Rules

I was flying Air Yugoslavia from Belgrade, Serbia to Frankfurt. As I walked out of the terminal and onto the tarmac, there was a twin-engine prop plane waiting for me and the other 18 or so passengers. I boarded the old plane with some anxiety about its airworthiness.

My seat was an aisle seat and there was no one sitting in the window seat next to me. After the plane had climbed for several minutes, the pilot announced that the aircraft had reached the necessary elevation to level off, and the man sitting in the aisle seat directly across from me lit a cigarette.

I looked at my boarding pass to make sure that I had a nonsmoking seat, because less than 2 feet from me this guy ws smoking. I waved my hand in the air—no, there was no call button for the flight attendant. After a few minutes of waving my hand in the air, the sole flight attendant came from the back of the plane.

She did not speak any English, and I spoke no Serbian. I pointed to my boarding pass and said, “no smoking.” She politely said “Yes.”

Then I pointed across the aisle to the man who was smoking and said, “smoking.” She replied, “Yes.”

Then I did a dramatic shrug of my shoulders and again pointed to myself and said, “no smoking,” and I pointed to the guy who was by this time blowing smoke towards my face and said, “smoking.”

She finally pointed to my side of the plane and said, “Yes. This side no smoking,” and as she pointed to the other side of the plane she said, “This side smoking!!”

I could not help but laugh at the fact that the smoking section was on one side of the plane with the nonsmoking section separated only by the aisle. I stewed over the fact that Air Yugoslavia had fulfilled the mandate from the international airline regulating authorities in that they had provided both a smoking and a nonsmoking section in the aircraft.

There were rules to follow and as far as Air Yugoslavia was concerned, they had fulfilled the separation of smoking and nonsmoking passenger regulation according to their own interpretation.

That’s what we customarily do. We either bend the rules or we adjust them to our convenience or desires. I have read that people who are more creative are more likely to break or bend rules. Now my wife is a musician par excellence. I don’t know how to classify her creativity, but when it comes to rules, she is very strict. We were standing in line outside the door of the shop waiting to buy a kebab in Bayeux, France recently. It started raining and I started to move inside to get out of the rain, but she said that we could not do that because it would look like we were trying to break in line. I was more interested in staying dry than what other customers would think about me. I did not see a rule to be broken, but she did.

It's all about interpreting what is right and what is wrong.

I wonder how many employees really wash their hands before returning to work. And absolutely no one uses their cell phone while driving! And everybody has jaywalked at some time in their life. It is actually against the law to drive in the left lane on a four-lane road unless you are passing, and then by law you are supposed to move to the right lane immediately after passing. Guilty? Yep. Most of us are!

I just started an old movie about Douglas Macarthur. He once said, “Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.” That’s where we get the expression “Rules are made to be broken.”

Some great things have happened when someone broke a rule. An example that I like is when William Webb Ellis in 1823 grew weary of playing football (that’s soccer for Americans). One day he took the ball in his arms and ran away with it towards the goal, and everyone else on both teams took off after him and tackled him. That was the beginning of a new sport—rugby!

There is one rule that if the whole world would live by, then this would be a better place for all mankind: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.