30 Great Examples of When Stupid Rules Backfired in Epic Fashion

1.

My company has a strict no-alcohol policy. You can't begin work within 10 hours of having had a drink. So whenever there's a staff shortage and they need me to come in right away, guess who just cracked open a cold one?

2.

One summer in Sweden, bus drivers in some counties started wearing shorts due to the heatwave. After being denied to continue doing so by management, they started wearing skirts instead. Dress code policy had banned shorts, but not skirts.

3.

When a daycare started charging a small fine for parents who picked up their children late. Instead of resulting in more on-time arrivals, the new policy actually caused more late pick-ups. This is because the parents were originally worried that a late pick-up would be a significant burden on the daycare employees, but because the fine was so small (only a few dollars), they decided that it must not be a big inconvenience for the daycare.

4.

One of the high-rise blocks I have to maintain has a sign saying "Anything left here will be removed due to it being a fire risk". People just dump the s**t there they don't want like fridges and sofas and by law, we have to take it

5.

The previous school I worked at decided that all shirts needed to have the school name or emblem (which was a fancy letter 'E') on them to be dress code appropriate. That's all the handbook said. No clarification on how the name or emblem was designed or the color or if it had to be permanently affixed to the clothing. The students hated the policy and, being in high school, looked for any loophole possible. They found one due to the lack of clarity of the handbook policy. The kids would make paper 'E's and pin them to their shirts. Thus, they could wear whatever they wanted and by pinning the 'E' to the shirt, were still dress code compliant. I thought it was pretty genius. The administration did not.

6.

My work has an infraction system. If you're a minute late that's half a point, if you're up to four hours late that's half a point. So if you're going to be a minute late you might as well be four hours late because it's the same penalty.

7.

The middle school wanted to create a "trash-free environment" so they removed the trash cans from the parking lots, halls, and cafeteria. Then just told the kids to "toss your trash when you get home or in a classroom" The amount of litter skyrocketed overnight, after a week or so they brought back the cans.

8.

Air pollution became a big problem in late-80's/early-90's Athens, mostly due to the number of old, heavily-polluting cars on the roads. So the Greek government made a law where only cars with odd-numbered final digits on their number plates (1, 3, 5, 7, and 9, etc.) could be driven on odd-numbered days (1st, 3rd, 5th, etc.)- and only evenly-numbered cars could drive on evenly-numbered days. Sounds great doesn't it, they'll halve the number of cars on their roads right - nope, they doubled it - everyone bought one old, highly-polluting car that had an odd-numbered plate and another with an even-numbered plate - nobody could park and the air was worse than before.

9.

In French Indochina, there was a major problem with rodents eating supplies and bringing disease. Given the plentiful supply of cheap unemployed workers, the colonial authorities thought they could be used to kill the rats and bring their numbers down. The French had a somewhat racially prejudiced view of the work ethic of the locals, so decided to pay them per rat killed rather than per hour worked. Each was compensated for every dead rat they handed over. A year or so later, the colonial authorities discovered the peasants had set up rat-breeding farms in the jungle.

10.

Zero Tolerance Policy for no violence at school. Punishing the victims for getting bullied... yea, THAT was a smart idea...

11.

When Domino’s said all pizzas would be delivered in 30min. or less or your pizza was FREE. All the delivery drivers kept getting in car accidents to get your pizza to you on time, so it wouldn’t come out of their paycheck. It was a short-lived venture.

12.

Brazil in the 1980s (I think) had a massive debt problem, which they tried to solve by simply printing a bunch more money. Any economist worth their salt would have told Brazil that would cause massive inflation, and that's exactly what happened. People found their life savings were barely enough to buy groceries for a week.

13.

My city has issues with loud bikes/vehicles. So as a deterrent, the city put up decibel meters that displayed how loud your engine is(similar to those signs that read your speed and display it to you) but instead of deterring anyone, people would pull up to these signs and rev the heck out of their engines to see who could get the highest decibel count. The city took the counters down within a week.

14.

During prohibition, the US Government decided to add poison to industrial alcohol as a deterrent to people drinking it since booze was illegal. Except they didn’t tell anyone that they were doing it... so the public had no idea there was poison in the alcohol. AT LEAST 10,000 people passed away.

15.

I worked at Macy’s one Christmas and found out the reason why you can never find anyone at the registers is that they don’t allow employees to stand at the register because it’s “intimidating.” I can’t tell you how many times I gave up trying to purchase something there because I couldn’t find anyone to ring me up.

16.

Washington State made it mandatory for schools to drop their room temperatures to save on electricity. The result: teachers brought their own heaters into their offices and the use of electricity increased.

17.

Dry Counties were meant to reduce the use of alcohol in certain areas, but they result in people who want to get drunk driving further away from home to do so, increasing the odds and frequency of drunk driving accidents. Also, many attempts to rescind dry county laws end up getting countered by campaigns paid for by the bars and liquor stores that are set up on the edge of dry counties, typically under the guise of religious messages.

18.

The infamous housing project Pruitt-Igoe had a policy of supplying housing to single mothers. However, if they stopped being single they would lose their tenancy to their homes. This meant that fathers or step-fathers of children in these poor homes had to stay away. Pruitt Igoe is a legendary social disaster and it was demolished after twenty years.

19.

At one point in history, the president of Paraguay tried to eliminate racism by making it illegal to marry someone within your own ethnic group. Needless to say, this was quite racist.

20.

"You have to eat whatever you touch" was a rule in my kindergarten which led to all the children touching all the food to call dibs on it.

21.

A Buddy of mine told me about a Happy Hour promotion a bar ran close to his campus. Apparently the special was something stupid like 50-cent beers that lasted until the first person went to the bathroom. As he tells it, the first few weeks went without incident, but once it got more popular, people were going to extreme lengths to not be "that guy" including wearing adult diapers. Once people tried to covertly pee in corners and trash cans, the bar cancelled the promotion.

22.

I worked somewhere with a clean desk policy on Friday afternoons. The common way around this was that everyone would just sweep all their paperwork into an envelope, stick it in the internal mail, and then it would arrive back on your desk on Monday morning.

23.

The one-child policy in China has led to a serious gender imbalance in the population.

24.

My institute banned p**n sites from its WiFi. Most people weren't tech-savvy enough or bold enough to ask how to bypass it. Then the institute banned Facebook. Everyone learned to use proxy in a matter of days. Let's just say the servers were under heavy pressure from then onwards.

25.

In Kenya, our governor in Nairobi banned public transport from getting to town so people had to walk long distances to work. And since we don’t have enough pavements, people ended up walking on the roads (like 3000) and there was a traffic jam that lasted for more than 5hrs. The next day the ban was removed.

26.

Alcohol bans at college football games have led to increased intoxication problems because fans are loading up before going to the stadium.

27.

The military used to have a 2 beer lunch rule...they never specified the size of the beers.

28.

"No cards game at school" When I was in elementary/middle school Magic The Gathering and the Pokemon card game were pretty popular. Almost all of the guys played and would get together after lunch to play before classes started again. Here is where it's important for me to mention that this was a Christian school. It probably didn't take long for a teacher, administrator, or helicopter parent to wonder what all the fuss was about. Sure enough, one of them probably got a hold of an MTG card, saw art depicting a demon, and decided that this had to be the work of Satan to warp our young minds. Almost over night, all trading card games were banned from school. Any cards would be confiscated until the end of the school year. Well, you now have several dozen pre-pubescent boys with about 30 minutes of free time and nothing to do. So we did boy s**t. Ran around, pushed each other, went places we weren't supposed to, just overall got into mischief. All this time they had a free babysitter that was keeping us all engaged, quiet, and civil, all while reinforcing quick math skills and teaching multi-level problem-solving. The next year we got a new administrator and card games were allowed at school again.

29.

The school I go to has a rule that says if you come late 3 times, you get an unjustified absence, which lowers your grade quite a bit. So if someone is late they pretty much always skip class so they can get an absence that can be justified by simply signing it...

30.

At my old job, some people abused lunch so they made a few of em text in when they started and finished lunch. One guy specifically would text the start time, a place he got food, his order in detail, the address, price, etc. Even when he bought a snack while out. That stopped a week later.