Rules are put in place to make sure everyone stays in line. They also help things run smoothly. However, sometimes that's not exactly the case. Someone might think putting a new rule in place will help things be much more productive, but occasionally the exact opposite happens.
Workers share the rule implemented at their work that didn't go according to plan. Content has been edited for clarity.
“Most Heartless Thing I Have Ever Heard”
“I worked at a call center and whenever someone called customer retention to cancel their service, you would lose a point if you could not talk them out of it. The people with the least points lost got more hours.
So, whenever people called with a legit excuse like ‘I am moving,’ the phone agents would hassle the caller to try to make them stay or give them the run around, so they would get frustrated and just give up.
Once, I was on the phone with a lady and she wanted to cancel her service. I asked her why and she said ‘it was for my mother and she has died.’
I gave her absolutely no pressure to stay or change her mind (she sounded like she was having a hard enough time as it is).
After the call ended, I got a message from a supervisor that had been listening to my call (they randomly listen to our calls from time to time), and he wanted to know why I did not try to get her to stay with them.
I said, ‘The service was not for her, it was for her mother and she died.’
His response was the most heartless thing I have ever heard: ‘You should have made her send us proof of death, that can take over a month to do, and that’s another bill for us, or try to convince her to keep the service I’m memory of her mother. It’s all about delaying the customer until after their next bill.’
After my shift was over, I gave them my two weeks notice.
As a final dirtbag move, they change my schedule to 6:00 PM to 2:00 AM for my final two weeks. I told my boss, I had made a mistake, took back my letter saying I would still come in for the next two weeks. I left and never came back.”
“Didn’t Inspire Us To Do Any Favors”
“The beach club I worked as a cabana boy at decided one summer to buy $40,000 worth of ‘club umbrellas.’
The old system was that you, as a cabana boy, had 30 to 60 families who you took care of in exchange for tips. One of your responsibilities was to carry whatever heavy beach equipment they bought (Tommy Bahama chairs and umbrellas) from the cabana to the ocean and set it up. You then had to carry it back up to the cabana at the end of the day. If you left chairs or umbrellas on the beach, the club supervisors would charge you a dollar per item left behind. This was because they would have to carry it themselves to avoid the stuff from getting washed away, broken, or stolen by locals. It was a pretty fair and workable system.
The new system was members still had their own chairs, but would request a number of umbrellas from the cabana boy. Obviously, they requested way more than they would ever need or buy themselves, and the club umbrellas were extra heavy and exhausting to set up. We complained to management about this and a lot of other stuff, but they basically just said ‘forget you’ to us. Well, that didn’t exactly inspire us to do them any favors, considering most of our pay came from the members.
Since all the umbrellas looked the same, we would just take the chairs and leave the umbrellas on the beach and no one would know who was supposed to be responsible for picking them up. The supervisors simply couldn’t get them all and almost all of them wound up broken or missing by the end of the summer. Whoops.”
“They Needed Me More Than I Needed Them”
“In college, I worked at a department store. I was a pretty good employee. I always showed up on time. Never called off. I always did the right thing. I folded and cleaned while others just loaded around, disappeared, or goofed off. I didn’t ask for crazy accommodations with my schedule.
So, some sort of formal for my sorority rolls around. I request off that Saturday and Sunday. Saturday was to attend; Sunday was to recover.
I was informed that there was a new policy and sales associates could no longer request off two days in a row. I was not guaranteed either. They would not give me a decision. I just had to wait till the schedule came out.
I got the schedule. I was on it, working until 4:00 on Saturday and open to close on Sunday. I worked that Saturday till 4:00, but wasn’t happy about it and decided that they needed me more than I needed them. So, if I woke up feeling good enough to go in to work on Sunday, I would. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t.
I didn’t feel good Sunday morning, so I stayed in bed. I got a call from the manager shortly before shift. The manager wanted to know where I was and when I would be there. Then, she emotionally unloaded on me. I told her she could enjoy covering for me for the rest of the week because not only was I not coming in for this shift that I had requested not to work, but I would also not be coming in for my remaining shifts.”
Should Have Backtracked Earlier
“When I was in college, I worked in a warehouse managed by without a doubt the worst collection of human beings that could possibly be assembled to manage a thing. There should be a class dedicated to these idiots at Wharton– How to Annihilate Morale and Foster a Contemptuous Attitude Among Employees 101.
Here’s the biggest testament to their uncanny incompetence:
Shortly after the beginning of the school year, they announce the One-Hour Rule. If you’re going to miss a single hour or more of work or more in a given day, your time card will get a NP (non-pay) designation. This awful environment didn’t have paid time off until you’d been there 10+ years.
This went over, as you might have expected, very poorly. The first few weeks, I started noticing how short-handed we were– and I’d hear things being said like, ‘Well, Mike had to take his daughter to the orthodontist this morning– he would have been in by now, but that stupid One-Hour Rule kept him home today.’
Management starts putting the spurs to use because we’re not meeting schedule– and, of course we aren’t. We’re running at 80% manpower on a good day, so they call us in for another announcement.
We’re thinking they’re about to walk back their boneheaded One-Hour Rule. Nope. They double-down on it.
Anyone with two or more NP designations in the calendar year will be terminated. However, they have a new designation for people subject to the One-Hour Rule: AP (adjusted pay). The AP hourly rate: $0.00.
So, get this: you need to run your kid to the doctor and you’re going to miss a couple hours of work, right? Cool. Go do that, come to work and work the last 10 hours of your shift for $0.00 an hour because if you don’t, you’re going to be fired.
Management argued they could do this because ‘minimum wage laws consider your weekly wages, not daily.’
This is just… hilariously untrue. I remember this one fat prick manager (let’s call him Dan, because that’s his real name) kept trying to normalize this stupid rule by saying stuff like ‘There should be no mathematical way this drops your weekly wages below the state minimum wage.’
Well, that fat prick ate those words. A couple weeks after that announcement, a guy who worked on the ramps received his paycheck and, when he did the math, he discovered he did indeed make less than minimum wage for the hours he had worked. He approached management simply asking to have his pay adjusted up to minimum wage and they refused. When he protested, they fired him.
And he sued.
I ran into this guy a few years ago and he told me that the settlement was significant enough to pay off his house, buy a new car for him and his wife, pay off all their debts and send his wife back to college. That was beyond gratifying to hear.
And the management team? They walked the One-Hour Rule back…to its first iteration.”
“Nobody Said How Well It Needed To Look”
“Three years ago, while working at a large resort, our general manager decided to stop hiring the outside company we used for Christmas decorations. Instead, they made all of us managers sign up for multiple 2-hour blocks to decorate since most of our decorations we owned in-house. Well…we were a lodge style resort with rafters ALL OVER. This meant fluffing and decorating multiple trees for our 30,000 square feet of meeting space and hanging the icicle lights with a staple on every stupid, godforsaken rafter. Nobody wanted to do this. Not even the engineering crew. We all had so much to do in this period, like preparing for banquets and holiday parties each night, sales coordinating these, front desk crazy busy. It was one of our busiest times of the year.
So, we all decorated. Nobody said how well it needed to look. The front desk manager stapled his thumb and had to be out; it took twice the time to check people in when he was on desk. The sales department decorated trees on only the facing sides, and awfully, I might add. They were so sparse on ornaments it looked like a tree decorated in a halfway house. People found these old Peanuts Christmas decorations from probably 20 years ago in the basement that were unanimously decided to be placed all over. A four-diamond resort with Snoopy and Charlie Brown all over every place possible.
The one thing I did that was cool was I made a drinking rack advent calendar. I told them I gifted a cheap bottle each night to a random guest who had a pretty high check. I tried it once and the guest was weirded out and thought I was messing with them, so I just gave them out to my friends at home.
Needless to say, the general manager was furious and couldn’t discipline everyone. So, we hired the company back and everyone gloomily went back to their normal jobs.
“They Just Wouldn’t Stop”
“I was a police officer, and my agency’s administration, ever fearful of lawsuits, implemented a policy that we ‘shall not’ initiate vehicle pursuits when the only violation is a traffic infraction. The policy was in fact, so narrowly worded, that you could only initiate a vehicle pursuit if the driver (or other occupant) of the vehicle was wanted for a violent felony. This was along the lines of murder, kidnapping, really serious crimes.
This went on for several months, we let stolen cars go with regular frequency (not a violent felony). The bad guys in town got wind of the new policy and they just…wouldn’t stop anymore.
One day, an officer tried to make a traffic stop on a vehicle for some type of moving violation (speeding, etc.) The vehicle failed to yield and the officer, compliant with policy, let the vehicle go.
The driver had just murdered his wife and wife’s brother. He subsequently killed another individual approximately an hour after the officer discontinued and let him go.
They reverted back to the old discretionary policy pretty quickly after that.”
“A Horrible Day At A Horrible Job”
“One of my previous jobs: a co-worker told me a story about how he trusted the wrong fart when he was way out in the sticks and about a hundred miles from his house delivering office products. There were no drivers in the area to relieve him.
He stopped at a gas station bathroom and tried to clean up as best he could (his boxers were a total loss, of course), but he had still gotten enough on his pants for the smell to be obvious within conversational range. He still had a full-van route to run.
Instead of entering the customer’s business, saying hi, and getting a signature, he decided to just slide the product as far into the lobby as he could from the front door, say ‘Hey, how y’all doing? Y’all have a good one,’ and then signed the proof of delivery as ‘Left at the door.’
He did this for 35 customers.
So, of course, a few of those customers called in on him asking what the heck was going on. Some of those calls made it to the owner of the business. The owner called the driver and asked the driver to explain himself, which the driver did (in full). He asked the driver if he had called in the issue to dispatch, and the driver had, adding that dispatch had signed off on his plan.
After he got off the call with the driver, he walked to the dispatch office and asked the dispatcher if the driver had called in his dilemma. The dispatcher confirmed that the driver had indeed called it in and that they authorized him to leave the orders at the customers’ doors. Naturally, this made the owner mad, at which point he yelled, red-faced, ‘NEW RULE: IF A DRIVER POOPS HIS PANTS, HE GOES HOME! I DON’T CARE WHERE HE IS OR WHAT’S LEFT OF HIS ROUTE! WE CAN’T HAVE DRIVERS GOING AROUND SMELLING LIKE POOP! IT’S BAD FOR BUSINESS!’
Fast-forward 3 months: our shippers’ trucks are late, I had just gotten back from a very early route. I had to help ‘put out fires’ all over the warehouse due to the late trucks. I then had to get the drivers loaded and out the door before I had to load up and run a second route of my own because another driver had called out that morning. It was shaping up to be a horrible day at an already-horrible job, and I wanted no part of it.
Instead of running around like an underpaid chicken with my head cut off, I simply recalled what my coworker told me about Rule #1 regarding Number Two and pooped my pants in front of the dispatcher. He had to send me home because it was in the rules and I got a free day off.”
A Slight Overaction
“My summer camp had a no phone policy a while back for a few weeks. The division leaders took phones and kept them for a few hours and made the parents come in after camp had ended. When parents couldn’t make it because of work, they stopped doing that. Then they started to just take them and give them at the end of the day, but when one kid missed like four calls from his dad, they stopped doing that too.
Halfway through the summer, they just held them until they finished talking which resulted in more parental hate. Unsurprisingly, everything backfired. One of the division leaders was very annoyed by the constant phones and was fed up with all the parents, so he started to threaten to throw the phones into the lake. It all stopped when he mock threw a kids phone into the lake, but actually let go either by accident or as a rude move. From there, he was fired.
With a few more VERY angry parents voicing their frustration at the camp, suddenly no one cared what the kids were doing.”
“This Stupid Rule Ended Very Quickly”
On a road trip, somewhere in California I discovered that semitrucks by law are required to travel at 10mph below the speed limit for everyone else
Might not seem like a huge deal, just go around them right? Well if it’s an arterial highway and a lot of semis come up this way and there’s only two lanes, congratulations legislators, you managed to engineer a one-lane highway. And the most frustrating one ever.
So you’ve got two lanes, one is a long line of cars. But the other Lane is empty so you zoom down it wondering why no one is using it, until you get behind the semi and realize you’re going to be stuck going 55 unless you get over. So you signal to move in, the long line of cars lets you back in line because they have to.
But while you’re going along in line with everyone else, car after car after car after car does the exact same thing. You spend more time hitting the breaks to let people back in line, you almost feel like you’re at a perpetual stoplight
I wanted to die. I pulled over and made my ex finish the California stretch because I was about an inch away from road rage
Safety First
“I currently work in a very small shop that works with some industrial machinery. New owner decides it’s unsafe to have one person in there alone in case of injury, so we cannot be in the shop unless there are two people present. I get the concept, it’s a safety issue and would make sense EXCEPT…there’s only two employees.
So guess what: one of us is sick? We’re shut. One of us needs to come in late? Guess we can’t open till 10:00. You want to run across the street and buy coffee? Gotta close till you’re back. That project has to be done today, but one of us has to go pick up the kids at 5:00? Guess we’re gonna miss that deadline.
I’m in the middle of it now, but I do believe that policy will be ending in the next couple days or so, as we are further behind than we’ve ever been on a MOUNTAIN of work.”
He Should Know Better
“I work in manufacturing and we get paid piece rate, so the more I run, the more I get paid. We also have a base hourly pay rate of $10/hr, so whichever pays more (the hourly or the piece rate) is what we get paid for the day. On bad days, sometimes they bump us to $12/hr for the day. When we train new people, we get paid $15/hr to compensate for having to slow down or stop our machines to teach the new people.
The big boss, my boss’ boss’ boss, came in last week. Now, he used to work on the line like I do now, but you can tell he’s living comfortably in his corporate life and has forgotten some of the bad parts of this job. He told my boss that we are to no longer receive training pay because, by his logic, if we are working with someone we should be making more than $15/hr, anyway.
These past 3 weeks or so we have been doing a LOT of training, so a few of us got together at the end of the day and agreed, if they aren’t paying us, we won’t train people. We will teach the new people enough to make us some money and leave the training to the designated trainers (two people split between 15 or so new hires, but they make $17.50/hr).
The policy lasted 4 days.”
“We Knew He Regretted It”
“My ex boss had a new rule after seeing us occasionally be late for work. We had to be at work by 8:30, not walking in, but already sitting down at our desk by 8:30. Not 8:35, not 8:31, etc. So we all start to get there before 8:30, and of course, promptly leave work at 5:30 on the dot. We would do this even if we weren’t finished with work.
We used to pull in so much overtime, but after being so rude and annoying about being there on time, we said, ‘whatever.’ He never said anything because he couldn’t, but we knew he regretted saying anything every time he sees us all file out exactly 5:30.”
How Is That Any Easier?
“A call center I worked at as a temp for the holidays, implemented a rule saying that you had to work 3, 6, or 9 hours in their assigned blocks. People either couldn’t start as early as the block did or had to leave before the block ended. So, the workers couldn’t work enough hours. The company had to hire more employees (more hassle) to be able to cover all the hours.
So, let’s say the block started at 8:00, but you couldn’t come in till at least 9:00. With the blocks, you couldn’t start until 11:00. You’d ‘lose’ those two hours. However, if you had to leave at 12:00, you couldn’t work the 11:00 block either. So, you didn’t work that day and didn’t make money.
This started because the year before they allowed you to work as many hours as you wanted as long as it was at least two hours, and you could start on the hour or half-hour. However, the scheduling person complained about the chaos of keeping track of all the requested hours. And she suggested this to ‘simplify’ things.”
Did More Harm Than Good
“I work in emergency medical services. A couple of years ago there was a rule that no patient who we had inserted a breathing tube for was allowed to be transported to the hospital without a waveform AND a number value for the CO2 they would be breathing out.
Unfortunately, this created a circumstance where if you had a problem with your equipment (mind you that this device only served to detect a problem with the breathing tube it didn’t actually make the person better), you could not move to the hospital. In fact, if you did, you would be ‘restricted,’ which means you are barred from seeing patients until an investigation is conducted.
This led to many people being restricted while others sat on scene with the sickest patients waiting for another ambulance to bring one of these devices. However, if the person didn’t have a pulse and they were being resuscitated, there was no rule against pronouncing them dead without this device giving you a value! Only against taking them to the hospital.
So, if you had a value and it was high, you could take them to the hospital and continue resuscitating them.
If you didn’t, you could say, ‘Ah they are probably too far gone. Just pronounce them dead.’”