Thursday 19 April 2012

Playgroundlaw is back! Or was at least, briefly.

Here's a good one that I got by clicking 'random story'.

I actually believe this theory to be correct. At my school, it was strictly against the rules to try and leave the dinner hall before the plates had been tidied up and a final grace said, then we were supposed to file out in an orderly fashion, table by table as instructed. Which wasted about ten minutes of your precious lunch hour. If you tried to sneak out early by the door at the far end (away the teachers' table) and got caught, you were in big trouble. And you usually got caught, it was a suicidal thing to try.

My tactic for sneaking out early was to march up the dinner hall bold as brass, past the teachers' table, a curt nod to any teacher I knew who happened to catch my eye and then straight out of the big door at their end without any pretence that they hadn't noticed.

Never once did any one of them ever dare to call my bluff, despite I would have been in heaps of trouble if they'd ever bothered, given that "sneaking out of dinner early" was presumably a cumulative offence, i.e. had they ever bothered to check whether I had permission to go early (like a piano lesson) and established that I didn't have and never had, then surely the penny would have dropped that I had been sneaking out early regularly for years.

Weird.

5 comments:

Barnacle Bill said...

Mark I've just lost an evening of my life on that site!
Thanks though, the tears are still running down my cheeks from some of the tales!

FrankC said...

He wasn't "sneaking out" was he? Marching out "bold as brass" is definitely not sneaking.

Mark Wadsworth said...

BB, it's more something for work :-)

FC, yes, but I was trying to illustrate the concept of "immunity in excess". Sneaking was punishable, but I discovered i could get away with bold as brass.

Steven_L said...

It's the same if you are running a scam. The more blatent you are the less likely the Police will investigate you.

If you bolt and run at the first sign of a regulator you look dodgy, so they might.

James Higham said...

Joys of school life revisited. And the food was awful. We had a "cook" who made the salad in a rubbish bin.