Rules and regulations are often put in place to maintain order, safety, and efficiency in schools and workplaces. However, occasionally, even the most well-intentioned rules can have unforeseen consequences, leading to unexpected outcomes. Now, let’s delve into the realm of institutional policies and explore instances where a seemingly harmless rule ended up backfiring spectacularly, causing more harm than good. From school dress codes to workplace attendance policies, we uncover how one rule intended to streamline operations or promote certain values can inadvertently create chaos, dissent, and frustration among those it was meant to govern.
The pizza place I worked at in high school implemented a ZERO tolerance policy on employees taking home any food home that wasn’t paid for at non-employee prices. Any screw-ups or un-picked-up orders? trash.
The local homeless population started flocking to the store, and calling in bogus orders because they knew there would be free pizza in the dumpster every night.
In my dorm, if you did something that triggered the smoke/fire alarm, you had to do a safety presentation for everyone on your floor. This was intended to deter pranksters from pulling the alarm.
A guy on our floor was making grilled cheese in the kitchenette, and burned it, which legitimately triggered the fire alarm. Afterward, he explained, assuming that since it had been a legitimate alarm and not a prank, he wouldn’t have to do a presentation. He was, of course, wrong.
So, the next Wednesday night, the entire floor assembled, and we were treated to a thirty-minute safety presentation on the dangers of grilled cheese sandwiches. It contained literally nothing about fire safety. It was all choking hazards and cholesterol.
Our RA was furious, but the student pointed out that the write-up that he’d been given just said “safety presentation.”
If you return a library book late, your parents would have to return it and explain why it’s late. It worked about as well as you would think. The rule lasted a few months before they figured it wasn’t worth the cost of replacing all the books.
A few years ago, we weren’t allowed to stand in groups bigger than 4 at our school because this old teacher told us it was “gang behavior” and encouraging gang violence.
One day my entire year of like 100+ people got in a massive group screaming “gang gang” and throwing gang signs on our school field, so they had to bring every single teacher out to try and split us apart for a straight 20 minutes, best school day ever.
I worked for a tuxedo chain in the US midwest for years. During a prom season a few years back, a new policy in how we answered the phones came through.
The greeting was: “Thank you for calling (Company Name), Sales and Rental, Suits and Tuxedos, where we can save you some Cha-CHING on your prom tuxedo today!”
Now say that out loud a few times, and realize how much TIME it takes to say on the phone… each time it rings… all day… every day.
Several of us senior managers refused to say it, 1) because it sounded stupid and 2) because it took an eternity to say, and we’d often get interrupted halfway through. Our office would call each store (16 locations) and make sure we were saying it, then threatened to FIRE us if we didn’t.
Needless to say, we took our defense to the owner of the company, and he nixed it pretty quickly.
If you violated the dress code policy, you had to wear these really big gray sweatpants or sweatshirts that said DCV in big orange letters. (Dress Code Violation). It became a thing to get caught because they were apparently really comfortable. When the admin finally caught on that people were trying to get them on purpose, they changed it so that you got an in-school suspension. Jokes on them for that too. Lots of kids preferred that over being in class.
Any support call lasting longer than 25 minutes must be reported to higher-ups for review. If you have too many, no matter if it’s your fault or not, you get a disciplinary review. I implemented the rule of politely hanging up on a customer as close to 25 minutes as you can and calling them right back.
“I am sorry, I am experiencing a small issue with my phone. Is it ok if I call you right back? Gotcha”
Outgoing calls are not reported or recorded. It’s amazing.
We used to be allowed to stream music etc, on our computers. Spotify was an approved program and would come installed on your computer. someone complained about productivity despite us always doing our work, and so the banned streaming of any kind on our computers. but now everyone just listens on their phones, so you walk around the office, and nearly everyone has their phone out now, so it looks even worse when sponsors come into the office.
All printers were defaulted to print two-sided, and you were unable to disable that feature. The thought process was that this would:
Reduce paper waste by literally cutting consumption in half
Prevent people from printing out personal crap on work printers
This was decided by a committee of people, primarily from HR, who were tasked by the CEO to find ways to reduce costs and improve our corporate culture. To improve our culture, we basically decided that we’d be petty about work printers, and then we’d all sing together and have a coke.
What ended up happening instead was that corporate finance poop a brick because you can’t, or shouldn’t, print financials double-sided, and the IRS doesn’t take too kindly to getting filings delivered to them in that fashion. Reverse the policy? Nope. Just force areas to add blank pages into documents so that we trick the printers.
HR then implemented their new Gestapo program where you were rewarded for turning in anyone who was doing “personal business” on work computers or on work printers. The problem was that a stunning amount of “personal business” was actually stuff like employee benefits stuff. Filling out insurance forms, submitting flex pay receipts, scanning your transcripts for our tuition assistance program etc.
While the VP of HR decided to go full-on petty and say that employee benefit stuff wasn’t “work-related” and needed to be done at home on your personal PC, our freaking Chief Legal Officer came down as our voice of moral reasoning to say that was bullcrap and only then did some of the stupidity unfold. The printer thing was done officially once the CAO and CFO started getting double-sided financials. When they complained, their underlings gave them time studies to show the financial cost of having highly paid CPAs do crap like insert blank pages to trick printers instead of, you know, doing accounting and stuff.
The deputy head of our school banned fidget spinners (and rightly so, in his defense- they were everywhere). On the final day of year 11, someone hacked his school Intranet login and edited the bulletin, leaving a notice in his name, saying that fidget spinners were now not only unbanned but mandatory and that aficionados could come to his office and learn ‘tips and tricks’ from him.
When I was in eighth grade, my school implemented a new iPad program. We were recognized as an “Apple Certified School” or some bullcrap like that. The problem was that students were just using them to play games, the administration didn’t have any way to crack down on it, and teachers had no clue how to implement it in the classroom. We constantly played 2048 in class since it was impossible for them to block all the different iterations for it, and when they made it an instant demerit to be found playing it, even in lunch and homeroom, we just switched over to browser Tetris. It was so bad that one kid who sat right next to me didn’t even try to focus on school. He would spend the entire period playing on his iPad, then constantly complained that he kept scoring 50s and 60s on his tests.
A nursing home in our area thought it would be a great idea to bring back the traditional white nursing caps. They made it mandatory for all female nurses to wear during their shifts or be written up (and eventually pointing themselves out). Male nurses were not included.
About half of the staff quit within the first two weeks, and several started working at my facility. The others who stayed said that the residents and families of residents laughed and made fun of the nurses constantly. Those are pretty degrading and sexist comments.
Basically, about three months after this all went down, someone from corporate came in and fired all the directors who implemented the uniform change, and everything went back to normal. Several nurses stayed with my company, but a few went back when the rules changed.
One of the top managers for my work decided that everyone who’s worked there for 7+ years had to do a special online training course that consisted of two 400+ page volumes of “leadership” training followed by a 20 (25?) question test for each volume. You were expected to complete this within one year of being automatically signed up for the course. Failure to pass the tests or to complete the course by the end of that year rendered you ineligible for promotions and almost guaranteed to be laid off within a year.
So many people tried to take the guaranteed-severance-package option by not doing the course that they had to change the rule that you wouldn’t get laid off or not promoted, but you still “had” to do the course. People still didn’t do it.
That guy finally left shortly after, and a new guy replaced him and promptly chucked that course and the whole idea of it into the garbage.
When I was in school, I was part of a board game club that just wasn’t very good – we never won a competition, and it led to a lot of negative vibes among the students. Anyway, they just decided to ban board games in general – anyone who got caught playing would be put into detention.
A few weeks go by, and I’m asked to go the store room, and guess what I found? A stash of all the old board games. You bet I shoved a chessboard up my butt.
Delivery driver here. The manager was tired of the higher-ups complaining about our delivery times (how long it takes to leave and get back to the store). She implemented a 22-minute delivery time rule. If your average went over for three consecutive days, it was a write-up or termination. LOL ok.
Tell me how we’re supposed to go to the far end of our delivery range (10 minutes one way on a good day but 15-20 on heavy traffic times). Mess us for getting stuck behind trains! There are a lot of train tracks around town, and you can get stuck for 10+ min. There’s also a ton of variables. Bad weather, bad traffic, customer has to count out and pay you in quarters, the customer doesn’t have cash, so you have to call the store to run a card. One regular customer is a prison, so some times we can wait for 20 min just for them to walk across the grounds to meet with us.
Some days we are ducking slammed and don’t have enough drivers. Most of us try our hardest, but 22 min or less for our far-away deliveries, especially if it’s a double+ is extreme. Most places have 30 minutes or less for their delivery times, which makes sense. Didn’t last long, but we still have a computer to dictate how long things will take. No variables are accounted for. Now we just fudge the numbers by manipulating dispatch.
Back when I worked at Disneyland, they had a system like this, and I believe most (if not all) departments followed it. If you called in sick, you received 3 points. You could call in sick for up to 4 consecutive shifts on the same 3 points. On the 5th shift, you were put out on a LOA and required a note to return. If you were late, you received 1.5 points. Depending on your status or seniority, you were written up based on the number of points you accrued in a select amount of time. For example, 9 points in 3 months, 12 points in 6 months, 24 points in a year, etc. The points would fall off 1 year from the date you initially received them.
Here’s the kicker: they also have a call-in option called “dependent.” A dependent call was 0 points for up to 3 consecutive shifts. When that was first instituted, it was meant for people who have dependents that they need to care for at home, namely children or elderly parents. At the time, you had to qualify for it by having these dependents listed on your tax forms with HR. If you didn’t, you got 3 points. Later, Disneyland was forced to open the option to all Cast Members but revised the policy to limit all dependent calls to single shifts (no more consecutive shifts) and to cap them at 4 in a year. They were use-them-or-lose-them, and they’d reset on January 1. Furthermore, the CM would have to say who they were caring for (kid, mom, etc.)
Do you know how often people called in dependent on January 1? Most of the time, when they left their VM, we could still hear the party going on in the background. It wasn’t unusual to have massive staffing issues on January 1 because people who were not scheduled to work didn’t want to come in because they had already received the day off or wouldn’t answer the phone. And these kids were calling in to care for their grandmothers. Seriously.
I don’t know if Disneyland still uses that points system, but in theory, you could miss about 25% of the year if you watched your points carefully, balanced your sick and dependent calls, and were never late when you did show up.
When I was in kindergarten, during the morning announcements one day, they came on and said, “And please, no throwing snowballs. There is a chance you might accidentally get some rocks in them.” You could see on the faces of all 20-some students the realization that “OMG, we could put rocks in them!”
I’m a programmer. In a previous job, the developers and teams were measured by the number of feature requests they completed.
We figured out to subdivide everything to blow it up into the maximum number of feature requests possible. A manager might request a new report. We’d set up separate feature tickets for “create button,” “make button blue,” “make button respond when clicked,” “implement business logic,” “display results in a grid,” “allow sorting of the grid,” and so on. We’d subdivide a 1-day task into 20 one-hour tasks.
Management loved it! Our team looked twenty times as productive, despite deliberately slowing ourselves down with red tape.
In an attempt to make school more enjoyable, I guess they put a jukebox in the cafeteria. This was in 2001, so there were a bunch of generic pop songs in it and a handful of classic rock songs.
My school was full of rednecks, and they wanted country music, so the only song that ever got played was “That Smell” by Skynyrd. For a week, everyone eating lunch got to hear that song like 5-7 times. I say a week because that was how long it took before some stoner/tweaker got fed up and cut the power cord.
The new manager got rid of the sofa in the break room so people couldn’t nap on their hour-long lunch break. No one overslept or took the pee, but it was good to have the option on a tough day.
The Stoner guy started sleeping in other places, including in-between walls and in the warehouse. That’s when we started losing him and couldn’t find him as he’d go into a deeper sleep and was less likely to be disturbed.
We’d find him in between walls and shelves. It was a DIY store that had been something else years before, so there were random partition walls and oddly laid out shelving units everywhere, a real crap show of a store layout. He had quite a few places to hide in and nap.
He didn’t lose his job somehow. That place had a hard time hiring.
They made a new rule where we had to ask permission to use the restroom during lunch.
We all coordinated, and the whole cafeteria would raise their hands at once to request to go. They responded by sending us two at a time. We did this for a few days, then changed our procedure to everyone just getting up at once and going to the restroom without permission.
They didn’t ever officially do away with the rule, but the teachers on duty in the lunch room eventually just stopped enforcing it.
As GM of a small business, I had an informal ‘Just shoot me a text if you will be late or are sick and can’t come in’ rule.
That policy backfired when one employee texted me 5 days in a row being late. They lived closer to the office than I did, and I only had a 7-minute commute. They got all pissy when I finally wrote them up for being late, claiming, ‘I thought we just had to send you a text!’
So the rule went to ‘Just call me if you are sick and not able to come in.’
That worked OK until this past week.
First, one employee called in 3 days in a row, intentionally calling before the office opened, knowing that I and my location manager wouldn’t be there. He got rid of his cell phone about a month ago and claimed to not have a landline. He would call from an ‘unknown caller’ ID, so we couldn’t even call him back.
Second, I had a very early morning flight on Saturday, and all my staff knew I would be out of town and when. I landed after 3 hours to find my phone had been blowing up. One employee decided to wait until he knew I was on the flight to text me that he would not be coming in. That left me trying to arrange employees at 9 am on a Saturday morning, without access to my computer or scheduling Excel stuff, in a city 1500 km away.
Now the rule is ‘If you are sick, you need to call and speak directly with either the GM or a location manager. Texting and voicemail are no longer accepted.
The rule at my workplace was that if you were late, you had to bring donuts for everyone.
People quickly figured out that the cost of being 4 hours late was to bring donuts. As a result, if you were running late, you just had a slow, easy morning and stopped by to pick up donuts on your way in.
Our boss, who had put the rule into place, thought it was funny and just let it continue. He was an easygoing guy and REALLY good at motivating people. Letting them get away with this sort of thing meant they stayed late or showed up after hours for emergencies.
No running during recess. It was made because some kid in the 2nd grade ran and tripped. So for whatever reason, they restricted running for all grades K – 5th. Everyone should know that when you ask a 5 – 10-year-old not to do something, that’s the next thing they’re going to do. They started running in the halls, the cafeteria, the classrooms, and you bet your butt they ran outside. After a week, the teachers stopped enforcing it, and everyone stopped caring.
A school in my area jacked up the cost of the parking pass. People protested by not buying the pass. Instead, they rode the bus. The funny thing is the county really relies on juniors and seniors driving because they don’t have enough busses for all the students. The parking pass fee dropped. People drove again. Don’t ever let them tell you that driving to school is a privilege. They NEED you to drive to school.
Our school made it so you couldn’t play dodgeball anymore. So what happened was that the gym teachers came up with this new game called “Fireball.” The rules are there are balls in the middle of the gym, people go on two separate teams, and if you get hit, you’re out. If you catch a ball, you- okay, so it was basically dodgeball. Then Fireball was banned. So now there’s this new game called “Pinball.” Which isn’t involve the machines, unfortunately, but it’s basically dodgeball/ Fireball, but there are bowling pins that need to be knocked over as well. I think they just gave up after a while.
Freshman year of high school we had access to vending machines for drinks and snacks. Senior and Junior classes beat those machines up terribly to the point they were cutting the power cords with bolt cutters and continually breaking/scratching/defacing the graphics, or spraypainting the vending machines with black so you couldn’t see inside. Cut to next year, and the machines have been revoked for only senior use. They were enclosed in lockable outside areas and while you couldn’t get into them outside of the senior lunch period, you could climb over the wall and get into them and then climb onto them to get back out. We had upwards of 50 students get stuck in there in an attempt to get snacks and a drink between classes, and the rule was revoked pretty fast. They eventually got rid of the machines and opened a snack bar at the school, but it was pretty funny walking passed there during passing period and seeing a kid stuck, unable to climb back out.
I used to work for a production company that employed a lot of really skilled, award-winning editors. There were producers and executives and directors, but the real money makers, the people who really made the company, were the editors, so the company was basically centered around them.
The executives would always order in food for the editors, and the editors would usually eat in their offices while doing their thing.
One day the executives decided to cut paid lunches to save money. The editors all thought this was a cheap move, so they’d go out for lunch and sometimes stay out for like 3 hours. There was nothing the company could do, really, because these editors were top of their game and if Warner Bros. heard that the editor they always used had left, they might leave, too.
So the company couldn’t do anything. They saved maybe $15 dollars per person per day, but lost like 4 hours per person per day.
My 4 years of high school were full of my school trying out new policies and procedures to use in the future.
In my sophomore year, my school decided to make tests count for 100% of the grade and homework count for 0% (but it was still assigned). And as you’d expect, kids did absolutely no homework. The ones that didn’t retain information well (or were bad test takers) struggled pretty hard to make the grade without homework padding it. Our failure rate was pretty high that year.
Then my junior year, they brought homework grades back and made a new rule that there were no due dates nor penalties for turning in late work for your 6 weeks (we didn’t do quarters). As long as it was before the next 6 weeks started, you were good.
This led to students doing no homework until the last few days of the 6 weeks, and teachers had to accept and grade them all before grades were due. This put teachers under immense stress by causing them to work insane hours and spend every hour at home grading, which made them very irritable and more likely to just shove pointless activities and busywork at us until they could finish grading.
I’ve told this story before, but my high school tried to crack down on people wearing their ties too short, as was the fashion. It got to the stage where anything except completely pristine uniforms would get you detention — which, coming up to exam season, was one more thing we didn’t want to deal with. In protest at what was widely seen as a ridiculous rule, ties started getting longer and longer — one foot, two feet, two and a half feet, as long as people could get them.
It culminated in one girl sewing two ties together into a five-foot beast that trailed on the floor as she walked and resulted in the Deputy Head having a screaming fit one day about how disrespectful we all were to the uniform codes. After that, the teachers quietly gave up on the new hardline approach to uniforms, and everything went back to normal.
No short skirts rule at my high school resulted in a sharp increase in yoga pants. All the guys at my school saw this as a net gain and did a good job of not advertising our collective appreciation for fear of ruining a good thing.
My Dad was a corpsman with the Marines doing high desert training in the Mojave. They had a big problem with unidentified snakebites, ie, people would get bit but not identify the snake, so it was hard to find the right antidote. So my dad got all the Marines in a room and said, “If you get bit by a snake, bring it back here so we can identify it. Not even a full week later, they had to alter the wording a bit because a marine was bit by a rattlesnake and decided to bring it back without killing it. This man had carried this snake all the way back to base ALIVE, and the snake decided to let him know exactly how he felt about that by repeatedly biting his arm the entire time. Needless to say, that marine went home, and they made sure to hold another meeting where they told everyone to KILL the snake and then bring it back.
He kept the arm. They got him to the base hospital in roughly 50 minutes and gave him anti-venom. He was out for 6 weeks. This was in 1995 at 29 Palms (He calls it 29 stumps) 4th Marine Division, i.e., reservist marines out of Buffalo, New York.
At my college, my dorm used to have this thing called Malt Mondays. Someone would go around knocking on doors at around 8 or 9 pm asking if you wanted to order a 40oz. Then they would go on a run to the liquor store and buy them for people who ordered them. We would then all hang out outside, drinking 40s and listening to music until security came and told us to take it inside. It was a fun tradition we had, but the dean hated it. He decided to fund his own Malt Mondays, but instead of malt liquor, he wanted to draw people in with free chocolate malts. What ended up happening is people who did the regular Malt Mondays and wanted a chocolate malt would just go to that one first, get a free treat, and then leave to go and drink 40s.
My high school’s student council decided to use their funds to build a bike cage. The idea was to reduce theft. Bikes go in at the start of the day and are locked up until the end of the day. There would still be racks outside the cage for students who needed to leave in the middle of the day (dentist, cutting class, etc).
I told the other council members that the bike cage would cause a huge increase in traffic as what was previously an open bike rack would now have one exit and entrance. Additionally, it would actually increase theft as people could now cut locks in the cage without worrying about someone looking at them through the covered fence (they were planning a chainlink fence with slats in it).
GUESS WHAT HAPPENED??!? Bike theft increased, and traffic around the bike cage became a nightmare.
I quit the student council after they made that decision.
I worked for a place that did RMA repairs on PCs. Most of our clients were businesses like hospitals and factories. Anyway, as I was touring the workshop during my orientation, the guy taking me around took me to the QA department. Once all builds or repairs are made, they’re sent to the QA department for a final inspection before going out to the customer. The guy jokingly said, “We used to pay the QA guys bonuses for every mistake they found on a build.” I started laughing. The only problem was it wasn’t a joke. They actually paid bonuses to the QA people who found mistakes on builds. For anyone not familiar with the internal workings of a PC it could take less than 3 seconds to completely render a computer inoperable. Heck, you could loosen a connection just by inspecting it. Luckily that policy ended before I was hired. I mean, can you imagine giving someone a bonus for finding screw-ups when it would take almost no effort to make a screw-up and then claim you found it?
You now need 40 hours of community service to graduate. It’s recommended that all freshmen do 10 hours a year while the seniors start as soon as possible to get the 40 hours out of the way.
The rule was gone the day before graduation because they would have had less than a 10% graduation rate that year, and it would have made the school look terrible.
They did this to try to increase their reputation of being a good school. All the other schools in the area are trash, though, so I really don’t know why.
I worked at a high school in LES NYC a few years ago. Was a large school with 3000 students. As a teacher, you realize fights happen. We all know they do, and the best thing to do is make sure those involved are punished and leave it at that.
This was our principal’s first year in the building. She wasn’t a new principal, as in brand new, but she was new to our school. Our school wasn’t horrible, but it was declining.
A fight happens during the first period on the basement floor. Security is called, and those involved are sent to the deans. Whatever happens, no big deal, right?
The principal comes on announcements 2nd period. First, she acknowledges there was a fight, which most already knew about. It’s a high school, after all. Then she says, “No student will be allowed to leave to use the bathroom the rest of the day! Teachers do not allow students to leave to use the bathroom!”
Well, this wasn’t received well. Students decide to flood the halls, yelling and shouting. This happens on all floors (six total). Students refused to go to class and just shouting, yelling, running in the halls. I opened my class for the good kids and got in as many as I could.
Security couldn’t do anything. This went on for 2-3 periods, do this was the prime lunch period. Most of these kids said screw it and just left.
Around 6th period an assembly was held. Those students who remained were put in the auditorium, where they were lectured by the administration. The kids who did nothing wrong, mind you.
Eventually, word gets out to the NY Post that there was a “riot.” It wasn’t but a reporter asking kids you know what’s going to happen?
She turned out to be an awful principal, and after more incidents and bad press, we ran her out within a span of 2 years.
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.
At our highschool, the library was one of the main places to hang out during a free period. It was common for kids to ‘book’ each other. ‘Booking’ was a prank where you would sneak a random library book into someone’s bag and watch as the RFID tag in the book triggered the alarm when the person tried to leave. It always caused a big commotion.
In order to combat the booking situation, the librarians implemented stricter and stricter policies. When the alarm went off, they started blocking the exit to all students until the offending book was located. This made tons of innocent bystanders late for class but only encouraged more and more bookings. Then they made it so that if you were the victim of a booking, you got an automatic detention. But of course, this only encouraged people to book each other even more! At the height of it, kids were self-booking, kamikaze style, then making big displays of annoyance at getting detention for not even doing anything
When I graduated from high school, they had just completed the installation of a new football field (the little rubber pieces, not sure what it’s called). They sent out a notice saying that girls were not allowed to wear heels in order to protect the new field. (We’ll ignore the fact that they were setting 500 metal folding chairs on the new field.) Most of the class graduated barefoot, wearing the ugliest, dirtiest shoes they could find or in cleats. Basically, anything to make a point about how absurd the rule was.
If I recall, there were a lot of embarrassed parents upset with how the pictures of their recent graduates came out. The rule was abolished after that.
I was stationed aboard the USS Harry S. Truman from ’02 – ’05. At one point during a deployment, the Capitan found a candy wrapper in a P-way. What’s the obvious solution to finding trash? Geedunk (snacks and sodas from vending machines) were only to be consumed on the mess deck. Anyone caught eating candy anywhere else on the ship would be put on report. Now, it’s not like we organized a boycott, but the only reason to buy something from the vending machines would be to eat it elsewhere. If you were going to eat on the mess deck, might as well hit a chow line. 3 days of zero sales from the machines and the supply officer talked some sense into the Capitan.
At my elementary school, you had the choice of going either outside or to the gym for recess. The gym was right across the lunch room (They were really the same room split by a retractable wall), so to prevent kids from going there to line up at the door between the lunch room and gym, they made it so you had to be participating in what the gym teacher put up for recess; anyone not participating got kicked out of the gym.
The problem was that they never sent out an email to the gym teacher regarding that rule, so to no one’s surprise, almost everyone who went to the gym lined up at the door, and the line wrapped around the entire gym.
Not sure if it is still the case, as I graduated many years ago.
But where I went to college, the hospitals had a thing where if someone came in with alcohol poisoning and they were underage, then they’d also call the cops. So, of course, what happened was when underage kids really should have gone to the hospital, their friends wouldn’t call an ambulance because of fear the cops would punish people. Luckily, while I was there, there weren’t many deaths due to alcohol poisoning, but there were more than 0.
For clarity, I wasn’t saying the people calling would get punished by the cops. I was saying the person with alcohol poisoning would be punished. But people still didn’t want to call for fear that their friend may get in legal trouble.
