Unwritten Rules
Who presses the buttons in a lift, and the rest of the protocol
A lift is a small room with a dense set of conventions, most of which exist to manage the awkwardness of…
· 4 min read
Unwritten Rules
Conventions with no author that everyone is expected to follow anyway.
20 articles · page 1 of 2
Unwritten Rules
Stand on one side, walk on the other, and the argument against it
The escalator convention has no author, varies by city, and is contested by people who have measured what it does to throughput.
By Tanmay Ghosh · · 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
Who speaks first at a counter, and what the opening sentence is for
The first exchange in any service encounter is a negotiation about scope, and both parties are doing more…
· 4 min read
Unwritten Rules
The office kitchen runs on notes because nobody owns it
Shared facilities without an owner develop a predictable set of conventions, and a predictable set of…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
The distance at which holding a door becomes an obligation
Door-holding runs on an unspoken distance calculation, and almost everything awkward about it comes from…
· 4 min read
Unwritten Rules
The line on the floor and the habit of standing back
Waiting a few paces behind whoever is being served is a privacy convention that predates every marking…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
How a group works out who is paying
The negotiation over a shared bill runs on conventions about who invited whom and what was ordered, and…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
What happens to fairness when one queue becomes two
Opening a second position is the moment a queue is most likely to break down, because nothing in the…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
The armrest, the middle seat and the rules of shared seating
Fixed seating forces strangers to allocate a small set of shared resources, and the conventions that result…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
The pavement dance, and why two people step the same way twice
Walking past a stranger without collision is a coordination problem solved thousands of times a day, and…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
The rules for holding somebody’s place in a queue
Saving a spot is permitted within limits that nobody states aloud, and almost every dispute about it comes…
· 3 min read
Unwritten Rules
How a seat becomes somebody’s seat without anybody deciding
Repeated use turns an unallocated place into a recognised claim, and the strength of that claim follows a…
· 3 min read