Couple that with the large amount of pavement in the park, the fact that the lift went above the treeline, and that there wasn’t a whole lot of ambient noise at that early morning hour, the sound apparently carried EXTREMELY well. I rather immediately got an angry phone call from my supervisor telling me to never do that again. I then got a second phone call from the manager 2 levels up from my boss telling me to never do that again.
Well, as the day went on, apparently this was SO loud, people in neighboring communities could hear it and called the park to complain. By the end of my shift, I had to have a sitdown with three levels of management to discuss the incident.
The next day we got an addendum to our SOP that told us we were only allowed to say the word “testing” into the mic and that it had to be a moderate decibel. Part of me feels a bit bad about it, but part of me also still thinks it’s at least a little funny to this day.
arksien
5. Beer please.
“No more than 30 cases of beer per vehicle.”
Instituted after I showed up at the beer distributors to buy their overstock beer with a step van and bought ALL their overstock beer.
erath_droid
6. Everyone survived.
It’s an old one at my public school but no snow forts. Some of us went a little too far and a snow tunnel collapsed on someone. We thought it funny after we realized we didn’t kill him but the teachers did not.
HighSchoolThrowAw4y
7. Dress code.
Not sure this count but when I worked at Sears the dress code required men wear a tie.
I wore same bollet tie everyday.
Six months later sears made new dress code “rule” and gave memo to 100 employees.
Bollet ties only allwed with coordinating western outfit.
Next day I wore my boots and and spurs with my bollet tie.
blackycircly
8. Light, camera, action!
I worked at a big chain store in college. We used to get these displays in for speakers and home theater systems and usually they had a sales pitch and demo loaded on a flash drive that would play when you pressed a button on the display (story continued on the next page…).
Continue onto the next page for more!
On a particularly slow Sunday morning, i took 3 or 4 of these flash drives and plugged them into a laptop. Replaced all the audio files with “Gangnam Style” and set the function to auto run at 3 a.m. Before we closed shop, I cranked all the displays up to max volume and inserted the flash drives. It took the night crew three nights to finally figure out how to stop the entire Electronics section from playing that song at 3 am.
So after that, management retained all flash drives that came in and had customers plug in their phone to test out systems.
Half_Past_Five
9. Single and ready to mingle.
One time I got airdrop banned from my school because I renamed my phone to “hot single goats in your area” and airdropped photoshopped pictures of goats in bikinis so much that people couldn’t use their school devices. Nobody knows it was me and I won’t tell anyone at my school.
Thedude22ewd
10. The floor is lava.
There’s a cruise ship somewhere with a handwritten sign that says “the floor is lava is strictly prohibited on the carousel” thanks to me.
hummingbirdie5
11. This is important.
If you walk into any county election office in California you’ll see a secondary monitor showing what the central tabulator (main vote counter) is doing at all times, right behind the viewing area window.
I spent a day in the San Diego County Jail to make sure that happened, back in 2005.
All charges dropped a week later, and the viewing of the central tabulators was ordered the next year by the California Secretary of State’s office.
JimMarch
12. No playing around on school grounds.
My twin brother and I went to the same community college before university (story continued on the next page…).
Continue onto the next page for more!
I saw him sitting on a bench in the courtyard one day and threw a snowball at him. This started a chain reaction of a 50+ person snowball fight. It was pretty crazy.
Well… a undercover police officer was in the court yard walking by and decided he should detain me then threaten to get me kicked out of school.
The Sean asked that it not happen again… but wasn’t nearly so eager to expel a student for throwing snow at his brother.
No snowball fights on campus allowed anymore.
PeterMus
13. Very accident prone.
“No tossing/throwing receipt paper. It must be passed hand to hand.”
I worked at Lowe’s, in outside lawn and garden during the summer. We were at on black Friday busy. My register runs out of tape, and my supervisor tosses me a new roll.
I fail to catch, it hits my in the face. I don’t feel hurt, try to continue working, get escorted to the bathroom by manager. My upper lip is almost detached from my face, there is blood everywhere. I am sent to the E.R. and have to have it stitched back up.
I was honestly more worried the supervisor was going to get in trouble than I was about the injury. I’m extremely accident prone.
ZombieIced
14. No more plastic wrap please.
When I was in high school, I would go to Band camp every year about two weeks before school started.
My junior year I brought a lot of food. It was a combination of disliking that camp’s cafeteria and being on the high school version of a health craze. Along with the food I brought saran wrap. I don’t remember the exact logic. I wanted to wrap something edible though.
Well, every morning we were supposed to clean the cabin between revile and breakfast. One kid a year behind me (we’ll call him Jonny) didn’t want to clean and went back to bed instead.
Jonny woke up a few minutes later completely immobilized by his saran wrap cocoon. Thus was born the contraband list. The list is about a page now and my family is responsible for about half of it.
Now every year, parents of freshmen raise their eyebrows at the words (plastic or saran wrap) near the top of the list.
boxrthehorse
15. Have to be first in line.
In my elementary school, there was a rule that you could no longer wear heelys to school. I would heely down to lunch and be first in line, always, and some jerk told the teacher I ran into her while heely-ing. Jerk.
phobee144
16. This one has quite the twist.
No one is allowed to take the rental kayaks more than 100 feet from shore. No, I didn’t steal the kayak. I did something much, much worse.
I was hanging around a beach near South Padre with my Grandpa and I decided to do an hourly kayak rental. There was a cool little island like 200 yards from shore that I thought would be cool to paddle out to. The rental shop warned me not to paddle out perpendicular to the shore because I would wear myself out and get stranded. I bet you think you know where this story is going… you don’t (story continued on the next page…).
Continue onto the next page for more!
So I’m paddling out perpendicular to the shore like the mad lad that I am. I’m getting kinda close to the island when I stop to check out this orange concrete stationary buoy-looking thing because I could see 2 of them from shore and was wondering what they were…that’s when I heard it…
So the thing about Texas is…it’s really really flat. Even the beaches are super flat, so that means that even 200 feet away from shore, the water is still really shallow. I’d been looking out at this huuuuuuuge, 80-yard long cargo barge for the last few days that had been just parked out in the water and I was wondering how the hell that thing was floating on only 8 feet or so of water and not scraping on the shore.
So now back to me and the buoy. I’m looking at this thing, it’s all covered in barnacles. I still don’t know what it is or what it’s for. I’m inspecting it like an idiot when I hear that noise. That noise that I still hear in my sleep. The barge had started up and it was coming for me fast. That thing is cutting through the water at like 20-25 mph. I’m freaking the crap out. That thing has been sitting there for days, possibly weeks, and it starts up the minute, nay, the second that I cross out into no man’s land???
So what do you do when you’re in a kayak in open water and giant concrete death leviathan is coming at you? My thinking was that if I just hold onto this buoy thing, the barge isn’t going to run over it so I’ll just hold onto the buoy. I paddle to it, grab on, and watch as that thing points exactly in my direction. I start to lose my nerve as that thing is getting closer and closer, still looking like it’s aimed directly at me. Just imagine a sideways, floating skyscraper coming right at you or like that horrible feeling you get in your gut when you stand in front of a jumbo jet x 1000.
I lose it. I can’t hold onto this buoy anymore. But there is another buoy about 30-40 yards away. I gotta make a break for it. I start paddling like crazy towards this other buoy. Surely the driver of that thing has to notice all this splashing and flailing around in a neon orange kayak, right? Well in all of this flailing around, there’s this moment where I look down…remember how I said the water was really shallow? Well I look down and it looks like it goes down forever. I start feeling helpless. There’s a giant void under me, death hurdling towards me, and the safety I’m trying to get to is a little stationary buoy.
I make it to the other buoy. It’s also covered in barnacles. I look out towards the barge, almost on top of me now…WTF??!! It turned! It’s still aimed almost right at me! Now that it’s closer, I think it might barely miss me. But that thing could still suck me right under and I’d be toast for sure. I grab onto the buoy covered in sharp barnacles, while I’m still in my kayak. My hands are bleeding from gripping it so hard as that wave of displaced water hits. I keep my grip. Blood is seriously dripping down. I look up at the barge from below as it passes about 12 feet away.
So I manage to hold my grip as it passes but it doesn’t go much further. About 100 feet later it stops really suddenly. Like unnaturally sudden. It had run ashore.
You know those buoy things? They were markers. Markers for the outer edges of the dug-out canal that allows barges to come in and out of those shallow waters. That’s why the barge was aimed at them. I’m guessing that the driver saw me in the water, tried to make some kind of adjustment that he was unable to recover from, and thus he went a bit to close to the outer edge of the canal.
I don’t know how many thousands of dollars that cost. I was terrified that someone would come knocking on our door because, being the only person to rent a kayak, it would have been pretty easy for them to find out who caused the accident. But really…why wasn’t that trench marked with some kind of sign or maybe the barge could let people know when they’re going to be running their death machines through a recreational beach.
So I came out of that with some bloody hands, and a few lifetime supplies of nightmare fuel and the barge received God knows what kind of damage (it was stranded for the rest of the time I stayed at the beach, which was about 3 days).
So that’s why they don’t allow people to kayak away from the shore. Also that little island I was paddling to kinda sucked.
VelourFogg
17. Time for evaluations.
When I was in college, I had this one professor who was all but universally loathed. Tended to be very condescending to students, was unhelpful, went on convoluted tangents that didn’t explain the material, and just generally had no capacity for teaching. Story went that one time, he’d been assigned to teach an intro-level course – not only did most of the students drop it, a third of them dropped out of college altogether.
Anyway, it came time for evaluations, and I wrote a lengthy and rather scathing screed for pages upon pages – I don’t remember most of what I said, but I do recall writing to the effect that “a typical birdbath would have made for a more effective instructor.”
Next semester, the evaluation forms all suddenly contained a new line specifying that our critiques had to be civil.
CrazyCleric
18. Don’t forget to bring a calculator for your test!
I started the trend of putting notes in my calculator (ti-89) for exams. This was before cell phones became popular. In my last semester, I told some of my peers and they all started doing it.
Someone snitched, the whole department got pissed. They put a rule in to now have the students have to do the written portion first, then get their calculator to do the other part.
TrueMoeG
19. Never knew musicals could be so dangerous.
In high school, I was on the lighting crew for the spring musical and was the lead spotlight. The spotlights for the show where on scaffolds relativity high above the gym floor. Before the matinee, the wooden bleachers for the gym had been pulled out and the scaffold was in between them. I was on top of the scaffold doing my preshow check on the spotlight when the preshow meeting was called for cast and crew. As I climbed down the scaffold, I lost my grip and fell fifteen feet onto the wooden bleachers. I luckily landed in between two sets of bleacher seats and not on any of the hard edges of the bleachers. I got knocked out cold, got sent to the hospital and subsequently was diagnosed with a bruised left femur.
Because of the accident, now no student is allowed on scaffolds (if they are needed) without adult supervision (i.e. teacher, parent, etc.) and spotlights for all shows from then on were placed on the floor.
-Pagemaster
20. Taking Yu-Gi-Oh very seriously.
Whenever we had an indoor recess it was “the thing”, as the kids a saw nowadays, to play Yu-Gi-Oh. There was this one kid in my class who had this massive deck of 200+ cards that was all strapped together with rubber bands (story continued on the next page…).
Continue onto the next page for more!
He always bragged that he had all of these rare and powerful cards, despite this he never won a duel. His deck was so massive there was no real flow or strategy to it. One day he got so tired of losing that he sneaked away during lunch, went back to the classroom, searched through everyone’s things, and bit all the cards he found in half. The only reason we found out it was him is because he swallowed a bunch of cards, and when he went to the nurse and starting puking them up it became pretty obvious what happened.
And that’s how Yu-Gi-Oh cards were banned from school when I was in the 3rd grade.
S0aring
21. Play safe.
I had a possible concussion at the regional championships and kept playing. Turned out it was a major concussion. The league now has a much more cautious concussion protocol.
Chamale
22. Fast & Furious.
No drag racing on airport runways…. wasn’t formally written before.
SirNooblit
23. May the Force be with you.
Well…I got lightsabers banned from the local movie theater after watching the Force Awakens.
I’ll be watching Rogue One at a different movie theater now.
Athragio
24. School is expensive. Gotta find a way to save some money.
Some community colleges in California has a system joint with the UC’s and Cal-state system where if you take 14+ credits in CC, you can take a 3-4 credit class at UC/Cal State for CC prices. It’s only certain classes and an extension program of the sort.
Anyways, I enrolled in 28 units at CC(telling my counselor that I would be dropping two of those classes) which enabled me to sign up for 6 units of courses at the local UC(two classes pretty much).
So I enrolled in 28 units of CC courses + two courses at the UC.
I then presumed to drop all 28 units of CC courses 2 weeks in the semester(the last deadline). The extension program didn’t have any check on whether you dropped the CC courses, which should by extension drop your UC courses. So essentially I took 2 UC courses at CC college costs for a semester.
However, the counselors caught onto this after the semester and had a long talk with me about how I exploited a loophole in the system and that it broke a lot of UC and academic integrity rules.
After that, they made sure that if you dropped the CC courses, you were automatically dropped from the UC courses.
badoosh123