If you watch any baseball on television, you may have heard from time to time the announcer will talk about the unwritten rules of baseball.
One of those rules is you don’t steal a base when your team is up by 6 or 7 runs late in the game.
The same holds true for bunting for a base hit to break up a no-hitter late in the late inning of the game.
That got me thinking about the unwritten rules of day-to-day life.
I suppose if you live by the golden rule, you wouldn’t need to concern yourself with the unwritten ones.
Because of a recent office conversation, I’ll start with this unwritten rule: If you’re sitting down and you’re about to shake someone’s hand, you should stand up first.
If two cars approach the same parking space at the same time, the one that has their blinker on first gets the space. If you’re the car with the blinker on first, you might want to do the polite thing and do a quick evaluation of the other driver. Maybe you might want to yield the space to the other driver.
Just this morning I was wondering who wrote the rule that right-handed people should wear their watch on their left wrist and vice versa for lefties?
Did you notice in that last paragraph I asked who wrote the unwritten rule?
The unwritten rule of the sidewalk is just like the road: Walk to the right side of the sidewalk.
The unwritten rule for the grocery store checkout line is if you have a full cart and the person behind you only has an item or two, you let them go ahead of you.
Sometimes the unwritten rule isn’t enough, so we have to have a written rule. As of today (Aug. 1) there is a new written rule that carries a fine with it. In this case the written rule is now a law: the hands-free cellphone use while driving law. You would have thought the unwritten rule would have been good enough, but it wasn’t.
I found it interesting that on Amazon you can find any number of books written about unwritten rules. Makes you wonder if the pages of such a book are blank.