6 Hilarious Loopholes Normal People Used To Beat The System

As part of 2017's total desire to not make any sense, the UK experienced a scorching heat wave which left many residents begging for the return of their damp, overcast utopia. Among those suffering were the schoolkids of the stuffy Isca Academy in Devon, which slapped down all requests from male students to temporarily switch from suffocating full-length trousers to shorts. Because heaven forfend, what would that result in? It'd be kneecap anarchy.

In response to the protests, one teacher dared the boys to dress up in the only alternative allowed on the uniform policy: a skirt. That teacher went onto learn a valuable lesson about hubris. The next day, a handful of boys arrived for lessons wearing skirts borrowed from their sisters or girlfriends. The gender barrier smashed, around 30 boys were attending lessons in skirts and praising the "nice breeze" they were getting.

And you know what? They killed it.

In an ill-thought-out attempt at, um, kneecapping the protest, a teacher dressed down a student for showing too much hairy leg ... which led to several boys buying up razor blades and shaving themselves smooth. After realizing that they'd been bureaucratically sassed out by a group of sashaying teenage boys, the school ceded and promised to revisit their damn policy. With the school defeated and the heat wave over, the boys returned to their normal garb, to the delight of several who'd started to worry about hemlines and the disappointment of several who'd discovered something new about themselves.

Pirate Joe's opened in 2012, and word of mouth soon made it a smash. Trader Joe's responded by banning Hallatt from their stores as a way of cutting off his supply of goods. That failed, however, when he roped in family and friends and other resisters to do his grocery runs for him. So the company fired off a cease-and-desist letter, figuring that ought'a shut Hallatt down fast. A judge didn't agree. The court decreed that Pirate Joe's wasn't exactly in the "white market," but they weren't a "black market" joint either, since they weren't stealing or smuggling the products (they paid import taxes at the border). They were smack dab in the middle of the legal/illegal Venn diagram, in a little-explored area known as the "gray market." And that meant Trader Joe's couldn't stop them.

Until, of course, they did. Trader Joe's appealed to the decision, and although the law never charged Hallatt with any wrongdoing, the legal costs eventually piled up to the point where Pirate Joe's had to close its doors in 2017 (after temporarily removing the "P" from the name).

Still, Hallatt got five years of memories and a crapload of fine, fine steak tips out it.

The librarians were countering a dumbass system that the local government had installed to make sure that the library was performing at peak optimization. See, having books that no one withdraws is inefficient, and all inefficiency must be culled ... even though such books have a habit of being withdrawn in peaks and troughs. Burning books to save money and space becomes pointless when the books come back into vogue and the library has to reorder new copies. So the librarians figured, hey, why not save everyone some time?

Unfortunately, the state didn't agree. The inspector general who disciplined the librarians justified their punishment by pointing out that the making of fake library cards constitutes manufacturing a fake public record. Which is total bullcrap, considering that library cards are only useful for a) jimmying open doors, and b) visiting the library. It was also never made clear why the library needed a system to monitor the collections when that's literally the job of librarians, but our requests for information were never returned by PRBot 2.0.

It was a dream tenancy ... that Fannie kept alive for 35 years, thanks to a little thing called "rent control."

Because of the never-ending nature of the lease and the fact that her husband passed the apartment into Fannie's name before his death, the price was frozen at the wartime rate. And she knew it. And abused the hell out of it. Under a series of obscure rules outlining what rent-controlled tenants were entitled to, she made sure that the suite was regularly cleaned and repainted. She also made an enemy of the hotel's staff for, well, being a firebrand old lady who knew she had everyone by the balls.

Speaking of grabbing people by the genitals, she also ran afoul of Donald Trump. Or rather, he ran afoul of her. In 1987, Trump bought the Plaza and dared to ask about the hotel's liabilities. Only one thing came to the minds of his lawyers: Donald Trump. OK, two things: Fannie Lowenstein too. Upon hearing about his new acquisition, Fannie demanded a private face-to-face with Trump to chew him out. (Today, you have to be a head of state or go to a crappy country club and shell out $200,000 for that privilege.) According to Trump's pal Tom Barrack, Fannie ended up with a bigger apartment, new furniture, and a Steinway piano. And that's probably why there wasn't a chapter about her on Art Of The Deal.

But, much like the hotel under Trump's stellar leadership, Fannie's health took a turn for the worse. She had launched lawsuit after lawsuit against the hotel's previous owners for, among other things, defective carpeting and their insidious plot to murder her with toxic paint. In the end, fearing her room, she moved out and took up residency in another nearby hotel paying the full day rate. She finally died in April 1992, never having seen the dossier of compromising material that Trump had probably asked Boris Yeltsin to hack from her CompuServe account.

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For more sketchy lifehacks, check out 7 Loopholes That Are Basically Glitches In Everyday Life and 9 Insane Loopholes You Won't Believe Are Legal.

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