

At my first internship, they made me go through an entire bookshelf of safety training manuals that felt like they were written by the local staff. They were all full of things like “don’t put a pipe on the end of a wrench to give you the leverage you need to do your job” and “don’t forget to clock out at lunch or we’ll have to assume you were gone for exactly one hour”. Took me a moment to realize they were in fact telling me exactly what to do, but in a way that would also cover their asses. Always thought that was clever.

This reminds me a bit too much of another engineering story. Worth the 5 minute read:
Institutional memory & reverse smuggling
https://landley.net/history/mirror/institutional_memory.html