Rules for Rules Sake?

I am a rules girl.  Dewey says that if I were a super hero I would be "Rules Girl....out to enforce the rules of the world!"  I'm not quite THAT bad!  I like rules.  They keep people in check and give us a guideline to live our lives.  Do I break rules?  Of course!  Most rules make sense and you might break them but you at least know why they are the rules.

One thing I don't like, though, are rules that don't make sense.  Camping in Banff this weekend we came upon quite a few things that just didn't make sense & left us with a bad taste in our mouths.

Prior to leaving for Banff, I checked the Parks Canada website to see if there were any closings, etc I needed to know about.  I also checked to see the rules for the campsite we were planning to visit.  The normal stuff was there....leave a bare campsite when you aren't there so it doesn't attract bears, be courteous to your fellow campers & quiet time after midnight.  Ok, I can live with all of that!  Let's roll!

We arrived at the campsite to see a paper sign on the window of the ranger station.  "Fire ban & quiet time in force at 11pm!"  What?  You see, here in Alberta it stays light really late so it doesn't get dark until after 9pm.  Then with a campfire & some marshmallows the kids are barely in bed by 11!  Where's the adult time?  The time spent chatting around the campfire relaxing with a glass of wine??????  Ack!  We went ahead and paid to camp because we didn't have a plan B.

Then.....we broke the rules.  Well, it's more like we ignored them.  We just didn't put our fire out at 11.  Really what would happen?  We were a small group of 4 adults at that time (kids were in bed) and we weren't singing or listening to music.  We figured that SURELY they were using this rule to weed out the rambunctious 20somethings who keep the whole campground up.  We were partly right.  On the first night we got visited by the ranger & it was pretty chill.  On the second night we got visited by THE RCMP!!!!  Now it isn't as bad as it sounds b/c they were there to visit the campsite next to ours about a car parked in the wrong area & we wouldn't have even known it was the RCMP if those campers hadn't told us.

SERIOUSLY????  Don't the RCMP have better things to do than enforce bs rules that don't even make sense?  I totally understand fire bans when the forest is dry (we got rained on for 2 days & the fire hazard rating is "low" per Parks Canada) and I get bans on noisy people.  What I don't get is punishing everyone with stupid rules instead of just throwing out the trouble makers!

So what do you think?  What is your biggest "stupid rule" pet peeve?

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