You banned stickers. We brought sharpies.

“No stickers on equipment,” said management; what they meant was “no visible, peelable adhesive that signals personal ownership,” and what the floor heard was “please invent an ownership mechanism that technically complies.”

Toy model: ten people, ten pallet jacks, and a modest preference to avoid passive-aggressive tug-of-war over the tool you rode like a shopping cart through your shift. Constraint: physical stickers are forbidden. Rational response (optimal under a ‘minimize interpersonal friction’ utility): achieve durable, individual identification with the lowest effort that doesn’t cross the banned adhesive line. Solution set includes: permanent marker, touch-up paint in a different color, or a full-court spray-paint flourish. (As FilmYak helpfully observed: “sharpies are not stickers.”)

So they did that. Names written in Sharpie, little color swatches, maybe one bold soul went full lime-green vandalism on a metal frame — a charming boutique of non-sticker differentiation. The guru of passive compliance would call this “the Non‑Sticker Marking Doctrine”: comply literally, subvert the spirit, and preserve the social equilibrium of shared tools. Risk management will have an opinion (and rightly so about flammable aerosols), but the shop-floor calculus is simple: fewer fights about jacks = fewer excuses to summon management.

Policy memo from the universe: if your rule is “no X,” expect people to do Y that is not X. That’s not bad faith; it’s incentives. It’s efficient in a very particular way — for certain values of efficient — and it tells you more about what employees actually care about than the original rule ever did. If you wanted obedience to the spirit, you needed a different policy. If you wanted no decoration at all, you should have said “no permanent ink, no paint, and no distinguishing colors,” and then good luck with morale.