Ever been at work and wondered, “What in the world is up with these rules?” Well, you’re not alone! From dress codes that make you feel like you’re on a fashion runway to email rules that seem like they’re written in code, we’re spilling the beans on the stuff that just doesn’t make sense. So, grab a seat and get ready for some stories that’ll make you say, “Are they serious?” This is the low-down on workplace policies that are more puzzling than a jigsaw on a Monday morning!
A truly stupid one! Before leaving, all employees have to go into the president’s office and say: “may I leave? “
It’s a small company so I guess it’s just to keep track of the slaves.
My old workplace had someone who yelled “DON’T TELL ME HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE!” any time a coworker told him to “have a nice day”… So management actually made a rule that said if you or a coworker was leaving for the day you could not tell them to have a nice day, you have to say “goodbye, I hope you have the type of day you choose to have.”
When I was in the military I saw a buddy of mine sitting outside crying. I went and consoled him as best as I could – apparently, he was just depressed and unhappy. After he was feeling a bit better I went to go and find someone to tell them what was happening. They knew. In fact, he had been crying so much lately that they had instituted a ‘no crying at your desk’ policy – which is why he was outside.
I once needed a pen. Figured this was a reasonable ask. Went to the supply closet on my floor, which was locked. Asked the floor’s admin, and she told me to go to the main supply room in the basement. Went to the basement and explained my situation of needing a pen. They told me all requests for supplies must be approved by my department head. The problem is, being new, I’d never met my department head. She also worked in San Francisco (I worked in Milwaukee), so I needed to send an email both introducing myself and asking her if I had permission to get a pen from the supply closet.
My workplace doesn’t let you use the word “problems”. Instead, we have to say “challenges” if something is wrong. As the problem is a negative word, and challenges promote the fact that there is room to fix the said problem.
All the extra toilet paper in the building has to stay in a single closet where it can be overseen by the toilet paper queen. I heard her shrieking the other day when she discovered someone had “hoarded” one spare roll of toilet paper upstairs so the people who work upstairs wouldn’t have to walk down multiple flights of stairs when the toilet paper ran out.
Two weeks after I left my previous job a memo went around saying people aren’t allowed to look out of the windows at work anymore.
It’s a big a** glass building.
We can’t ask others if they want to come grab a coffee in the break room.
We have a swear jar that is constantly filled.
The record for the number of bills put in at once goes to my boss.
And it was once filled in one day after an order for parts we needed went wrong and we didn’t get anything.
We have a lock on the first aid kits. So if you just need a band-aid for a cut, you have to get the key from the Safety guy. Which in turn makes it a ” reportable accident” with mountains of paperwork and investigations. We use an unbelievable amount of duct tape now.
There was an issue where there was too much ‘socializing’ going on on the factory floor, particularly when people were working while sitting down (false-skewed supervisor perception), so they made everybody stand. When that presented ergonomics problems, they brought in these weird chairs that made you sit at a slant, had no backs, and no wheels, so they wouldn’t cause “distractions.”
No part of it made any sense.
A rule that said “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean” which fairly obviously meant if there was no work then you should be cleaning things. It was at an aircraft servicing station that was fairly small, but we needed a crew of at least 3 people for larger planes. The problem was that sometimes there were just no planes, so there was no work. We would clean for a couple of hours and then just run out of stuff to clean, but according to management, that was no good – we had to be busy! It got to be that we would fight over work when it came in because everyone was so bored, and finding pretend busy work was much harder than just working.
I remember getting the crew together to pick up pebbles off the taxiway for a couple of hours. There’s an old joke in aviation “Go sweep the taxiway!” so we actually did it.
Empty inbox
My boss was an inbox Nazi, like if you had old emails in there he would flip and make you respond to them or delete them. Apparently, you shouldn’t have anything left at the end of the day, deal with them or delete them.
The jokes on him though, I just made a subfolder marked “personal” and everything went in there
I used to work for the now long-defunct books, movies, and music store Media Play. Just one of the 285 reasons that poorly run businesses ran into the ground was the tardy/attendance policy.
If you were literally: 01 seconds late clocking in, even hours before the store opened, it was a really, really big deal. You’d not only be formally written up but lectured like a child oftentimes berated even. If you were tardy three times, bye-bye. HOWEVER, if you did not show up and then called 2 hours later saying you were sick?—okay, thank you, feel better. This trained everyone to just take a sick day instead of being half a second late to work. I can’t tell you how many times you’d see a coworker screeching into the parking lot before work after fighting traffic from a wreck or whatever, noticing it was 8:01, and then slowly driving off to go home and feign being sick. This was particularly upsetting when it was a pulldown stock week when we needed every hand on deck but had unusually early shifts.
I don’t know if it’s standard, but I worked at a place where HR wasn’t allowed to tell us if someone was fired. It was a big enough place that you might not immediately realize someone had left and, when you found out, you weren’t supposed to ask why. So, if you wanted to know if they were fired, you asked, “Was there cake?” Which was to say that, if the person had retired or left pleasantly after a number of years, they would be given a party with cake. If they were fired, not so much.
“I haven’t seen Brian for some time.”
“Brian no longer works here.”
…” Was there a cake?”
I used to work at a place in which my boss implemented a no more than 2 glasses a day water policy.
What a c*nt. I ignored this rule and complained directly to our CEO and the matter ended later that day.
What was weird though was the majority of people actually followed the rule and some even shopped me up to HR about ‘breaking the rules’.
I left not long after that because not only was my boss a bellend, but if my colleagues were going to hr over me drinking water, then I obviously couldn’t trust them.
The old job of mine in a warehouse. Our stations were pretty far apart, so when we’d listen to music we’d all usually have our own stuff playing. Not a problem since you could barely hear the neighbors music. Well, the CEO didn’t like hearing multiple songs when walking through the warehouse. He made a rule that we all either had to listen to the same music or none at all.
Many years ago I was a vacuum cleaner salesman. There were songs about this particular brand of vacuum cleaner and how awesome it was. Every morning, we had to sing these songs as a group. In fairness, it was a pretty quality item.
I worked as a call receiver. We NEVER saw a customer. We were only on the phones with them. Rule: Your hair must only be a natural color. I dyed my hair the same exact color that someone from a different shift had. I was reprimanded. I told them that if the rule was not enforced for everyone, they couldn’t single me out. Their reasoning for letting the other person have that color but not me…mine was my real hair, dyed an ‘unnatural’ color; hers was a weave that could be changed very easily.
Really?! Then why hasn’t she been asked to change her hair? Because that sh*t is expensive.
They gave up trying to convince me they were in the right.
My dad told me this one a while back. He used to work for a PR firm… The way he described the office environment, think “The Office” but in the 1980’s.
The company hired a “Corporate Efficiency Specialist” to come in and “improve” things. She came in and implemented all kinds of rules, which seemed to follow some sort of caste system.
Her philosophy was, that the higher your office rank, the more “perks” you get…
Her idea of perks:
Number of pictures you are allowed in your cubicle.
Whether you are allowed to have a potted plant or not.
Coffee mugs were only allowed to senior employees. Others had to use paper cups.
Being allowed to leave the office for lunch was also considered a “perk”
Needless to say, a coup soon followed, and she was tossed out on her hiney.
At my old job, HR held a meeting to tell us that there was too much swearing on the sales floor. Someone raised their hand and pointed out that swearing is very common in our industry and that is the way that our customers speak. HR later sent out a memo explaining that swearing should be limited to conversations with clients. It was amazing.
Had a workplace where time for our bathroom breaks and deducted them from our allotted 15-minute breaks or lunch. We had to go see the office manager to get a key to open the restroom. As soon as we left his office he would start a timer… when you got back he would stop the timer and tell you how much time you needed to deduct from your lunch or next break. They watched our breaks like a hawk.
Also, if you made a mistake they would stand over you and time you while you fixed it and deduct that from your lunch or breaks.
You couldn’t bring anything “that smells” for lunch and they had no way of heating anything up.
I worked out my contract and split.
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, and 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 wtf we did wrong, she explained that the CEO quite literally still didn’t understand it and banned post-its for that reason.
Former job at a law office: One of the partners sent an email to the entire staff that employees were not allowed to gossip in the building.
What was everyone gossiping about, you ask? Oh, said partner was divorcing his wife and sleeping with one of the associate attorneys in the firm. But, you know, don’t gossip.
We can’t personalize our workspace. There are no nameplates on anyone’s workstation either. No pictures, no mementos, nothing but work stuff. It is bad enough we are jammed into an open floor plan and have to spend many hours at our desks, but then to deny us the ability to make it more enjoyable? Petty.
Not current job but 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 (we were one of the smaller stores/cafes in this chain of 20+ stores and cafes). The health inspector must have realised that it was the company’s fault for all the health and safety breaches because we (the staff) were given near full marks on the staff’s health and safety responsibilities but the boss’s responsibilities were a different story.
No fly killer in store (despite them being attracted by our bakery part and us having a fly killer out back for over a month but no one was ever sent to install it), no mouse/rat traps, only one sink (the law requires 2, one for hands and one for dishes), no hot water, the counter were we put the coffee down wasn’t nailed down and we actually had a customer attempt to sue over a spilt coffee, some of our bakery was expired but we were made to put it out because according to our companies Food manager, “they looked ok so they must be ok.” 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 where she just watched us work from the office on the security cameras and gave out 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. “
Glad to be out of that h*llhole, last I heard a few of the stores she manages (4-5 store managers quit all in one week while she was on holiday. so she took over managing those stores) are failing with massive sales drops and mass employee quitting ever since she took over them. Hope to God she loses her job.
We aren’t allowed to wear jackets unless they are purchased from the resort gift shop with the hotel name logo on it. They are $50+ and we don’t get reimbursed, but it’s the price you pay to stay warm in the cold months.
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.
We got a new vacation policy where you can take UNLIMITED time off. When he announced it, we looked at the big boss like he had a d*ck growing out of his forehead; all the while he assured us that if we wanted a vacation, to take it. Really! A little bit afterwards, he changed it to “discretionary” time off meaning that if your boss approved it, it was ok. Then it changed to “160 hours should be the max and if you go over 200 hours then you probably don’t need to work here.”
There was trouble when I (officially) moved desks and my new desk had a phone with a call display. Apparently, call display phones were allowed for people at a certain pay level. Your pay level also governed the height of your cubicle walls. My manager’s solution was to promote me.
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.
If a customer asks for a straw, we have to say we don’t have it. If he doesn’t insist, he doesn’t get a straw. But if he insists, we have to gladly offer him a brand new biodegradable straw with the company logo and brag about how nature-friendly we are.
Documenting your productivity.
Worked for one of the top 10 companies in the US. You might know them, they make sh*tty computers and really sh*tty printers.
My job was reporting. I was very good with spreadsheets and somewhat enjoyed it, because of this every time something needed doing like it came my way.
Eventually, I had a mountain of work that was pretty impossible to finish on time.
I started writing scripts, macros, and more auto-hotkey language than I even thought possible
More and more my work was automated and all I had to do was hit the on button. I could even leave my station and my work would finish itself.
It got to the point where I’d remote in from home to start my work and just not come in for the day.
My managers didn’t care because I was doing the work of 5 people in ways they couldn’t comprehend and getting them better numbers because of it.
Then the productivity nazi came to power. I hate this b*tch.
She implemented a policy where everybody had to report how they filled their day down to the minute in one of 14 categories. You were then given a productivity score and anything under 80 percent was an automatic meeting with her, your direct supervisor and their supervisor.
I was safe for a while because my boss covered for me. However, the type of person that takes this sorta role is usually the type of person everybody hates who will go on personal missions for the pettiest things.
Anyway, my score was always abysmal if I reported it properly. I had to start lying and pretending to be busy as more and more this lady would watch me and quiz me on what I was doing.
My supervisor would give me busy work that was way beneath my pay grade to shut her up.
Like guy before me was getting about 30k a month for the company out of his billing and I was pulling in 80k a month for them because I automated the very tedious things so it became easier to go after the minuscule stuff more and more. But here I was pushing mountains of paper into a shredder machine so I’d stay busy and keep the b*tch off my back.
Can’t use a knife but won’t supply you with box cutters and you can’t buy your own box cutter as it’s not regulated. The manager then complains the boxes are ripped open.
Nobody was allowed to drink at their desks in case they spilled their drink and broke the $5 keyboards we typed on.
I offered to sign a binding agreement stating I would pay double the cost of anything I damaged by drink spillage. They said no.
I offered to go to the store and buy 10 keyboards for them to put into storage as replacements. They said no.
I don’t work there anymore. 100% sure the only reason that rule existed was so that they could be sure they had a workforce of mindlessly agreeable doormats.
I worked janitorial at this community college. Every different person I was assigned to told me a different way to do things. 8 different ways to wash a window, 8 different ways to scrub a toilet, 8 different ways to tie a bag.
Well after being there for about 3 months I told one of the people, “Look, I’m a results-oriented fellow, why does it matter if I do 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 lines of, “Well, when you’re in this area you’re going to do things my way, and this is the boss’s way anyways, so you should do it this way.” There’s a fair bit more to it than that but shortened it for brevity.
Anyway, finished out the night, and came in for my next shift, boss started chewing me out, saying how I shouldn’t be arguing with full-timers and that if I was going to continue working here I was 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 8 different ways of doing everything?”
She asks me if I really want to keep arguing, and 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?” Stares at me for another 5 seconds, and I go “I guess not.”
Work in IT Support.
Everyone was pulled into a meeting one by one to discuss negativity in the workplace.
We were told we were not allowed to complain about clients between ourselves, not for the reason that I would expect and would understand (in case a client heard it on the phone), but because of the negative energy in the room.
In IT Support, complaining about people is the only thing that gets us through the day.
Grocery store here. We are not allowed to make an announcement that we are closing or are now closed or to confront a customer about being closed. Apparently, the CEO was in one of our stores past our closing time when a manager in the store made an announcement to the customers (who were still shopping many minutes past closing).
CEO didn’t like it because customers matter way more than employees going home. So now it’s banned, and we have to stay in the store and deal with still-shopping customers even 30-40 minutes past closing. Some people know we’re about to close and do it anyway…
So now what we do is make an announcement to night shift employees to make their final purchases. It doesn’t really work.
No dangling earrings. I could have plugs the size of dinner plates in my ear, so long as they don’t dangle externally.
I work the front desk at a hotel and wear conservative 10g stainless hoops.
I work for a small company (<10 employees) that distributes textiles. The company name is the founder and CEO’s name. Nothing in the office is allowed to have a brand label. Any food brought into the building must be repackaged in a bag or foil, and every morning I have to pour my lunch soda or coffee into an unmarked mug before walking in. All boxes are turned inside out and taped back together. She hired someone to file the brand logos off of the computers and appliances. Cleaning supplies have labels carefully peeled off or are rebottled in generic containers. The exception to the rule is fire extinguishers that are rotated so that the labels are not visible.
From a previous job. First was cell phones had to be turned off and stored in a locker by the boss’s office, only to be retrieved during lunch and when leaving.
The second was no one could bring anything in for the office unless approved by the boss. I would stop maybe once a week and buy doughnuts for everyone because I thought it was nice… We had to sit down and have a meeting about it because “you can’t just decide it’s doughnut day”. That’s only for special occasions
We are no longer allowed to mention conspiracy theories of any sort on the sales floor. One of our part time employees saw a video about lizard people on YouTube and was talking about it with another employee. As it turns out, quite a few people around here believe in ‘reptilian elites’ and were starting to share their stories when they came in. Management was not pleased.
Everyone MUST stop all work when the Senior team say so, in order to play Basketball. The loser has to wash the dishes for the day.
This literally comes above anything.
We have to call our customers “Athletes” – I work at under armour. Most of the people who come in are not athletes lemme just say that.
Worked for a billion-dollar health insurance company. They determined which font used the least ink when printed, then issued a Corporate memorandum requiring that be the only font used company-wide.
If you’re late to any programming event or meeting, you have to dance in front of everyone. I refused after being a minute late to a walk-through the week before an event and was given a strict talking-to later in the day and now because of my upset reaction, other coworkers avoid me.
In my nursing home, we are not allowed to sit down and you will get written up if you are caught relaxing. The only exception is sitting down to talk or take care of a resident. Apparently, getting caught sitting in a chair in any room in the facility except the break room means you are lazy. But, most of my co-workers are older and have back/feet problems from working in the caregiving field for decades. I had a blood clot in my leg a few years ago so I have circulation problems in my right leg.
I’m sitting down as much as I d*mn well please and I have a doctor to back me up. Screw HR and healthcare administration.
We are not allowed to refer to the Xerox Machine as “Bob Marley” any more even though it still jams way more than it Xeroxxes. This is because apparently the CEO had a tween daughter come one day and she got very upset when she thought the staff were keeping her from seeing Bob Marley in real life. She did not know that Bob Marley is dead. This made the CEO get stressed out and yell at us about the nickname.
I work for a very superstitious Korean man. The rules are no red pens, no shaking your legs and no whistling after the sun goes down. These aren’t official ‘rules’, but he gets very serious about these things and doesn’t allow joking about ghosts/the supernatural.
Guys, I AM Korean.
I’m a librarian. If somebody asks me where anything is, I have to redirect them to the front desk. No matter what.
Example of how this is dumb:
“Where’s the bathroom?”
I’m pretty sure the front desk can help you with that.
Women aren’t allowed to lift anything. Literally anything. I was going to dump a trash can full of shredded paper in the dumpster last week and my boss caught me, made me put the trash can down, and go find someone to dump it for me. I was literally lifting the thing with one hand.
As my job requires a lot of lifting and I hate asking for help constantly, I have mastered the art of picking up 50+ lb boxes and running with them so no one catches me.
I’m a cashier at a grocery store. One time we had an inspection agent from corporate come in disguised as a customer to monitor employee behavior. It’s pretty common practice. Of course, the agent happened to come in the day this one female employee, who treated the job like a social hour since day 1, was quite literally stuffing her face with Mallomars in front of customers. I even saw the agent’s report and it said “She had so much food in her mouth I couldn’t even understand her.”
A few weeks later, no more food or water was allowed on the registers, only in the manager’s office. If you need a drink, wait for a lull in customers and briefly go to the office. The employee mentioned earlier is still employed.
Fast forward a year. New computers and other tech set up in the manager’s office. No more food or drink allowed in the office because it’s a hazard. Hungry? Thirsty? Either wait until you go home or have a break.
Of course, the employee at fault for all this quit a while back so she doesn’t even get to see how bad she f*cked things.
I don’t work there anymore, but I worked in a call centre that did support for Apple products. I worked in the iTunes section.
Right before I quit they made a rule that we weren’t allowed to listen to music anymore, even though all of our work was on chat/email. I could understand why they didn’t want us on our phones, because we were working with people’s private accounts and could see personal stuff like addresses and things, but music? That was the one good thing about my job. Being able to listen to music all day while I worked. Then they changed it so we all just sat in silence, listening to the sound of typing all day.
They had a lot of stupid rules there but of course, I’m blanking on most of them now.
They changed the uniform policy.
Because of me…
Because they saw my “fashion socks” that I regularly wear…
While I was sitting cross-legged in a staff meeting.
The uniform policy does not allow us to wear shorts, and since we clean carpet we never take our shoes off, so literally nobody sees my socks unless I specifically want them to. Kinda like lingerie, I guess. In the meeting, I was sitting that way specifically because I was showing off a new pair that I was wearing. And then I commented that a couple of summers ago I started wearing bright socks with cool patterns and literally don’t own any plain socks anymore. And so it became a slightly regular morning ritual for people to ask me what socks I’m wearing before shift. Literally zero customers have ever seen my socks, and if they did, it’s not like seeing a c*ck ring or something awful. They’re colored socks. They don’t detract from the “clean cut” image. They don’t affect how well I do my job. They’re a non-issue at all times.
What really pisses me off is that in our last staff meeting, we discussed uniforms and appearance and grooming standards, they mentioned things like no cologne and pants being too long or too short, having a spare shirt in case you get sweaty, etc. Well, they tried to casually slip in this new policy as if it was always that way and I’d been allowed to get away with it. Nah, f*ck that. I went back into my new hire paperwork and found the uniform policy, my copy, the one I signed, and it is conveniently devoid of the mention of the color of socks or anything of the sort. They changed this policy because one person is uptight and can’t stand that my socks are so bright and expressive and hidden under my pants. Like maybe one day they’ll tell us to only wear white underwear just in case our pants rip and they don’t want our customers to see my silk leopard print boxers. Good grief.
I work at a bookstore. We have no dress code other than, “No blue jeans.” I never really questioned it, I mean I assumed it was because jeans could seem too casual? Until one day my coworker told me the reason for the rule was that there was a guy who used to work there a few years back who wore the same blue jeans every single day to work, and he never washed them. My boss would tell him over and over again to wash his d*mn pants as they were becoming dirty and smelly. Realising he couldn’t physically force the guy to wash them… My boss just created the rule that NO ONE was allowed to wear blue jeans ever again.
I was fired for getting invited to speak at an industry conference. It’s a prestigious thing. Most agencies want their employees to speak at conferences. But we had a silly PR policy that limited speaking engagements to certain people.
Even though I had several speaking engagements prior to joining the company, which were listed on my resume, they weren’t willing to budge. I told them I could just go on my own; they wouldn’t have to pay and I wouldn’t mention my employment with them while there. They said it didn’t matter. So I decided I’d rather go to Las Vegas and speak at the conference than continue with them.