Rules are rules and we need them in place to keep work environments safe and running smoothly. But some rules seem oddly specific, mundane, or flat out useless. How did these come about?
Below, people share the most pointless rule they had to follow at their job, as told on AskReddit. Check them out!
(Content has been edited for clarity)
Bathroom Battles
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“I used to work in a coroner’s office. The main bathroom smelled like the autopsy room drain. I found a private, one stall bathroom around the corner (still in the building). My boss was at my desk one day, asking where I was and acting like he had caught me shooting up illegal substances. I explained and he insisted I was only allowed to use the coroner’s office bathroom.
I was seeing red; started applying for jobs the same day, on company time.”
These Tills Are Awesome!!!
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“I work in a clothing store, and we have tills which are electronic, can scan items easily and we are only allowed to cancel three items on the receipts a day.
Often we have customers who change their minds or don’t want a bag, therefore I get on average nine cancels a day, giving me a cash error, too many cash errors result in a ban from being on tills, which is 60% of my day.”
Let’s Just Add Some Commute
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“I live 40+ miles from work. I was able to work from home for two years, then out of the blue, they said that I had to start coming in to work. No reason was given. While working from home, I always got my work done and was far more efficient. I saved tons of money on gas and car maintenance while not having to spend two hours a day in the car. Now, I drive an hour to work and basically do exactly what I could do from home, or any remote location with an internet connection.
There is absolutely no reason for me to physically be here at work.”
Burrito Laws Must Never Be Broken
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“I work in a hotel, we aren’t allowed to bring food in because someone stole one of my manager’s burritos out of the fridge. She keeps a mini fridge in her office for her personal use now.
We also aren’t allowed to use the vending machines because a guest gave us a negative review because our snack machine was out of KitKats.”
Lock The Doors!
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“I work customer service for a utility company. We get to the office at 8 AM to do paperwork, but we’re not open to the public until 9 AM. Our hours are clearly posted on our door.
However, our boss makes us unlock the front doors when we arrive at 8 AM, so instead of having that hour to get paperwork done, we’re dealing with customers that come before we’re technically supposed to be open. Makes no sense.”
Down With The Dress Code
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“Our dress code is pointless because no one follows it.
We had our HR person quit and not long after that, the office manager quit as well. We never filled the positions after they left so it’s become a free for all of bad hires within the other positions. Last week we had an important new customer come in to work on getting their account set up within our facility. The individual handling their account came to work in wrinkled, rolled up pajama pants and a dingy, long sleeve graphic t-shirt that also looked like a pajama shirt. Her hair was unbrushed and the cherry on top, she was wearing flip-flops.
Everything was against the rules and it was very noticed due to the important customer within the facility. Not a word was said…”
Maybe The Rules Work?
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“I worked in an office on an intersection.Tthe traffic lights were abominable, they would take minutes to change, and then you could not physically get more than halfway across before the lights changed again and you got stuck on the island. You could waste your entire break just trying to cross the street and most of the time there was no cars or anything. So, why not just ignore the lights and cross anyway?
The company had a sign at the front door, and on the Intranet, and in the elevator, ‘If you choose not to follow the intersection rules, you choose not to work at__.’
They were so mental about it that in addition to the above, we had to discuss it at the beginning of every meeting, and a safety briefing on the subject was held twice a year. They also set up a camera, and from 12 to 2 pm one of the security guards would go and stand out there and just watch everyone.
I asked around, figuring that six or seven people must have been run over or something through the years, nope. Never a single incident in the 40 years the building had been there.”
The Downward Spiral Of Tyranny
“My previous manager had a rule that we weren’t allowed to go out to lunch together unless the whole office (five or so of us) was invited. She didn’t like that people were forming cliques by some people going to lunch together.
Her downfall began when she called out one of my male coworkers for violating this rule by frequently going out to lunch with a female coworker of ours.
‘What would your wife say about this?’ our manager queried.
‘Uhh…nothing? She knows we go out to lunch and I’ve had her over to my house to have dinner with my wife and kids?’
The guy proceeded directly to HR and said he felt threatened as if our psycho manager might be trying to blackmail him into compliance. She was required to recant her policy, undergo training about things managers can and cannot do and stop trying to police our unpaid lunch hour.
That began her downward spiral where she just behaved more and more erratically until she eventually disappeared and we got a sane boss (coincidentally, the woman that male coworker was going out to lunch with). Everybody won.”
Out With The Blue
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“I used to work in an office that had ‘blue sheets,’ legal sized multipage carbon documents with a blue top sheet, hence the name. Whenever I got a grant application to review, I was supposed to create a blue sheet that summarized a bunch of info, the name of the researcher, amount applied for, dates of the award, title, all that good stuff.
The only problem was for the grants that I administered, all of that information was on the front page of the grant application so I was supposed to copy the information off the front page of the application onto this blue sheet and then attach the blue sheet to the application. I asked why and was told that it was very important and I had to do it. I figured it would be clear at some point, like year-end or for an audit or something so I did them. After being there for a year and never once needing to use one or being asked for one and no one ever being able to tell me what they were used for, I stopped doing them. I made a list of the incoming applications I hadn’t done them for so that I could quickly do them up if I was ever asked for them but didn’t actually do them.
Anyway, one day my boss came in and asked for an application so I pulled it and gave it to her and she gasped in horror and said, ‘There’s no blue sheet’
I thought, ‘finally, I will find out what these blue sheets are for!’ so I asked her what she needed it for.
She said, ‘Oh I don’t need it, it just has to be there!’
Anyway, after much digging, I learned that the blue sheet was invented because once upon a time, grant applications didn’t have the cover sheet that they do now with all of that information summarized and the people who did data entry needed to have the information in one handy spot. But… now it is in one handy spot, the front page of the application and we don’t have data entry people anymore since the applications are created online and the information automatically goes into our database. I still couldn’t get them to get rid of the blue sheets even after pointing this out!”
If I Don’t Get It, It’s Gone
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“Our workplace started a friendly post-it war with the office across the street that went on for about half a day. Honestly, all of the pictures were safe, just Samus, Mario, emojis, super basic stuff. The pieces were getting pretty good too and it was clear both offices were having a blast thinking of the next, fun design.
Our CEO walked by around 4 pm that day, saw the post-it art, and asked what it was. We exclaimed ‘Oh just a post-it war with that office! Would you like to join us in the next mural?’ She said she didn’t get it. She didn’t get the concept of the post-it war. So, we spent a few minutes trying to explain what it was about, you make art out of post-it notes, and whoever has the best mural wins. Pretty simple stuff. She kind of laughed it off, but it was clear to all of us that she still didn’t quite understand why someone would do it. What a silly millennial thing, she must have thought.
The next morning, an office memo was on every desk saying that no one was allowed to put post-its on windows. We had to take all of our art down. When we asked the office manager what we did wrong, she explained that the CEO quite literally still didn’t understand it and banned post-its for that reason.”
Destined For Doom
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“At my last job at a store/cafe, an unspoken rule, as in me and my manager were never told this by our boss, was that we were not allowed to let a health inspector see anything that they come to inspect while still getting a good grade.
We followed health and safety laws but our bosses didn’t. The health inspector must have realized that it was the company’s fault for all the health and safety breaches because we were given near full marks on the staff’s health and safety responsibilities but the boss’s responsibilities was a different story.
No fly killer in store; no mouse/rat traps; only one sink; no hot water; the counter where we put coffee down wasn’t nailed down and we actually had a customer attempt to sue over a spilt coffee; some of our bakery items were expired but we were made to put it out because according to our company’s food manager, ‘They looked ok so they must be okay.’ The list goes on.
Our manager ended up showing the health inspector months of emails and texts and WhatsApp messages informing the bosses of these health and safety breaches and asking them to be fixed, all of which were promptly ignored.
Later that day, our boss called and screamed over the phone at my manager, telling him that it’s all our fault and it’s our job to make sure the health inspector never finds out about all that. Over the next week, she came in every single day and she just watched us work from the office on the security cameras and yelled at us for every little thing and made a massive deal over everything. Like for example, I had a mini-sneezing fit one of those days and was yelled at, in front of customers, because I was going to ‘infect everyone and all our food.’
I’m glad to be out of that place, last I heard, a few of the stores she manages are failing with massive sales drops and mass employee quitting ever since she took over them.”
The Donut Committee
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“I just started working at an IT company with pretty serious security rules regarding everyone’s computer. You have to lock your computer whenever you get up to go anywhere for any amount of time. The kicker is if you forget to lock your computer and anyone who passes by and notices, they send out a company-wide email saying that you will bring donuts for your entire floor tomorrow and put them in the break room.
If you don’t bring donuts, you are forced to go to ‘trial’ with our ‘official donut committee’ under which you are allowed to prove that you were forced to leave your computer open for whatever reason. If you challenge the ruling and you fail, you have to bring donuts twice. I don’t know how this rule happened or who enforces it but apparently, it’s a real thing.”
The Coffee Bandits
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“I wrote the ridiculous coffee-making rules for my workplace. But I had my reasons. I was a woman on the edge. The coffee was unbearable and every time it was bad, I would have a parade of people through my office complaining and a deluge of emails wasting my time. So I wrote a guide, rules if you will, on how to use the extremely simple drip coffee maker in our break room.
I emailed them to everyone, I put two copies in the break room – one of them in the cupboard where the ground coffee was kept. I went through it with people who didn’t understand. Minutes of everyone’s time was wasted. No improvement, endless complaints to me, more of my time wasted.
By this point I was fed up of even hearing the word coffee, the sound of the coffee maker caused me to flinch. So I ordered pre-packaged coffee grounds to take the measurement difficulty out of the equation. How can you get that wrong? I thought, naively.
On the first day of what I was sure would be the new world, a coffee nirvana, I went to the coffee machine with high expectations. The senior partner had beaten me to it, she had put four sachets of coffee into the machine and added enough water to make six cups of coffee. The first mouthful nearly killed us. I went over it again with her and returned to my office, confident that this was a one-time problem.
After lunch, I went back to try and get a cup of coffee. My expectations were not so high. I witnessed another senior partner carefully opening the sachet of grounds and reach for a teaspoon. She carefully spooned out a quarter of the sachet into the machine, filled the machine with enough water for 12 cups and triumphantly threw the rest of the sachet away. I waited, we tasted it together, she was appalled. She had no idea why it was so weak. I started a new pot, slowly filling with despair as it brewed. I couldn’t shake one thought: I work for a doctors surgery. These people prescribe.
I went back to my office. I ordered a giant container of respectable instant coffee and a padlock. I keep the ground coffee locked in my desk. I brew four pots a day (this takes less time than the complaints) and on my day off they make do with instant. We have a kettle, people are welcome to bring their own filter coffee and do with it what they will. Until someone can be trusted to make a pot of coffee which is not so awful as to inspire eight people to email me multiple times a day, each one of them hitting reply-all to create a small email firestorm in my inbox, this is the way things have to be.”
The Rule That Drowned The Company
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“At my first job we had a ‘clean desk policy.’
In other words, nothing on your desk beside what you’re currently using.
It was pretty stupid by default, but for me, and a few others specifically, working in IT, often had to set up computers and laptops while also taking on support tickets at the same time. And we had no spare desks to use as a ‘lab,’ so we couldn’t set anything up anymore. We’d have to leave the office to do that part of our job. So we no longer could take calls, tickets, and we just kind of messed around in the tech area because otherwise, we’d have to climb stairs up and down every time we were going to work on some new machines, even servers.
I told all of this to the superiors; they held fast. The price was an untold amount of tickets building up, new users not getting their machines in time, and a general decrease in productivity…ultimately leading to the company failing.”
And Now, We’ll Never Know
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“I worked janitorial at this community college. Every different person I was assigned to told me a different way to do things. Eight different ways to wash a window, eight different ways to scrub a toilet, eight different ways to tie a bag.
Well after being there for about three months I tell one of the people, ‘Look, I’m a results-oriented fellow, why does it matter if I do the windows your way or windows their way, as long as the windows are clean at the end of the night, that should be good enough.’
He responds with something along the line of, ‘Well, when you’re in this area, you’re going to do things my way, and this is the boss’s way anyway, so you should do it this way.’
Anyways, finished out the night, come in for my next shift, the boss starts chewing me out, saying how I shouldn’t be arguing with full-timers and if I’m going to continue working here I’m going to need friends. Let me remember how she precisely put it: ‘If my employees don’t like you, why would I like you?’
After she is done, I ask her how she cleans windows. She shows me her way, which is rather different from his way, and I ask her, ‘Well the basis of my question is this, every different area I go to has a different way of doing everything, do you really want me to learn eight different ways of doing everything?’
She asks me if I really want to keep arguing, I go ‘I’m not arguing, I’m asking for clarification.’ She stares at me for a solid 10 seconds, I’m not looking away, and I make the gesture ‘well?’ She stares at me for another 5 seconds and I go, ‘I guess not.'”
Gettin’ Short About Shorts
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“The dress code policy is just dumb at my work. Different positions have different requirements. Even though we all work in the same office.
My favorite rule though is the one on shorts. We can wear shorts on Fridays between Memorial Day and Labor Day. However, the shorts can’t have pockets on the side. It was written to discourage ratty cargo shorts, but the way in which it is written allows me to wear gym shorts. So I do.”
Team Redundancy Team
“We have to do all of our paperwork at least three times. There is a copy of it in our personal folders, a copy online, and a copy in our store folders. Not only does it waste time and paper, but forgetting to do one has gotten people fired. They did the other two identical pieces of paperwork confirming that yes, they did take out the trash and yes, they did check the store voicemail, but how dare they forget to do the third piece of identical paperwork.
Our weekly visits from corporate revolve around whether or not we’ve all done this paperwork. It’s so redundant.”