by Stephanie
Rules and regulations are everywhere we go. We live our lives according to what we're allowed to do and when we're allowed to do it.
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And, of course, if we disobey said rules, there are usually some pretty hefty consequences. But why do people like to bend (or break) the rules so much?
Psychologists refer to this need to rebel as a "psychological reactance." It basically means we tend to act out when we feel our freedom is being threatened.
Humans typically don't like being placed under constraints, and we only have to look at how people reacted to living under new Covid restrictions to know that is true. And some people find it more difficult than others to abide by certain laws and traditions.
But sometimes, the rules aren't quite that serious. Sometimes, they're just there as a guide, or perhaps they've been put in place because certain people have caused trouble in the past.
Those are the kind of rules we're here to talk about today. Rules that may never have even existed if it weren't for some particularly mischievous people.
Reddit userTheBlackTemplar125went to the r/AskReddit community to ask the question, "What rules were put in place because of you?" With more than 16K responses, the Reddit community didn't disappoint with their answers.
We have 30 of the best mischief-makers' responses for you below. Keep scrolling to read about the rules that wouldn't need to exist if it weren't for them.
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In middle school, I would use sharpies to tattoo myself. Other kids thought it was cool, so I started charging $1 per drawing wherever they wanted.
Principal found out, and after I wouldn’t stop, she put a ban on sharpies for the entire school. Even the teachers couldn’t bring them in. I’m a tattoo artist now.
- u/Orbitalconfusion
2. Girl Power
School dress code. Girls must wear skirts. We lived in the country. Kids had to walk a half-mile on a dirt road to catch the bus.
Told the school that in cold weather, my girls would wear warm clothing, including pants. They changed the dress code.
High school wouldn’t let my daughter take auto shop. I talked to the school. They let her in, and the following year auto shop was open to all. These incidents occurred in the 1960s.
- u/Free-Cartographer-26
3. "Your Dad"
In history class in high school, there were about 10 of us really close friends. We would take every opportunity to make “your mom” jokes.
A couple months into class, the teacher made us sign a “treaty” promising to stop making fun of each other’s moms. We signed it and started making fun of each other’s dads.
- u/MoreMegadeth
4. All The Rules
I used to work for a company that had flex hours; you could work all you wanted but no overtime. So I would work 4-10 hour days and then take three day weekends. That lasted for about two months before my employer made a rule that we had to be there five days a week.
Then I used to come in at 4am to avoid traffic, skip lunch, then leave at noon, and nobody noticed for about six months, but they figured out I was not coming back after lunch and changed the policy so I could not come to work until 8am.
So I started working lots of extra time and started banking my flex time and saved up about 430 hours by October (10-hours a week of OT) and was informed by HR that I could not roll it over in the new year so I scheduled a 12-week vacation. Yeah, they made a new rule over that too.
When COVID hit, and I had to stay home, I figured out I could do a side gig, so I got a second work from home job and worked both until I got caught, and they laid me off. After that, there was a new rule.
I just like hacking the systems they set up; they were so difficult to work for that I wanted to figure out a way to make it work for me.
- Reddit: u/Phat3lvis
5. Wrap It Up
Not a rule but a reminder to "please be respectful to our guest speakers." I was on a Zoom call, and I didn't realize my cat unmuted me when he stepped on the keyboard. When the guy asked if there were any further questions, I said aloud to myself, "yeah, can we wrap this s**t up so we can all get on with our lives?"
- u/disapearingelephants
6. A Bouncy Operation
“No bouncy balls in the bathrooms.”
In middle school, we had a school store that sold supplies and these tiny bouncy balls (I still don’t know why).
The bathrooms in this school were narrow and made of brick from floor to ceiling. I discovered that if you threw a bouncy ball in the bathroom as hard as you can, it would bounce until the end of time. Get 3-4 of your buddies in the bathroom with a ball of their own; you now have an epic game of life and death. It became the most popular sport the school had ever seen. People were even placing bets.
When one kid had to explain that his bruises didn’t come from his parents, my operation was shut down.
- Reddit: u/AskMeAboutMyTie
7. Silence Is Golden
No sign language during silent lunch punishment.
My lunch period was so loud we got put on silent lunch for over a month straight. I decided the only clear solution was to teach my entire table sign language so we could still talk without getting in trouble. Apparently, it was "unfair" to the kids who didn't know how to sign, so we had to stop.
- u/future-unperson
8. Pizza For Everyone
Back in the day, a radio station had a weekly trivia contest. The prize was a free pizza and movie rental.
Somehow my mom figured out which book they were using for the trivia questions. She bought it and memorized all the answers.
Each week we would call in immediately. Sometimes we were the first, but even if we weren’t, it didn’t matter because other people were usually just guessing. We won almost every time.
Even though we changed up who would actually make the call, they eventually figured out we were all from the same household. So they made it a rule you couldn’t win if your family had already won in the last month or whatever.
Up till then, we enjoyed a lot of free pizzas.
- u/cavendar
9. A Good Rule
As a kindergartner, I once fell asleep on the bus. When I woke up, the bus was in the garage, and I had to yell to get someone to get me out.
So to this day, every bus driver in my school district needs to walk to the back of the bus and check every seat before they park the bus. Seems like a good rule to have.
- u/pikkdogs
10. Dad's Change Diapers Too
I got the Ryan’s Steak House buffets in Louisville, KY, to put baby changing stations in the men’s bathrooms back in the ’90s.
- Reddit: u/middleagethreat
11. No More Flaming Chickens
The military school I went to. After me, an adult is required to check the parade cannon to ensure it is clear and closely monitor the students as they load it.
There is to never be another flaming rubber chicken flying over the parade grounds ever again. Circa 1989.
- u/RjBass3
12. Keep It Short
The valedictorian speech at my high school now needs to be reviewed by the principal before the ceremony for content and length.
- u/swankpoppy
13. No Cheating
The school website is no longer accessible out of school hours.
So you know how in Harry Potter, there are 4 houses and they compete or something like that? Well, our school does that. Every kid is put into 1 of 4 houses, and they earn "house points" throughout the school year. At the end, whoever has the most points gets a bonus field trip to someplace cool (previous rewards include Crazy Pins, Sky Zone, and this one place with a bunch of bouncy houses).
Anyways, I was poking around the school website, and I found an archive of all the winners over the years. When I scrolled down, there was a button that said "Add Points," and naturally, I clicked it.
I was redirected to a new page that had 3 things: a dropdown, a text box, and a button. Select the house, input point value, add points. I added 25 points to my house as a test and saw that it worked. Over the following days, I'd slowly add more points.
Eventually, some teacher got suspicious of my house staying in 1st place for so long (rankings typically change daily - it's a very close competition). They checked the logs and saw that there were being points added after school hours.
Unfortunately, they disabled access to the site after 3:00 P.M. on Monday-Friday, and you can't use it on the weekends. Sorta my own fault, but everything we do on our school computers is tracked, so I couldn't add the points during school hours; otherwise, they would've found out it was me.
- Reddit: u/Irregular_Chaos
14. Programming "Teqhniques"
Well, I doubt they're teaching the class these days. But when I took "Advanced Programming Techniques Using FORTRAN," our professor added a line to all our projects stating that all programs had to be written in FORTRAN and only in FORTRAN.
When a student asked why he'd added that, he told the class to ask me. I just grinned. I still got a perfect score on the one where I had a FORTRAN shell call an assembler subroutine which did 99.99% of the work. Heh.
- u/HowdyDoobie
15. No Blindfolds
A local amusem*nt park added a "no blindfolds on rollercoasters" rule because of me.
When I was in middle school, my friend and I thought it would enhance the overall experience if we blindfolded ourselves on the biggest roller coaster at a local amusem*nt park. We got one of those pictures they take on the ride, and there we are, blindfolded in the middle of a tunnel, having the time of our lives. Looking back, we easily could have strangled ourselves or worse because we literally just used scarves tied around our heads. Next year we went back to the same roller coaster, and they had added a "no blindfolds or loose accessories" to the list of rules before the ride.
- u/idontcare4205
16. Personal Delivery
I got our HR box taken away at work because the HR lady threatened not to pay us if we missed a clock in or clock out (in our defense, the phones didn't always work, and the clock in system was really unreliable), and I printed out the law stating that was illegal, highlighted it, and put it in her box when no one was around.
She threw an unholy fit and tried to figure out who put it in her box, and from then on, everything had to be handed in personally, lol.
- u/Pollowollo
17. Positive Changes
I had to sue my school district back in high school just to leave special education after fighting it for over a decade.
Special education students now have the right built into every single IEP to attend any standard education class in their grade level or below, earn the associated credits, and also go to both health education and driver's education. They could do *none* of that before the lawsuit.
- Reddit: u/robexib
18. Dogs Are Family Too
I graduated with my Ph.D. in April 2020.
As graduation was virtual, they asked us to take a nice picture that would pop up when they read our names off. The email said family that had been integral to your journey could be in your picture.
So I took a picture with my dog and sent it in.
The next day they sent another email that said you couldn't have pets or family in your picture.
I never sent them another picture, so they used it.
- Reddit: u/alpacaification
19. "Briefly"
My high school biology teacher added "briefly" to all of the essay questions on his tests and quizzes because, if I was bored, I would write unnecessarily long answers in really small handwriting just to take up time.
He pointed out the word "briefly" when handing out a test and said to me, "I added that for you." So I made my next answer even longer out of spite.
- u/HawaiianShirtsOR
20. The Party God
Freshman year of high school, I had to give an oral presentation on a random Greek god. This was at a Christian school, for context. I got Dionysus, so naturally, I spent many hours researching on YouTube how to act drunk (wasn't much of a partier, so I didn't know) and pretended to be absolutely wasted for my presentation. It was a great success, but my teacher unsurprisingly banned Dionysus for the following years. It didn't help that Dionysus was basically the god of orgies and b********y too, if I remember correctly.
- Reddit: u/nadirbahama
21. No Skipping
You can no longer skip to the end of training videos at Wendy's.
I completed about 10 hours of this training when it was implemented, after I'd already been working there a year, in about 45 minutes.
Open, skip, skip, skip, skip, do test, rinse and repeat. I was quite proud of my "estimated time 45 minutes, time to completion 2 minutes."
My store, which is a franchise location, got a call from corporate like an hour later. I didn't have to redo any of it though.
- u/Thegungoesbangbang
22. "TAKKA TAKKA TAKKA... DING!"
No typewriters in class.
I was kind of a s**t kid, and while my school allowed us to use laptops, I would play video games. Primarily Warcraft 3. In class. No sound or anything, so I wasn't being a complete nuisance, but I wasn't doing my work.
A teacher told me I couldn't use my laptop.
I happened to have a 1950's Remington Quiet-Riter portable, all-mechanical typewriter. It was anything *but* quiet, with all of the TAKKA TAKKA TAKKA TAKKA... DING! you'd expect from a typewriter.
After one full day of studiously taking notes and doing my assignments via typewriter, my teacher said I could use my laptop as long as I didn't bring the typewriter to class.
- Reddit: u/HelpfulCherry
23. It's An Emo Thing
"No makeup."
I went to an all-boys school, and apparently, this never came up until me and my emo friends rocked up in black eyeliner and lipstick.
- u/DanteWrath
24. A Bit Soapy
"Don't trick your siblings or friends into eating soap."
I would cut bars of dove soap into pieces, wrap them in old candy wrappers, and pretend like they were mints. I was 8 or 9.
- u/Applesintheorchard
25. Making Plans
My older brother got a curfew enforced at Boy Scout camp when one of the leaders noticed him walking around the area in the daytime with his eyes closed, counting steps. He may have just been practicing being blind, but the adults assumed he was figuring out how to get around at night without lights so he could get into some kind of mischief. Which, knowing my brother, was also possible.
PS: If you're one of those people saying "BUT BUT BUT," you're not thinking like an 11-year-old.
- u/f*ck_you_Reddit_Nazi
26. "Sorry Guys"
My junior high made a rule against yo-yos in class after I tried to do a trick, and my yo-yo flew across the room and broke a glass beaker set. I’m sorry, guys.
- u/FartAttack911
27. It's Personal
Local job center no longer has working USB ports on public PCs because I found private files on multiple PCs with far too much private information about strangers.
- u/BelthazorDK
28. Toasty
I put a croissant in one of those hotel toasters. It soon became engulfed in flames and needed extinguishing. The next day at breakfast, they made a sign that said, “if you’d like your croissant toasted, please ask a member of staff.”
- u/thatbitchlol
29. "I’m kind of a legend"
Back in the 1980s, we were allowed to pick our own high school classes. In my freshman year, I picked two gym classes back to back, and the school said no one had ever done that before. Only one gym class was allowed to be scheduled after that. I’m kind of a legend.
- u/nuF-roF-redruM
30. Yeah, What About Ivan And Bobby?
At my elementary school, I was the third person to break my arm after falling off the track slide on the play structure.
Everyone treated me as if it was all my fault… But what about Ivan and Bobby, huh? WHAT ABOUT THEM?!
- Reddit: u/BondsOfEarthAndFire
So, there you have it. 30 rules that may never have existed if it weren't for these cheeky mischief-makers.
Has a rule ever been put into place because of something you did? Or have you suffered the consequences of bending such rules?
You can share your stories with us in the comment section below. We love hearing from you!
