There's nothing that says marketing can't steal your job—and your ticket to the client call

Opening sentence: The corporate handbook is rarely a source of guidance; it’s a toy model that says “do X unless you prefer doing X‑adjacent things,” and this Reddit post is a case study in reading silence like a legal brief.

Story in one neat sentence: OP worked entry‑level support at a tiny web‑hosting shop and watched a team lead deploy the precise syllogism, “There’s nothing that says the marketing team doesn’t work directly with clients,” which, when applied in an environment where authority is mostly whoever-says-so, turned into marketing taking client calls. (As one commenter put it: “It’s all about knowing what you’re authorized to do!”) The result looks a little like malicious compliance and a little like bureaucratic arbitrage: support offloads grunt work, marketing accrues client prestige, and the org chart does its best impression of paper confetti.

A toy model: suppose each department wants more status and less drudgery; suppose the rulebook forbids A but is silent about B; then some ambitious person will declare B to be A’s cousin and capture the benefits. Call this the Doctrine of Negative Prohibition—the practical corporate rule that silence equals permission, and permission equals power. (Faux policy addendum: Clause 12.b.iii — “Absence of interdiction constitutes affirmative license to reassign tasks in a manner that increases perceived value.”)

So was this clever, petty, malicious, or simply efficient? All of the above, in the same way a hedge fund is both mathematically clever and morally inert: it optimizes incentives. No one read the handbook because no one needed to; they read the room, cataloged incentives, and acted accordingly. Outcome: clients get slightly different people on the phone, marketing gets a new line on its résumé, and the phrase “there’s nothing that says…” becomes the company’s unofficial memo. Efficient, for certain values of efficient.