Over at The View from Taiwan is a post about falling afoul of unwritten rules here. The examples are new to me, but they brought to mind an amusing description of the medical football players have to take before they are ever considered for the NFL. What follows says nothing about Taiwan, but maybe something about human nature:
When you get to the hospital, you are herded with the others into a long hallway to wait. Chairs line the way and at the end of the corridor is a door. A woman pops her head out the door every so often and beckons to the body filling the seat nearest the door. In the true spirit of the thing, the masses have somehow determined that the correct way to proceed is for all forty remaining bodies to lift their carcasses up, only to drop them immediately in the remaining empty seat. It’s a truncated and ridiculous version of musical chairs without the music. At that rate, you will get up and sit down seventeen times before you are beckoned. You revolt. You decide to sit and not move. You’ll wait for ten or so spaces to open up before you shuffle on down.
When four empty chairs are between you and the next guy, those behind you start to shift uncomfortably in their seats. Someone is not obeying the rules. That’s not a good thing. You start to feel like the grandpa snaking through the mountains on a single lane highway with twenty cars crawling up his back because he’s going five miles under the speed limit. You surrender and take up your role in the mindless shuffle. Despite your sense of the absurdity, you feel much better.
-Tim Green, The Dark Side of the Game, p 8-9