Rules were made to be broken…but what happens when we commit an act so stupid and unexpected, they have to make a new rule just because of us? Well, these people have firsthand experience with that embarrassing situation.
1. The Show Must Go on
I’m literally never going to live this one down. After going through a horrific operation, spending weeks embarrassed about my appearance, and having my two front teeth replaced...our band director finally had to have a talk with us. As he said, "Okay. I never thought I'd have to say this, but wrestling is not allowed in the band room."
2. The Naked Truth
Not me, but my dad. My dad and his friend streaked through their high school and then ran right through a meeting. Guess what? They got off pretty much scot-free. There apparently was not a "no streaking rule," so they only got in trouble for skipping class. When I went to school there 20 years later, there was definitely a no streaking rule.
3. It Gives You Wings
Summer camp, when I was in seventh grade. The camp sold Redbull at their snack shop. One of my close friends was a 4'8" boy with ADHD at the time. He ended up drinking five cans in one sitting. Went absolutely mad, then proceeded to pass out. The following year, we found out that Redbull had been banned after word spread and a higher-up found out.
4. Super Idiotic
My middle school in the 90s banned superglue. The reason was that my teacher said we were going to have a test (not a final exam) on the last day of school. I protested by supergluing my hands to my desk. In my defense, we had had an exam the day before and had been told previously that it would be a movie and popcorn day.
I had an A already and was looking forward to a fun day. I was still so stupid.
5. No, You Can’t Take Communion
The church I used to go to now locks its wine bottles in a cabinet…because I chugged a bottle. Not exactly my proudest moment.
6. Sleeping It off
Now teachers report students when they’re out for more than 15 minutes. They used to not do anything when students were ditching, that is until I was found passed out in a bathroom stall after being out of class for 40 minutes. My teacher wrote in the report: “I just assumed he was ditching. He hates this class.”
7. Eyes on the Road, Buddy
In college, we had a shuttle van that would carry you from your dorm to your car after dark. I got dropped off at my car and crossed in front of the van. The shuttle driver was on his phone, not paying attention, and started to drive. I felt the hood and grill start pushing into my shoulder and hip, and was able to scream and flail to get his attention before he ran me over.
Now they have to go both ways down each row of cars in the parking lots to only let people out on the passenger side.
8. Gone Fishin’
I used all of my annual leave in the summer in one block. A combination of public holidays and my annual leave allocation meant that I could take all of August off. More importantly, I switched off my phone. After two years of doing this, the vacation rules were changed so that people could only take a maximum of two weeks in one block.
9. Look Both Ways
A bunch of signs were put up in front of my school warning about pedestrians crossing. Why? Because I got hit by a car in the crosswalk.
10. Mother Knows Best
Back in the 80s, my mom was the definition of a coupon queen. She would browse every newspaper, pamphlet, etc. to find grocery store coupons to this particular chain near her house. Back then, there was no “limit 1 per customer” rule for the coupons, so my mom would chain together multiple coupons for practically everything.
It got to the point where she would have so many discounts and cashback that she would get all her groceries for free, and the store would have to pay her money for the cashback rewards. After a few times doing this, the store finally implemented a “limit 1 per customer” rule. Mom, you are the definiton of a legend.
11. Going Right to the Top
Not really a single rule, but more of a full restructuring. When I worked as a nurse, there were a lot of things going on that were pretty shady, corners being cut, procedures not being followed and such. A few colleagues and I went to the board to complain. As we were finishing the meeting, the higher-ups told us that we opened Pandora’s box, and that they were appalled.
I left shortly after, but in the meantime they had put a team in place to work on the issues, and it was a circus for a while.
12. Getting up to Speed
GPS trackers in all of our work vehicles to track speeding…because I did a nine-hour drive in seven hours.
13. Gaming the System
I was at youth group and we were playing the game murder, where one person is the killer and one person is a detective. The rest are citizens. The lights are out and there’s no talking, and the killer goes around taking out people by tapping them on the shoulder. Then the detective has to figure out which person is the killer.
I was the killer in this instance, and as a gag I "killed myself." So everyone walked around in anticipation of when the I would strike, when really I was just lying there. The game went on for like 20 minutes before our youth pastor was like, "Alright who is it, do your job, we need to get this over with." That’s when I then revealed what I did.
They were so mad, they had to make a rule about it, and they still call me out for it like three years later.
14. Natural Disaster
I was working late to meet some deadlines, and my job allows flextime. So basically, I can work up to four hours extra spread out over the week, and bail four hours early on another day as long as it's the same pay period and I arrange it in advance. I had to get this stuff in before deadline or I could not leave early the next day.
So I was working extra because I had a doctor’s appointment coming up. It's like 6:30 pm when suddenly tornado sirens start going off. There are maybe 20 of us still in the building and people go into the stairway. A few people just go home. So I tell a co-worker I'm not going to seek shelter and I'll be working.
Cool, no problem. Well, I am working when around 7:00 pm the sirens are going off again, and there is a dude coming from the tech department making sure everyone seeks shelter. I don't recognize him but whatever, we go through tech people like no one's business. He tells me to seek shelter. I say unless it's in the handbook, I'm not doing it since I have work to do.
We have a long stare. He says something about the tornado being close and I'm like I know, I saw it earlier out the other window. It's just a baby one, it won't even break glass, and it's not heading this way. Long stare. He seeks shelter. I see him as I leave around 8:00 pm, and he says something along the lines of “looks like you were right,” but adds that it was a giant company risk if I had been wrong. That’s when I started to realize the truth.
Found out the next day that dude was the CFO. He later had the handbook amended so anyone who left the building or didn't seek shelter during a tornado would be considered insubordinate.
Pixabay
15. I Scream, You Scream
In 1967, my dad was hit by an ice cream truck in the small town he lived in. Well, it just so happens that the mayor was a close family friend, and he banned ice cream trucks from operating in the town. Entirely. Also, they’re still banned. I have friends who still live there, and they whine all summer about the lack of trucks. If they only knew...
16. Using Their Noodles
This rule is from when I was a Junior. They did all sorts of various competitions between the classes, and of course the Seniors always won nearly everything. Well, during the food drive, the Juniors concocted a plan to win the event. Instead of bringing in food, we would collect money and a handful of people would hold it all until near the end.
It would look like we were losing because our totals would be low, but then on the last day they'd bring in a huge supply and we'd surprise them with the win. They wouldn't know how well we were actually doing until it was too late to do anything about it. I wasn't one of the money people, but a couple of them were friends of mine.
The plan was to buy as much food as they could with the money they'd collected, so naturally, they bought Ramen Noodles because it's the cheapest thing in the store. I don't know how much money they had, but I think they must have gotten special order shipments in. Yeah, they were serious. On the last day of the drive when I came in, there was a roomful of PALLETS of noodles stacked five feet high.
I was completely blown away. It was an insane amount of Ramen. Based on the number of items brought in, we had like double the Sophomores and Seniors combined. It was nuts. So now during the annual canned food drive at my high school, you can bring Ramen noodles, but they no longer count towards the total donated for the competition between the classes.
Wikimedia Commons
17. The Charge of the Dunce Brigade
In my sophomore year of high school during the short WWI unit, the sophomore history teachers had an event where we went out to the football field and played capture the flag using dodgeball rules. One team had the flag and had "trenches" made of football training equipment, and the other team had to charge across no man's land and touch the flag to win.
Occasionally the teachers would call out a gas attack and everyone would have to don paper bag "gas masks" or they were out. I had the genius plan of charging the main "trench" directly without a dodgeball to try to neutralize it to help my team. I handed my ball to a classmate and instead wielded a cardboard trench shovel I had made that morning, and then put on my "gas mask" ahead of time.
When it was time to go over the top, I barreled towards the main trench. I miraculously was never hit on my way to it and slammed into that thing with all of my might, taking it down, knocking a couple other kids over, and knocking myself out for a few seconds in the process. The teachers thought it was hilarious, but they quickly had to implement a "no trench busting" rule soon after.
Apparently someone else tried to replicate my antics during the next round and got really hurt. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware that was the last year they did that event.
18. I Make the Rules Here
In elementary school, we played “wall ball.” Two players and a red rubber inflatable ball. There would usually be a line next to the wall for who plays next. If you were next, you were the referee, which didn't consist of much, but sometimes you had to determine if a ball bounced before it hit the wall or not.
I didn't like standing next to the wall, so I invented “ringside ref” and would stand behind the players to get a better view. Years later in high school, I found out that the kids at that elementary school were still using my rule. Maybe it spread to other schools even, all because I was a bit of a wimpy kid who didn’t want to get hit.
19. I’m Going to Write Every Word I Know
When I was a freshman in high school, I managed to get a teacher to change their entire grading system. I figured out you would get full credit on homework just by turning it in. So I started writing nonsense answers on stuff that I deemed too much effort. At first, it was 1 or 2, maybe 3 answers at most, but it soon escalated into all my answers being stupid stuff such as “I hate chicken” and “Give me more beef” and other general nonsense.
One day, I happen to see my mom at the school. It was strange, but I was an otherwise good student who never caused problems, so I didn’t think anything of it. When I got home that night I learned Mom had been called to a conference with that teacher who had just discovered my tomfoolery. I was admonished somewhat by Mom, who found my antics comical.
The teacher tried to make an example of me, but it’s hard to punish one of your top performers for gaming a system you had created. From that day onward, the teacher graded everyone’s papers with a fine-toothed comb and was quick to shut down any further shenanigans. Too bad for them, I got in on the ground floor.
20. I’m So Extra
My freshman English teacher knew going in that she'd need to put minimum page limits on assigned essays. Apparently, I was the reason she also started adding maximum page limits.
21. Seven Years’ Bad Luck
I gave myself a concussion in a college yoga class by having my mat too close to the mirror/ballet bar. It’s now a department rule that you can’t be next to the mirror while stretching or doing yoga or Pilates. It’s been seven years.
22. Ace Ventura: The College Years
My school changed dorm room pet rules to "Any animal that breathes air is not allowed" after my roommate and I were done living there. The horribly unscientific answer, we assume, was just a dumb way of saying "fish, and only fish allowed as pets." Our iguana was everyone's favorite…small little incident of him getting into the vent system, but, c'mon, he's a cutie.
Might have been a tarantula also. He didn't get out, though. But oh, that would've been awesome.
23. Gift of the Blab
In eighth grade, we had an essay question on a social studies test that read something like this: "Imagine you are a miner during the gold rush. What would your life be like? Detail your day-to-day life in a diary entry below." Well, I wrote mine to have it actually sound like it was written by someone not from this time period.
Next time we had a diary entry-style essay question, I saw in the directions: "Make sure to write your essay using clear and proper English."
24. Security Risk
This happened to someone I worked security with at the ultra-important G20 summit. Long story short, we were screeners at the entrance. Our X-ray machine was like the one you'd see at the airport, with a treadmill-type bit pulling bins through some hanging rubber guards into the X-ray. It was a super big hassle.
See the issue was, most delegates had very little to put through. A watch, a belt, a wallet, the odd item here and there. The "curtains" were pretty stiff. So with only these light items in the bin, it could never get through the curtains—their weight was greater, so it just spun on the treadmill and got stuck before them.
One of the geniuses on a team next to me came up with a solution. We shall take six water bottles and tape them together in a bowling-pin style triangle with black duct tape. This will weigh down the bin so it can get through! And I must admit it worked...Like twice. And then everything went horribly, horribly wrong.
The next delegate mistook it for an explosive. I mean, picture it...six bottles with no labels and some fluid in them black-taped together...the RCMP got involved...it was a whole scene. No custom weights are to be used by screeners any longer.
25. Revenge of the Nerds
Some guys who were in my advanced math class in high school. I was 14 at the time, they were probably 17 and 18. Classic example of very book-smart (basically math geniuses) but with zero common sense. It was the week of the homecoming football game, which was obviously a really big important game at or school.
Well, these boys decided to make a noisemaker as a prank. Out of a pipe. I think you see where this is going. They set this pipe contraption under the bleachers before the game, and it gets discovered by a maintenance person before the game. Obviously, it is mistaken for a pipe explosive and it becomes a whole scene with the authorities, lockdown, and so on.
Nobody knew if they'd go do time or not for their stupidity, but since it was a harmless contraption, they were just heavily punished by the school. I didn't see them back in class again for months.
26. Can’t Be Tamed
During middle school, I was in the orchestra, and I'm the reason my school orchestra has the "video-record yourself practicing your orchestra instrument (the same one you play at orchestra concerts) for at least 10 minutes every day" rule. Yeah, that’s really complicated. The rule used to be just "record practicing for 10 minutes." I did everything BUT.
First, I just sent a sound recording of my sister practicing my cello. Then I recorded someone on YouTube practicing. Then I practiced my sister's violin (I'm a cellist). Then I borrowed my friend's trumpet. Then I practiced my other friend's viola during class. My instructor found all of this out and just kept adding specifics to the rule.
It's been 10 years since then, and I recently found out my instructor likes to tell this story every time a kid asks why it's so specific.
27. Better Late Than Never
In my first year of university, I took philosophy as an elective and our professor said on the first day that he was easy-going and didn't mind if assignments were late and wouldn't dock points. I turned all eight papers he assigned in to him the day of our final exam. True to his word, he graded them all fairly and didn't deduct points for lateness.
I took a class with him the next year, and on the first day, he said that due to past events he'd accept a late assignment only with a note from a doctor or if a relative passed…all while making direct eye contact with me.
28. The Flames Grow Higher and Higher
At Boy Scout Summer Camp, I was a scoutmaster. Turns out that if you make a five-foot tower out of ONLY the 1/4" dowels from small American flags, you get a straight and narrow column of flame about 30 ft high. It was absolutely terrifying. I was the Clark Griswold of scoutmasters. Now, "No campfire flames higher than 24 inches."
29. Open-Door Policy
When I was in high school, we had bathrooms with open doors in a large portion of the school. Once, I was eating lunch with some friends and we saw a senior girl and her boyfriend go into the open-door bathroom. Queue some very interesting noises from them as they got it on, and then an aide appearing out of nowhere.
The aide looked at me and my friends and we just kind of shrugged. Then she went into the bathroom. The girl pretended to talk to the aide for a moment, and then booked it down the hallway right by my friends, trying and failing to cover herself up. The guy went the opposite direction, and the poor aide tried to run after him.
This was near the end of the year. When we came back the next September, all of the bathrooms had been altered to have doors. I guess the school decided on a policy of “We’d rather you have relations without forcing others to hear it, ya stupid idiots.”
30. Don’t Tie Me up
In order: Ties must be worn. Ties must be worn around the neck. Ties must be worn around the neck with the standard configuration, not in a big loop like a Hawaiian lei. Only one tie to be worn at a time. Only one student per tie. Took about three months perseverance, but eventually, my school just gave up and I went back to not wearing a tie.
31. Paper Trail
First year of the company paper airplane distance contest: Rules say one sheet of 8.5x11 paper, no tape, no weight. I crumple my sheet into the smallest ball I can, and win the distance contest by 10 yards over second place. Second-year of the contest: Rules are amended to add "Paper airplane must be folded and generate aerodynamic lift."
I make a triangular "football" out of my sheet of paper, and win the distance contest by a larger margin than the previous year. Third year: contest is discontinued.
32. Holy Crusade
No more extra credit. I had a teacher who rarely gave extra credit out, and when she did it was an extra project. We were talking about book reports and someone in my class jokingly asked if they could use the Bible. She said, “If you can read the Bible by next week, I’ll raise a letter grade” to which I volunteered.
Sure enough, I finished the Bible in a week and we compromised on a 10 point extra and deleting my lowest score.
33. Sign on the Dotted Line
My school had an excusal form in addition to the doctor’s note, which had to be written by your parent or guardian explaining why you had to be excused from class. It had to be handwritten and signed by the parent or guardian. I was very good at copying people's handwriting and signatures, so the whole school knew that I was the person to go to if you needed a form.
I became so popular that I wrote so many forms, and so often, one year that the next year, the school board issued a rule that you could submit only one excusal form per semester. Still never got caught plagiarizing signatures.
34. Pet Project
I would impress friends at the zoo by getting the monkeys to come over to the side with wire mesh instead of the glass. A moat was meant to discourage them from coming near the mesh. However, I knew they could shimmy their way along a tiny upper ledge, and then slowly slide down. They only did it with proper motivation.
Well, that was accomplished by wiggling a plant outside the mesh that they really wanted to eat but couldn't quite reach. I would tempt them and they'd come over, reaching a tiny monkey arm toward my hand while I rustled the leaves. I never actually fed them, which got around the already established rule.
Then while their arm was outstretched, I could pet them, which was the whole point of this exercise. One day, I went to do the trick and realized there was now a sign forbidding this exact behavior. Considering I'm a zoo nut and would do this two or three times a month, I'm pretty sure I was the primary cause of the sign. I was heartbroken.
The animals I have managed to pet over the years at various zoos (some allowed, most not) include monkeys, an elephant, giraffes, a porcupine, a bactrian camel, a black bear, a bison, and a maned wolf. I've fed a hippo, but petting one is still on my bucket list. If I die prematurely, it will almost certainly be from petting something I shouldn't.
Public Domain Pictures
35. You Had One Job
I used to work at a small-time water park as a lifeguard. Normally, the employees could ride down the slides if they wanted, but one day me and another girl were racing down these two parallel slides, and she hit her head and got a really bad concussion. She quit and the owners revoked employee slide privileges. I was the head lifeguard.
36. I Fought the Man
"The high school must honor any and all accommodations requested by a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist, or other psychological professional" and, related, "All staff in accommodation meetings must read and understand the report provided." You see, my high school was utter worst when it came to accommodations.
It was the college-prep school of the area, and silly little things like learning disorders weren't worth the VP's time. When I had a meeting to discuss the accommodations my neuropsychologist had detailed, the VP showed up 15 minutes late, totally unprepared. She then flicked through the report and settled on accommodations completely opposite to what was requested.
My parents tried to get her to change, but she said the school wouldn't be able to meet my needs. Suffice it to say, my teachers, my parents, and I were livid—but she eventually got what was coming. Two of my teachers also tried to appeal, but the VP wouldn't budge, nor would she grant me access to a program geared toward atypical kids. So, I dropped out.
Then, apparently, my teachers took it up with the school board. My history teacher in particular led the charge, but all of the teachers I had that year all contributed toward reporting the VP. The rules were implemented after I had settled in a home-study program and realized I desperately needed to have time away from people, but it was nice to know that other students wouldn't be forced into accepting accommodations that'd only make them struggle more.
37. Deviant Behavior
Back in 2009, I was fairly active on DeviantArt. One day, I happen across a comment by some guy, totally creeping on a female model I was friends with. She didn't notice the comment, really, she gets it all the time. But I noticed it, and just the tone of it felt really off. He was commenting something like "I had to check your profile to ensure you were 18, wow you look so young."
Problem for this idiot is...comment history on DeviantArt is public unless you turn it off. Most people don't know how to turn it off. And this guy was certainly "most people," as a curious glance revealed an absolute treasure trove of creepy predatory messages to other girls on the site. Turns out, he included personal information on his profile too, revealing his age to be in his mid-30s, and that he lived in Florida.
In his commenting history, one immediately jumped out to me on a photograph of a girl's torso, her shirt off. "Lovely pic dear girl," he said. "But you should update your profile to say you are 18, so the mods don't take this pic down, and you can post more revealing photos!" Quick check to see if this girl also added her personal information to her DeviantArt profile. Yep. She was 14 freaking years old.
I reported him to the moderators. Sent screenshots. Sent links to other creepy messages he sent. I then made a huge mistake. I replied to his comment, saying, "You're disgusting, a real piece of filth." There's some back and forth of him trying to justify himself, I get angrier and say some things that I'd later regret.
A week goes by. I check in on my report ticket. The guy isn't banned by DeviantArt staff. He's still leaving creepy messages on models' photos, including the 14-year-old girl, complimenting her "feminine figure" on a bikini shot. I send another report, and then express my frustration publicly. I write a blog post stating that I found a creepy mid-30s guy telling pubescent girls to lie about their age to post on the site, and that DeviantArt wasn't doing anything about it.
I stated that I sent reports, and no action had been taken yet. I ask if other people had problems getting reports resolved, or if they knew of any direct means to get in contact with the website admins. Instead of responding to my inquiries, my curious followers instead decided to open up my commenting history. I, too, am certainly "most people."
They find out who I'm talking about, and a harassment campaign ensues. This guy then goes on the defensive, telling my good friend (where I first discovered his comment) that he was under attack by my "personal allies," and he needed help and support. By trying to drag my friend into it, I had no choice but to respond, publicly posting the screenshots of his comment telling a 14-year-old girl to change her age.
Somebody in DeviantArt must have noticed this rabble at this point. And DeviantArt came swooping down with the ban hammer…on the 14-year-old girl. Yeah. DeviantArt banned the 14-year-old girl for getting groomed by this gross man. They also issued bans and suspensions against everyone who followed my comment history, posted their own journals calling him out, and started harassing this guy.
The model I was good friends with was also suspended for a month, for reasons pretty much unknown, probably because she replied to the comment he sent her pleading for help by calling him a low-life. He was not suspended at all. But...neither was I. At this point everything is so confused, but I wasn’t giving up.
I go absolutely ballistic in a follow-up post, calling out DeviantArt administrators, posting it all on the forums, sending notes like crazy to their community managers, absolutely gobsmacked by the extinction-level asteroid of stuff that was just hurled at us. I went absolutely bonkers, and the result was pure chaos. The forums were now exploding with several threads calling the guy out, threads pleading others not to succumb to harassment campaigns, and ultimately, a mass-locking of all related threads.
I woke up the next morning, and a familiar "account suspended" error greeted my home page. Not the first time I've seen it, I've pulled stupid stuff on DeviantArt before. But it gave me a glimmer of hope. Thing is, when the account is suspended, you can open support tickets to create a line of communication with the site's moderation team. But the weird thing is, I didn't open a ticket.
They did. DeviantArt's head of Community Relations greeted me, and explained the situation. He thanked me for bringing the guy to their attention, and apologized for their ugly handling of the situation, particularly for banning the underage girl. Some misunderstanding of events, or something like that, apparently.
He explained that I was given a "lenient" one-week suspension for calling the guy out openly, that I should've gotten a month (or outright banned) for just how crazy it got. He offered me a line of communication to speak with him directly in real-time. We had a nice chat about it, and after explaining some things on my end, we discussed ways to expedite reports in the future.
DeviantArt created the "Deviant Safe" program in response to it, opening a special line of communication in the helpdesk for users who feel threatened, or for people like me who discover users encouraging severely egregious acts like encouraging underage girls to change their profile's age so they can post inappropriate content.
Thus, the scuffle was resolved. I took what I thought was a one-week suspension. Turns out, my account snapped back to normal after just two days. And at the start of the next month, of all the weirdest things, a new symbol appeared beside my name. I was awarded the rare distinction of a "senior" DeviantArt member, something only given to those hand-selected by the DeviantArt administrators. Since then, the DeviantArt administrators have been kinda chatty with me.
They sometimes reply on my blog posts about stupid stuff I get myself into. They comment on my art from time to time. Then one evening, they invited me out to a dinner with the rest of the staff and a small sampling of very well-known artists in the area, just to get some pizzas and discuss some ideas for handling their new Groups system. I got to meet the community relations department, but there was one twist left.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to meet the man I called on the phone to ultimately bring Deviant Safe into fruition. He got fired six months previous. He teabagged DeviantArt's CEO at a Christmas party.
38. Cuff Him, Boys
In fourth grade, we had this thing called “wax museum” where you dressed up as a historical figure and gave a presentation. My friend was Harry Houdini, so he had handcuffs. As we’re 10-year-olds, we were messing with them and my friend put them on me. These were not the cheap plastic ones at the dollar store, either; they were prop ones made from real metal.
So they get stuck, and long story short, I was in the office with three people around me trying to get the handcuffs open with pens and a pumpkin knife. My sister said when she had to do “wax museum,” there were no handcuffs allowed. Thanks Nathan for trapping me.
39. Cruel and Unusual Punishment
When I was 11, my class studied ancient Egypt. We each had to make a diorama and a poster, and younger classes of pupils went around in small groups and heard about our projects. I did "crime and punishment." I somehow thought it would be acceptable to explain adultery to little kids in lower grades, complete with examples.
"Well, it's like if your mom cheats on your dad and starts going to bed with another man” and so on. Wow, did my parents get a call from the school, and the guidelines have been updated.
40. Who, Me?
The place I work used to have unlimited coffee for their employees. Three weeks after I started working, there was a sign above the coffee maker that stated that employees were limited to 3 cups a day.
41. Smile, Fools
There is a required pin to change profile pictures on the classroom iPads now. This is because I decided to change every staff member’s profile picture in the school iPads to a smiling, old Mexican man on April 1st.
42. Tastes Like Chicken
Middle School: Eating any part of an animal that we're supposed to be dissecting results in an automatic 1-week suspension. Oops.
43. Icing Him out
I have a friend who goes to a school in Pennsylvania. He told me that one winter, one of the students wanted to build an igloo and sleep outside. So he built that igloo, whipped out a sleeping bag, got all cozy inside, and fell asleep. Now, this is a stupid idea for a number of reasons, but apparently, someone was dumb enough to think that he had passed out and was in danger.
They called campus security AND an ambulance to take him away. But as everyone came to find out, he was just asleep. However, for giving the school such a "scare," they banned the activity specifically. An official rule literally exists that says something along the lines of "no sleeping in igloos." Also, the same guy had a rule made about him that said "no performing parkour on the campus buildings." That one explains itself.
44. Baby You’re a Firework
The town I live in has a free bus that runs late at night through all the college neighborhoods 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 totally 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." I look at them with so much pride.
45. The GOAT
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. It’s just my special secret.
46. The Master of the Drive-Thru
At my work, we have a WRITTEN rule that we cannot do any voice impressions over the drive-thru headsets. Specifically, Skeletor.
47. Midnight Flash Mob
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. On a particularly slow Sunday morning, I took 3 or 4 of these flash drives and plugged them into a laptop.
Then I replaced all the audio files with "Gangnam Style" and set the function to auto-run at 3 am. 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.
48. Flying Too Close to the Sun
In high school, I was on the lighting crew for the spring musical and was the lead spotlight. The spotlights for the show were 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 15 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 (without adult supervision).
49. Good Morning to You Too
Oh I have one for this! Back in the day, I used to work at a theme park. So one morning I was goofing off with my friend and just generally horsing around while doing our morning checks and tests. We worked on a rollercoaster in the 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 the lift hill. 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 two 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 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 funny to this day.
50. A New Era
Years ago, I bought a computer from Dell. I paid for it with my debit card, and excitedly monitored the build status every day, checking in at work, and on my days off going to the library to check on expected shipping updates. When I made the purchase, it was a five to seven-day expectation for delivery. At day ten, when it had gone from "order accepted" to "order prepped" to "order built," it suddenly went back to "order accepted." Turns out, this was Stage One.
I called their customer service line and was told there had been a glitch in the system, and the order got expedited, and soon was back at "order built" and I was just waiting on shipping confirmation. The next day, back to "order accepted" again. This happened every day for five days. Cue another call to customer service.
Apparently, there was a problem with payment, and they referred me back to my bank because the payment was on hold. Called my credit union, and they told me it was just an authorization hold waiting on final confirmation from the merchant. Called Dell back, and they saw the same thing, but even the customer service director couldn't say why it hadn't finalized.
Every time the payment didn't finalize, they literally took the box with the computer off the loading dock and sent it back to stage one, again and again and again. This led to a long hold while the customer service director looked into their billing system, and ended up transferring me to a very nice lady in their accounting department.
Initially, she thought I was an in-house person from the listing dock asking about a customer's order, but quickly got up to speed. She was covering for a co-worker who helped with in-house billing system troubleshooting who was out on vacation, and usually just handled tracking the accounting from Dell, sending parts from one warehouse and factory to another.
Still, she dug in and figured out that the issue was that I was paying with a debit card, not a credit card. Now, debit cards were still relativity new at that point. Most banks capped the amount you could spend per day at $250 to $500, but my credit union was one of only five financial institutions that didn't cap it at all; they proudly noted on a monthly statement insert that the credit union felt that it was your money to manage the way you wanted to.
However, Dell didn't accept debit cards at all, not for a dime, not for the $800 I was trying to spend. The nice lady in accounting, however, had just come back from a conference, and knew that there was a push to get more banks to act like my credit union and remove their spending caps. She told me to hang tight and she was going to get it done for me.
I told her I could change my payment method to a credit card, but she told me that would delay the whole process. Two days later, I got a call from her—and I couldn't believe what she had to say. She had made a presentation to the CEO, CFO, and several VPs, making the case that Dell needed to get ahead of the curve and start accepting debit cards, with no spending limits, because the banking rules were going to be changing very soon and more people were going to be spending money with Dell the way I tried to.
They had to implement a process to start accepting debit cards, which had required a rush overnight change from their merchant bank, and my purchase was their test case. She had me check with my credit union, who showed the funds were officially a purchase and not just an authorization hold, then she called the loading dock and made sure my computer was on a truck. Within ten minutes I had an email with a tracking number. In short, I'm the reason Dell takes debit cards.
51. A Class of Her Own
There is a girl in my class who is beyond help at this point. Her best moments: “I don’t want to donate my eyes because I don’t want people to see what I’ve seen.” “Gingers can’t be American.” “Yay! I got a D in French.” I just want to clarify the French grade, though. I don’t want to seem like I think I’m better than anyone because of grades.
I wrote this one down because she interrupted other people’s learning and shouted this out in the middle of the lesson. Honestly, as long as anyone tries in their test it’s fine, but she was on her phone most of the time.
52. She’s Driving Everyone Crazy!
Every Friday, my mother goes grocery shopping. The store is a block away from where she lives and she usually drives there. On this particular day, after she finished shopping, she decided to walk back home. The next morning, she wakes me and my father up in a panic to let us know that her car has been stolen. The cops come, we fill out all the paperwork, and she gets a rental car for the time being.
That’s not even the best part. The following Friday, she drives again to the grocery market and parks the rental right next to her “stolen” car. Now, her car is a champagne-colored Mitsubishi Diamante—not such a common car or color. Nevertheless, when she sees it, she comments on how similar the car looks to hers, but makes nothing else of it.
A few days later, the cops call us to let us know that the car is in the grocery store’s parking lot just one block away from our house. Yea, that call was awkward, to say the least. I’ve got plenty of other stories about her, but this is probably the best one.
Sources: Reddit, ,
