It is now state personnel policy that, for the purposes of visibility, hair can be counted as visibility headwear so long as it is the correct color of bright orange.

I dyed my hair traffic cone orange one summer and asked if I still had to wear my hat. My boss was amused and asked his boss. His boss was also amused and asked his boss. On and on and on until a memo was issued signed by the director of the entire agency saying that no, anyone with traffic cone orange hair did not have to wear a hat.

When I was in 7th grade I was given the honor of “paper duty”. The fuck is that you ask? Well, our school was giving out free paper-anything (think notebooks, folders, anything a kid could need to write stuff for school) to every student because no student should suffer from his poor family background and a lack of writing utensils. Fantastic concept if you ask me but it had an issue back then. The unlimited power of the paper kid. As such your job would be to hand out paperproducts to those who needed them for the entire school year. How this hasn’t been abused until shithead teenage me came along is a mystery to me. I took a lot and I handed it out to friends, filled up a closet at home and would slip notebooks to kids for personal favors. The corruption was absolute. If I liked you a simple nod would be enough to get some juicy paper ware. If I didn’t care about you, you’d have to show me your full old notebook to get a new one as was protocol. If I didn’t like you I’d give you some anyway but not before breaking your balls for a bit. I was drunk on paper power and loving every second of it. In hindsight I feel very bad about abusing a social system intended to help kids like myself who didn’t have wealthy parents but with 13, growing up poor as fuck I’d take everything I could get. Anyway, at the end of the school year they noticed how many supplies had vanished despite no increase in students but they couldn’t tell who had taken more because guess who had the responsibility to fill up the paper closet with new paper from the unsupervised storage room? They just handed us all the keys and let us do our thing. My thing happened to be paper embezzlement. End of the story was an overhaul of the paper duty concept. From that year onwards it was done in teams of 2 who had to promise not to take anything and keep a detailed inventory spreadsheet that was checked once a month. Additionally only the teacher had the key to the storage room. The moral of the story is that no 13 year old should wield that much raw power.

it was kind of unspoken before this incident, but It got official with a little placard and everything at work after. So, I worked out of a satellite office, I was the senior manager with an office in that office; my boss was out for client meetings with people for whom it was easier to get to that office (the reason we kept it,) and had wrapped it up when I was coming in for the day. Our employees work 24/7 so, one of us was always on call, with a third and fourth people that could pick up slack if either one of us was unavailible for whatever reason.

Now. I’m walking in, some asshole that had been assigned to our office to provide coverage for an area that wasn’t anywhere in the state. (basically remote, but whatever.). This guy was a piece of work. rubbed everyone the wrong way. didn’t get along with anyone in the space, didn’t follow any of the even remotely basic play-nice-in-the-office rules.

Like, for example, putting on a fresh pot of coffee if you take the last.

So, here I am, walking in at the start of my shift, and my normal walk-in routine is to come in, set my stuff down and put on a fresh pot of coffee, for myself and a few others that were also coming in around then. In any case Asshole, here, sees me put on the fresh pot, and I went about tidying the donut station and such like waiting for the fresh coffee; He sees the coffee gets done, and comes out with a carafe air pot type thingy, pours the entire pot into that and turns and walks back to his desk.

now, anybody who actually knows me in the office, knows I’m a freaking addict. so here Asshole is, walking back to his desk, and he must have felt the daggers I was shooting into his back. Because he turned and said, “you know, people would like you a lot more if you just smiled more.”

My boss, who was done with whatever had come out to hear that comment. and to see my face. And she thought I was about to kick his ass. (and I might have been thinking about it.)

So now, it’s an official, with a placard and everything rule. “If the coffee is low, make a fresh cup.”

Another one that I’m quite proud of, is a “Must Report” rule. if your a member of management, and you see somebody doing good work… you must report that. the report goes into their file, with a quick blurb explaining what they were doing that was even modestly above and beyond. “picked up trash they didn’t have to”, “was extra patient with idiots”, ect. most things get a comment from their relevant manager as well. (nothing special or cheesy. just a, ‘hey thanks for taking care of that.’)

you’d be surprised the difference that makes.

My trigonometry teacher in high school had an extra credit corner. There were daily math puzzles and similar ways to get a couple of points here or there. I figured out that even if killed the rest of the term, I would finish with a low B. With the daily puzzles I could maybe bring my grade up to a more solid B, but an A was out of reach. Then I realized that one option was to bring in a cutout of a cartoon that had something to do with math. He was talking about cartoons from the newspaper, but this was in the 90s when digital media was starting to be a thing. I did a Yahoo! search for math cartoons and printed out hundreds of them. I printed anything that was even tangentially related and brought in a stack of papers an inch thick on the last day of class. It was enough. I got the grade by the slimiest of margins and the next year the extra credit corner had a 2-cartoon limit.

We were not allowed to play kickball at daycare because I accidentally broke the teacher’s face. We only had a soccer ball to play with & I kicked it right back at her head.

Then we got a rubber ball a month or so later & kickball was back on. For all of 20 minutes…

I kicked the ball over the fence & hit a moving car, almost causing an accident.

No more kickball again.

I got too comfortable at work and would walk around barefoot. The place was really clean. One morning a manager noticed and got weirded out. Next day there was a company wide announcement that shoes were required at all times.

I used the good old toaster in our closed department one morning just like always. But that morning my toast caught fire!

My coworker put it out but the smell of burning toast permeating the entire floor of the building. Where the public walks around.

Of course I hear “is something burning?” “Mommy I smell toast!” Etc.

We pretended it didn’t happen when security came around. “What? I smell it too! That’s so weird!”

Needless to say toasters were banned after that. We ended up getting a small toaster oven that’s better quality. Probably still not allowed but we like to live on the edge.

The main bicycle route from close to my house to a dedicated bike trail has more than 2 dozen signs between those mounted on posts and those painted in the lanes. It used to have a lot of stupid aggressive people in cars, driving back roads like it was their own personal racetrack. The city added the obnoxious level of signage to help because a lot of riders just stayed on the local highway. I didn’t ride the highway unless I had a reason. I had to go to the bank to deposit a check 2/26/14 and was riding down the hill to get to the trail when an idiot made a uturn into another car and very nearly killed me and left me partially disabled, unable to hold posture for very long. They added the signage around a year after my crash. There used to be 3 barely visible signs on that stretch.

I will share mine, although I didn’t do it alone, In my college they prohibited couples from going to do the internships together… Me and my gf were… Busy certain days and we didn’t assist those days so we got expelled from the company…

Not something that I’m glad to share, but still no complaints.