One of the things that has constantly gotten me into trouble in my life is that I’ve never been a rules guy.

Maybe I’m a rebel, maybe I’m an individual, or maybe I’m just a perverse idiot, but the surest way to get me to not do something, or to do something I’m not supposed to do, is to tell me it’s covered by a rule. When I hear the word “rule,” my hackles immediately go up. And that’s a particular problem when one of the rules involves not having raised hackles.

At my paper we have few, if any, rules. In fact, we have so few that this place would give screaming nightmares to even the most relaxed human resources professional. The publisher has given me pretty much two rules. One is “don’t get the paper sued,” which is pretty much a standard rule at publications. The other is that he doesn’t care when I’m in the office, or how much, as long as I get my work done. Because of various personal commitments, I’ve been working a lot from home this summer, so that rule is pretty easy to follow. This is also the first time in my career I’ve been on salary – reporters, believe it or not, are hourly employees and have to fill out time sheets or punch a clock – so I don’t have to keep track of work hours vs. non-work hours as long as I follow the second part of the rule.

The lack of rules makes this one of the more unusual places I’ve worked. I’ve worked at other places, both in the newspaper biz and outside it, where the list of work rules made a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica look like a pamphlet.

One of my former employers, which had a horror of sexual harassment lawsuits, had all kinds of rules intended to prevent that. One of the funniest meetings I’ve ever been to was convened by the human resources person to tell us we weren’t allowed to drop any F-bombs in the office. Of course, she went the entire meeting without using the word herself. She all but tied herself in verbal knots to avoid using the dreaded word. I was sorely tempted to yank her chain by raising my hand and saying, “I don’t understand. Exactly what word aren’t we supposed to use?” It would’ve almost been worth being fired just to watch her squirm.  Making her do that was a rule violation, unfortunately.

I guess one of the reasons I have issues with rules is that I’ve so often had to follow rules that just don’t really work, or that were arrived at by some management factotum who’s never actually done the job for which he’s making the rules. You wind up going from Chicago to Los Angeles by way of  Washington, D.C., because of some guy who can’t read a map but thinks it sounds like a good idea for some reason. And I’ve also noticed that if that particular factotum is underemployed, making rules is a great way to justify his job.  Lord save us from the person who has to do that.

The worst rules, of course, are the unwritten or generally-accepted-but-never-codified ones. Breaking those not only gets you in trouble; it makes you look/feel like a moron because you’re supposed to just know. And even if you don’t, everybody else does.

I know, I know, rules – even unwritten ones – are necessary. Without rules, we’d have anarchy. Maybe it isn’t the rules themselves that are the problem, but the way they are applied. In case you haven’t noticed, our society has evolved a set of rules that are supposed to be for everybody, but are for some people more than others. And those are mostly the unwritten ones. One of the rules, for example, is that if you screw up, you’re supposed to take responsibility for it and somehow pay a price. Yet so many of the people who ruined our economy and threw people out of their houses and jobs have skipped merrily away, better off than they were before. Where are the rules to cover that situation? That explains the general undercurrent of pissiness that pervades society; it’s hard not to get irritated when you see so many people break the rules and not just pay no penalty, but prosper and have the price paid by others.

The other problem with rules, and rule-makers, is that they ignore a fundamental part of life – ambiguity. Few things in life are ever clear-cut, but those who are fond of rules treat life as though it is always black and white.

That’s even true of rules that really, in theory, ought to be good. The Golden Rule would seem to be a great policy, but even that turns out to not always be true. George Bernard Shaw said, “Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.” Many a marriage has foundered on people not realizing that, and that’s only one example.

The irony in this society is that Americans are supposed to love a rebel. We think of the guy who breaks the rules as a deeply romantic figure; even people like the Hell’s Angels, who are generally deeply nasty, have been at times romanticized as people who live their own lives, damn the torpedoes and go full-speed ahead. There’s a fascination there.

But then, our society doesn’t really love a rebel. Really, people love a rebel in the abstract, but if he does something that really makes them uncomfortable, suddenly the rules are invoked to show why he’s wrong. It’s one of the more deeply hypocritical aspects of American culture.

I’d say more on the subject, but my posts generally run 900-1,000 words and I have a personal rule against going over that.