The Rules of Work Nobody Writes Down.

Before we get to the rules and this week’s editorial, the Mayor and I are absolutely delighted to share some official business with you: The Pineapple is now officially registered as a magazine, complete with our very own ISSN number! We are immensely proud of this milestone—even though the Mayor still insists on claiming that I am the worst-paid editor in the entire world.

We create The Pineapple with so much love, dedication, and hard work each week, but we truly couldn’t have done it without all of your contributions and you sharing your stories and experiences with us. Every piece, big or small, makes this publication what it is. Thank you!

Now, onto the rules…

When you start a new job, the ritual is almost always the same. You get introduced to everyone whose names you’ll instantly forget, handed a thick packet of documents, and told: “Read and sign.” Overwhelmed and slightly cross-eyed by page three, you scan the first few sentences, sign on the dotted line, and hope for the best.

In those first few days, you focus on the vital survival basics: what time to arrive, when you can leave, and how to avoid making a complete fool of yourself.

Then, week two hits, and you start discovering the real manual.

You learn that you must never, under any circumstances, heat fish in the breakroom microwave. You learn that eating at your desk is quietly frowned upon, and that taking a quick personal call might draw invisible daggers from across the room.

Yet, if you flipped back through that thick HR packet from day one, none of those rules are actually written down. They were decided years ago by someone who wasn’t even the boss—and who probably doesn’t even work there anymore. Nobody knows where the rules came from; someone simply passed them down to you, and now you pass them down to the next person.

Isn’t it the exact same in our everyday lives? Don’t park here. Don’t walk there. Don’t eat this, eat more of that. Leave your shoes outside. Put your shoes away. Open the lid, close the lid.

It makes you wonder why we feel the need to formalize and measure every single aspect of human life. Look at sport, for instance. Years ago, rugby was simple: grab the ball, run like mad, kick it, or score. But nowadays? The rulebook reads like international law. You can’t tackle like this, you can’t bind like that, and half the things that used to be standard play are now card-worthy offences.

I had the exact same thought while watching the cricket test recently. When I was seven or eight years old, watching cricket with my dad was blissfully simple: bowl the ball, hit the ball, and run between the wickets to score. Now, everything is meticulously measured—the wind speed, the heat, the humidity, the exact trajectory of the ball, the batsman’s stance, whether his pad was blocking the stumps, and even the wickets themselves, measured to the millimeter to ensure every single stump across the pitch is identical. Whole sports departments and international committees sit in parliament-like chambers just to debate and add more layers of regulation. Why do we do it?

Even at home, where there are no sports committees, we quietly invent our own codes. I asked my husband this week: “What unwritten rules do we have at home that seem a bit strange?”

His answer made me laugh out loud.

“We keep the sugar in the fridge,” he said. “I don’t know anyone else on earth who does that. And we keep a plastic bag in the freezer for meat wrappers and veg peels so they don’t go straight into the dustbin.”

Now, in my defense! I absolutely despise a smelly bin, and summer heat makes a kitchen bin 100 times worse. So yes, frozen peels it is!

Neither of those habits is written down anywhere. They aren’t law, but they are simply the way we do things around here—and the way he learned to do them from me.

We have written rules everywhere: contracts at work, handbooks at school, and endless regulations in sport and public life. But it’s those other rules—the ones passed down quietly, the habits we absorb, and the unspoken boundaries we honor—that truly shape how we live.

Grab your coffee (check the fridge if you can’t find the sugar!), sit back, and welcome to Pineapple 33, where we explore the rules of work—and life—that nobody ever wrote down.