March 27, 2026
We need a rule:
If you are waiting in line to pay the $3.00 toll to cross the bridge, a toll that is announced in big black letters which you can see for miles, and then you wait until you get to the window to fish around for your wallet thus holding everyone up: The agent gets on the loudspeaker asks everyone in line if they’d like to have you drive your car off the bridge into the Intracoastal Waterway. No worries…if no one says ‘yes’, then you’re good to go.
We need a rule:
If you come to Daytona Beach for Spring Break, and you get so drunk and disorderly that the cops must arrest you, and if your Daddy hires a top-notch defense lawyer to defend you, thus burdening the people of Florida with a prosecution…
We get to put your Daddy on trial for the offense and you get to pay his legal bill. And then, if he’s convicted, we reverse again and you get to spend the 90 days at the Daytona lock-up, along with all the other beauties they’ve rounded up in the backwaters of Daytona Beach.
We need a rule:
If you scam an elderly couple out of their rent money with a clever Internet come-on:
We march you right down the beach to the Kennedy Space Center and strap you to one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets for the launch. But we’re kind about it…we’ll give you a parachute.
We need a rule:
If you give a customer an estimate for the work, and your estimate is twice what everyone estimates, and the customer tells you and then you say that you’ll get out your “sharp pencil”…You have to eat the pencil. Because saying “sharp pencil” after you’ve tried to hose them borders on criminal. Not hosing them mind you but saying you’ll take out your sharp pencil. It really irritates some people, as you can see here.
We need a rule:
When you go to an ATM, you are not allowed to kind of settle in, relax, your mom, play with the buttons and chat with your friend. If you do that…all the people in line whom you’ve inconvenienced get all the money in the account you’re trying to access.
We need a rule:
If a taxpayer drives nearly an hour to get to your office in the Courthouse, and completes the forms to file a Small Claims action against a contractor who deserves it, and if you snicker at his forms and tell him you can’t accept them because he printed them on two sides, and then if he asks if you would copy them correctly for him and he’ll pay for the copies and then if you stare at him and pause and say, “We don’t allow the use of the copier” and then he has to fill them out all over again…
He gets to add you to the claim and you split the damages with the contractor.
We need a rule:
If you are in the supermarket, and you accidentally drop a jar of mayonnaise on the floor and it breaks, and you just walk away from it…then you must sweep the entire floor of the store…with a toothbrush.
We need a rule:
If you’re in the bar watching your favorite team in March Madness, and every time they score, you shout out “Yeah Baby!” and you enthusiastically high five your bro which means you do so roughly 30 or so times…
You have to pay everyone’s bar bill if your team wins, and you have to pay everyone’s bar bill if they lose. We want to be fair here, applying justice equally.
We need a rule:
If you are the person who helped develop the multi-media advertising that blares out at WAWA while customers are pumping their gas…
You have to eat all of the food advertised on the day the complaint came and then, we put the ads on a thumb drive and you have to listen to it every night for a month before you go to bed. My time at the gas pump is very private, I get to chill a bit, surf the phone. Don’t take that from me.
We need a rule:
If you are the brain surgeon in charge of The Resort Fee you charge customers at your hotel chain which fee is merely increasing the room rate but you’re too much of a weasel to just do that…
Then you have to work as the pool attendant handing out towels and setting up deck chairs for people and guarding the pool all day. If that happens to be in Green Bay in February you can’t complain. I mean it was you who said it was a resort.
Thoughts, questions, or reflections? I’d love to hear them. You can reach me anytime at anthony@workingprofit.com
