Unenforceable

Something that has amused me since I was a child is seeing rules that are, in practice, totally unenforceable. In modern society, many people seem to have adopted a belief in a sort of specter that punishes “rule-breaking” in an absolute, omniscient manner – I can’t imagine how else to explain the behavior some people have.

Some rules are dumb. The people who wrote them know that they’re unenforceable, they’re simply hoping that you don’t know. An example I saw recently: an employment offer that required a “minimum one year of service.” Here’s the thing – it’s theoretically possible to impose some penalty there. For instance, you could say “at the end of your first year of service, you get $X in bonus, but we don’t pay that out unless you stay the whole year.” But this offer had nothing of the sort. It was just “if you work for us, you have to stay for at least a year.”

Okay, think about that for like two seconds. How on Earth would you enforce it? As an employer, you pretty much have exactly one stick to apply as punishment, and that’s termination. So if I quit… you’ll fire me?