# Nobody wrote this rule down, and it still works

> A flow diagram with a starting box and four decision diamonds, every label left blank — the rule two children invented for who goes first, and never once explained.

August 21, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-rule-about-who-goes-first

A flow diagram runs across the chest in flat near-black lines. One box at the top splits into two
paths that loop through four decision diamonds set in a rough circle, arrows carrying the flow
around and back into the starting box. Two of the diamonds have three exits where the other two
have two. Not one shape in the whole diagram carries a word.

It is drawn the way the actual rule works: a diagram nobody involved could fill in, even given the
room to do it.

## Why is every box in the diagram left blank?

Because the rule has never existed as a sentence, and printing one in the boxes would invent
something that was never true.

Two children built this system over years without holding a meeting about it, adjusting it match by
match until it produced an answer often enough to be worth reusing. Asking either of them to state
the rule out loud gets a confident answer, and a different confident answer from the other one, and
both are sincere. Words in the boxes would report a rule that exists. Empty ones report what's
actually there — a shape with the content missing, the same way [a system for splitting one toy
between them](/stories/the-toy-that-is-officially-shared) turned out to need two separate
tallies rather than one shared number.

## What do the four decision diamonds stand for, if none of them are labelled?

Roughly the considerations the rule seems to run through in practice — who asked first, whose turn
it was last time, whose idea it was, and a fourth that shifts depending on who is arguing.

Four is not a fixed count arrived at by design; it's what a rough circle of decision points looks
like once you stop trying to name each one and just count the shape it makes. [The four short words
that settle a claim over a single toy](/stories/he-had-it-first) are one clean example of a
single diamond doing its job cleanly. Most of the time, more than one is running at once.

## Why do two of the diamonds have three exits instead of two?

Because a real decision tree only ever has two ways out of a yes-or-no question, and this system
doesn't behave like a real decision tree at every point.

A third exit is the tell. It means that at that particular junction, the rule sometimes produces an
outcome nobody predicted from the question being asked — a third child gets pulled in, somebody
changes their mind mid-sentence, an adult intervenes and the whole path resets. Two extra exits, on
two of the four diamonds, is an accurate count of how often the system does something a flowchart
isn't supposed to allow.

## Does anyone need permission to print an invented flow diagram like this?

No. A generic flowchart shape and a household's own unwritten priority rule aren't anyone's
intellectual property, and nothing here copies a specific published diagram or system.

If the rule's actual working title — a child's own phrase for it — went on the shirt instead of a
blank diagram, that phrase belongs to the household that coined it, worth checking with them the
same as any other piece of family shorthand before it travels past the fridge door. Leaving the
diagram wordless sidesteps that question entirely, which suits a rule that was never written down to
begin with.

## Does a system like this hold up with more than two children, or does it break?

It tends to change shape rather than break outright — more children means more paths feeding into
the same diamonds, not more diamonds.

The core mechanism, a small set of recurring considerations arbitrated case by case, scales
reasonably well. What tends to give out first is the loop closing cleanly back to its start: push
three or four children through it and genuine ties turn up more often, which is usually the point
somebody proposes an actual tiebreaker and [a seating system with a written record instead of a
memory](/stories/the-middle-seat-rota) starts to look appealing by comparison.

## Isn't a rule this arbitrary just going to cause more arguments than it settles?

It settles more than it causes, or it would have stopped getting used — the diagram loops back to
its own start, meaning it never permanently resolves, but it produces a usable answer often enough
to survive years of reuse.

A published, worded rule would be easier to argue with, because there'd be a sentence to quote back
at whoever invoked it. An unwritten one, recalled from memory in the moment, is harder to contest —
by the time an objection could be formed, the round it applied to is usually already over.

## Does it print well?

Yes — the whole design is line work, which plays to a print's actual strength: hard, flat edges with
no gradient anywhere to go muddy on fabric.

Keep every line a single weight and the diamonds genuinely empty rather than lightly textured — any
texture inside them reads as a hint at content, which undoes the point of leaving them blank. One
ink on a near-black garment, close to bone or pale grey, keeps the whole loop legible at chest size
without a second colour anywhere.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the diagram at [JustOG](/) — how many decision points, how the paths loop, and where the
extra exits sit.
Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to
order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

The loop still runs most days. Nobody has ever needed to open it up and check what's inside.