When the handbook is vague, deploy marketing as a weapon

Corporate manuals are not rules so much as invitations to clever cruelty — specifically the kind wrapped in the sentence: “There’s nothing that says the marketing team doesn’t work directly with clients.”

At a tiny web-hosting shop, a support lead discovered this and treated ambiguity like a delegated task. Support got the chaos, marketing got the phone calls, and clients got charm-forward troubleshooting: password-reset advice delivered with three GIFs and a mission statement. (Inventory: the handbook, five email templates, zero server credentials.) One commenter summed it up with surgical accuracy: “It’s all about knowing what you’re authorized to do!” — which in office law means silence equals a marching order.

This wasn’t malice so much as jurisdictional precision: instead of breaking rules, they exploited the spaces between them. The real lesson is modest and cruelly useful — if your policy doesn’t forbid something, someone will interpret that absence as permission and perform it with bureaucratic zeal. They followed the handbook so precisely they found where it was missing.