Rules are easy to enforce, right up until they hit the person who made them. A former military officer working security shared one hilarious case of corporate irony involving an HR leader who demanded total compliance from her team.
When the rain poured and her husband forgot his ID, she expected an exception. What she got instead was a cold, wet reminder that her own policy had no loopholes.
The soaked walk that followed sparked laughter across Reddit and even inspired similar stories from other workplaces. Scroll down to see how this drenched drama turned one rainy day into the best security win ever.
A security guard enforces HR’s strict ID rules on the boss herself, denying her husband entry and sending her soaking in rain
There’s an old saying in risk management: rules that don’t apply to everyone, protect no one.
This story perfectly illustrates what workplace psychologists call authority immunity bias when people in power believe they’re exempt from the rules they’ve created.
According to leadership researcher Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, this behavior often stems from overconfidence and entitlement. “When leaders think they’re above the rules, they undermine the very system they’re supposed to enforce,” he wrote for Harvard Business Review.
In professional environments, especially high-security ones, consistency is everything. Security policies are designed to eliminate discretion and personal bias.
Industrial psychologist Dr. Laura Hamill explains that employees are more likely to follow safety protocols when they see that leaders follow them too. “Fairness and accountability signal psychological safety. When leaders bend rules, compliance culture erodes instantly,” she told Forbes.
What makes this incident noteworthy is how the security officer handled it, with professionalism and integrity. By applying the HR manager’s own regulation to her, he didn’t humiliate her; he upheld fairness.
In organizational psychology, this kind of “neutral enforcement” is key to maintaining respect for rules across hierarchies. When rules are applied equally, they transform from burdens to safeguards.
Leadership experts also note that humiliation can be a powerful teacher. Dr. Hamill points out that when someone experiences the consequences of their own rigid systems, it often triggers empathy and course correction.
In this case, the result was twofold: the HR head realized the impracticality of her policy and provided rain gear for the very people enforcing it.
Here are the comments of Reddit users:
These commenters applauded OP for sticking to policy
These users jumped in with their own “security vs. authority” anecdotes
This group loved how following HR’s rigid rule forced her to face her own hypocrisy
Some rules are meant to protect people; others just stroke egos. But when the storm hits, literally or metaphorically, it’s always satisfying to watch accountability rain down evenly on everyone.
In this story, one soaked HR manager learned the hard way that leadership doesn’t mean exemption; it means example. And as a bonus? The guards finally got their rain jackets.
Justice, apparently, comes with waterproof lining.
