Students maliciously comply with teacher's new rule; causes the entire school to reek.
Always be wary of the way you word a rule. Rules are the building blocks of society, but rules aren't perfect. Society changes and grows upon accepting and realizing that sometimes a rule is unjust or not achieving its intended effect.
On a popular Reddit thread in the Malicious Compliance Subreddit, a teacher makes a rule with wording that they regret.
A student writes:
A bit of context: I live in an old rural town (not in the U.S.). This happened when I was in middle school (about 2010). The only middle school in this town used to be a nursery where plants and trees were grown or sold, not a medical nursery.
Most trees weren’t cut down when the place became a school, and a few were fruit trees. Three or four of them were mango trees. We, kids, loved taking them home by the bunches to enjoy with our families or eating them during lunch and breaks. Occasionally some kids would try throwing rocks or sticks at the tree branches to make some mangos fall; one of the teachers didn’t like this.
Understandably, throwing rocks could be dangerous, but nobody was throwing them at each other, and they were carefully looking around for any people passing by not to hurt anyone.
The most logical thing to do would have been to forbid students from throwing stuff at trees, but instead, the school passed a rule that any students caught picking up mangoes, whether they were on the floor or trying to get them from the trees would get in trouble or even face suspension.
We all thought it was a dumb idea. Still, a few other students and I could smell the eventual disaster from a mile away, so nobody protested, and everyone at school agreed to comply (even the kids known to be rebellious). Well, about a month or so later, the whole school was stinking of rotten mangoes, and for those of you who don’t know, mango season usually peaks during early spring and late summer, plus in the state we’re in rainy season hits in the summer.
So imagine old rotting mangoes in muddy water puddles that sit for days in the summer heat. Not a good combination of smells. By that point, the teacher told us that if we saw a mango in good condition to be eaten, we could pick them up.
But, We couldn’t break the new rule our respectable teacher imposed! We must obey like the good students we are! The school had to pay a clean-up crew to dump all the rubbish, and some of the parents (my mom included) complained about the wastefulness of perfectly edible fruit.
The following school year, we enjoyed delicious mangonadas (mango-flavored ice pop with a spicy sweet sauce) under the lovely shade and those good ol’ summer breezes; said ice pops were made and sold by a classmate. The teacher that had initially started the complaints was a loyal customer.
This unlocked some core memories for the internet.
Dangerous_Number_685 says:
Malicious compliance with a sweet ending! I love it!
baka-tari says:
More like delicious compliance at the end!
StrangeJayne says:
In South Florida, I spent my childhood knocking on random people's doors and asking if I could take a few mangos. They almost always responded, 'Please, God, take as many as you like.'
A similar thing happened when I was a kid. We had a mango tree that we THOUGHT was in our backyard but was in the neighbor's yard (no fences back there). In mango season, we would climb and get mangoes.
The neighbor got annoyed and complained to my dad, who told us to stop going in the tree. Naturally, we complied. A few weeks later and they came to ask us to pick the mangoes. They were overwhelmed with the dropping and rotting fruit- and the accompanying flies!
OP, your teacher should've known mangoes are the most delicious fruit but also the stinkiest fruit.