Forever Busy
A rule that said “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean” which fairly obviously meant if there was no work then you should be cleaning things. It was at an aircraft servicing station that was fairly small, but we needed a crew of at least 3 people for larger planes.
The problem was that sometimes there were just no planes, so there was no work. We would clean for a couple hours and then just run out of stuff to clean, but according to management, that was no good – we had to be busy!
It got to be that we would fight over work when it came in because everyone was so bored, and finding pretend busy work was much much harder then just working.
I remember getting the crew together to pick up pebbles off the taxiway for a couple hours. There’s an old joke in aviation “go sweep the taxiway!” so we actually did it. Story credit: Reddit / 727Super27