Not Always Right / Tropes M to T

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M

• Ma'am Shock: "Do I look old enough to be a ma'am?"
  • "You're stupid, and he's stupid, and everybody that works here is stupid!"
• MacGyvering: No wasp spray? I'll just "DIY" a flamethrower.
  • It happened again: "Yeah, there’s a wasp infestation in my garage. Figured this is easier than an exterminator."
  • What happens when you get in a drunken bar fight and your nipple gets ripped off, but you don't have medical insurance? Why, go to the art store and buy a needle and thread of course!
  • This woman comes into a vintage shop and buys modeling glue. The employee assumes she's using that for a model car. Nope. The woman is attempting to use the glue to put her car door back on! It's a miracle the lady wasn't pulled over for that.
  • This man's ring is stuck on his finger, causing it to swell up. Rather than go to the ER or a jeweler, he and his wife decide to go to a hardware store and use a pair of bolt cutters to get the ring off. They failed and actually managed to get bloodstains on the floor.
• Machine Worship: All hail Lord Konica!
• Major Injury Underreaction:
  • This person is still out shopping for purses despite having a broken finger, rationalizing it by saying that the store closes soon but the hospital doesn't.
  • I guess this knife is sharp enough.
  • (with a huge grin) "Yeah, I crashed my bike getting here!"
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places:
  • At a PG movie, of all places.
  • This couple were doing it in the hot tub at a hotel's swimming pool (it was their anniversary and they were drunk). Despite repeated pleas from the staff, they keep going back and continuing as soon as backs are turned, and end up being arrested.
• Malaproper:
  • "You're running out of espionage."
  • "I usually download my pictures in Chlamydia."
  • "I really need my car sodomized."
  • "I think my son has Liza Minnelli!" (they meant salmonella)
  • Chinchilla, I Choose You!
    • Made even funnier by the fact that there were two chinchilla-based Pokémon in Pokémon Black and White.
  • Some Films Are Just Sick.
  • So close, but let's not go here.
  • Mad Cow Cheese.
  • "Where can I leave my domination clothing?"
  • Even the person reporting the story had no idea what this art museum patron meant.
  • And subverted here.
  • A Japanese patron means to ask for books on sudoku but asks for books on seppuku (ritual suicide) instead, and has a major Oh, Crap! moment when he realizes what he was actually saying.
  • In two instances, these people say pedophile when they meant pedometer.
  • "I think I have necrophilia."
  • An employee who jokes about not being "awesome enough" is told by a customer "you shouldn't self-defecate yourself.
  • A customer at a movie theater wants tickets to a film about "the miserable lesbians"- it eventually turns out he means Les Misérables (2012).
  • “Yes, please. I would like you to dismember my dog.”
• Male Gaze:
  • Oh, about a B cup.
  • This one as well.
• Mama Bear:
  • A mother tells off another customer who almost rammed her child.
  • This mother tells off a very rude and hard-of-hearing hospital visitor who berates her daughter, and gets him thrown out of the hospital for his behavior.
• Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal: This case. To explain, a woman insists her son's kidnapping and assault must be a civil case because there is no way he is involved in a criminal one.
• Masquerade: "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" — it's from the same guy who wrote "Inconvenient Truth".
• Manchild: Way too many customers throw hissy fits when their unreasonable requests go unanswered.
  • This lady, the wife of a university president, throws her (expensive) plate of food on the floor during a fancy dinner just because she was served after her husband.
  • This woman is way too angry that the escalators are down (there's an elevator she can use). She has to be removed by the police.
    (She decides that flapping her arms like a bird will make the escalator work.)
    Woman: “MAKE THEM WORK! MAKE THEM WORK!”
• Mathematician's Answer: "Can I have your zip code, please?"
  • Sadly subverted here. Assuming the false dilemma where none exists is not going to get you your... um, whatever you're ordering.
  • Two for one. And God only knows what's going on here...
  • And this one.
  • What does this patient remember about their doctor? "It’s either a man or a woman."
  • "What sort of work are you looking for?" "Outdoor work... and indoor work."
  • What kind of bread does this man want for his beef brisket sandwich? "The square kind."
  • "Chipotle or jalapeño, sir?" "Yes". Luckily, the customer quickly realizes his mistake.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Invoked in this story; a manager intentionally spills some water around a customer who had a seizure and tells the OP (a witness) to tell paramedics that he slipped. This is done for two reasons; one, the man was at risk of losing his insurance if he had a seizure, so making it look like an accident shielded him from that consequence, and two, new investors had been intentionally running the store into the ground to line their own pockets, and sticking them with a fine for negligence was the manager's last means of screwing them over before quitting.
• Meet Cute: one example here.
  • Another one here; bonus points for the homophobe getting his comeuppance.
• Mean Boss: Not as prevalent as on Not Always Working (which was formed in part to deal with examples of this trope). But some from this site can be found here.
• Meaningful Echo: The submitter of this story throws "Mr. ObNox"'s "Did I stutter?" line in his face—the same line he used to dismiss their attempt to warn him that the Macallan whiskey he is about to order is ludicrously expensive.
• Meme Acknowledgement:
  • The tendency of a lot of store managers to bend over backwards to accommodate customers who make unreasonable demands, throw tantrums, abuse staff, abuse other customers and/or outright try to scam the place, led commenters to frequently denounce them as "spineless". This led to the creation of a new tag, "Managers With A Spine", to describe the rare occasions when they don't.
  • Similarly, the running joke about the "NAR Avengers" (typically for people who step in to defend others from abusive customers/bosses etc) also got its own tag.
• Messy Maggots: Maggots inside a weather transmitter Spiders too.
• Mind Screw: A few entries, such as these two.
  • This guy. "You asked if you were speaking to John Smith, and I said yes. But I'm not telling you who I am. C'mon, I wanna do the survey."
• Miss Conception:
  • This girl apparently doesn't know what the word "lesbian" means other than hearing from her mother that they don't get pregnant, and so declares that she is a lesbian herself so she can't be pregnant - despite also declaring to have a sexual relationship with her boyfriend. So she can't possibly be pregnant, because she is a lesbian, which she isn't.
  • This woman has two dogs from the same litter, of different sexes, that she never had spayed/neutered. The female one is pregnant. The woman refuses to believe the most obvious possibility.
• Misplaced a Decimal Point: A rare "good customer" story centers around a customer who was erroneously charged $1,852 for her purchase that was supposed to be $18.52. The submitter was amazed by how gracious the woman was (she, quite reasonably, asked that they correct the mistake, but was perfectly pleasant and understanding about it), admitting that they didn't know if they'd have reacted so well in her shoes.
• Misplaced Retribution:
  • A particularly frustrating example can be found in one customer who apparently blames the employees for the violent (and messy) actions of an angry customer who slings rotten chicken all over everything and everyone in this nauseating story. How so? Said customer (whose child got hit by some of the rotten chicken) actually sues the store and wins a $20,000 settlement. Ouch.
  • This story involves a french-speaking couple in New Brunswick, Canada, that buys a laptop and upon getting home immediately falls for one of those "We are Microsoft and found a virus on your computer" scams, spending well over $200 for the scammer to remove the store and manufacturer provided free trial software and install a paid subscription version. So they return to the store they bought it from, and angrily demand OP to refund them said cash, since Manager does not speak French, and adamantly refuse to believe they were scammed by anyone other than the store, and the store can not refund them. So they go and try to sic their relatives on a radio show on the store and drive them out of business. Fortunately, the radio show instead puts out a PSA regarding the actual scam and leaves the business alone.
  • This woman nonsensically blames and cusses out a waiter (right in front of the submitter's young daughter, no less) for dropping her, the submitter, and the submitter's daughter's food at a restaurant even though it was blatantly obvious that the waiter was not able to react nor stop in time before a pair of misbehaving kids from another table decided to jump out and tackle him, causing him to lose his grip on the food. The embarrassed submitter apologizes profusely and leaves an enormous tip for the waiter, and subsequently cuts the toxic friend out of their life when she continues to chastise them for treating the poor waiter nicely afterward.
  • When the hotel she's staying in gets two fire alarms in one night – the first time due to a sparkler lit by a guest, the second due to a malfunctioning hair dryer – this guest gets angry at the hotel, even thinking the hotel set off the fire alarm to celebrate the new year and after the second alarm, shouts at the submitter for ten minutes for their "rudeness."
• Misplaced Wildlife:
  • Arctic penguins.
  • "I assure you, ma’am, there is little danger of me actually harming a whale in Utah."
• Mistaken Ethnicity: It takes special effort to mistake a Caucasian for a Mexican, along with messing up basic Spanish language.
• Mistaken for Fake Hair: A customer in a store that is currently selling Halloween items mistakes the cashier's dyed hair for a wig, and wants to buy it. On being told it's not a wig, she insists she wants it, and tries to pull it off the cashier's head, before throwing a tantrum on being told the cashier is not going to cut off their hair for her.
• Mistaken for Junkie: According to this horrid old git, simply being young and not being absolutely miserable means you've been taking drugs.
• Mistaken for Masturbating: Inverted in this story, where a woman walks in on her son masturbating and mistakes it for a seizure, then refuses to accept the truth and demands the responding EMTs take him to the hospital.
• Mistaken for Murderer: "STOP KILLING ALL THE FISHES!"
• Mistaken for Pregnant: The (kind of) nice version. The mean version.
  • "I’m fat, not pregnant, lady."
• Mistaken for Racist:
  • This customer and her daughter decide the submitter is a "self-hating black" because they were both jabbering on their phones and not paying attention when they were greeted, which in their minds translates to the submitter ignoring them and only greeting white customers.
  • In this case, the submitter initially thinks the customer is a particularly horrific racist, only later realising that she tried to snap "Get me your manager", remembered halfway that the store was too small to have managers, and tried to change it to "Get me the owner", but too late. Which is why she snapped at a black man "Get me your owner". There's a terrible pause as she processes what she said, then she flees.
  • This customer takes an instruction to new employees to “Only use the white children’s hangers for children’s clothing” as racist.
• Mistaken for Servant: Common enough to have its own tag.
  • Here, here, and here, and one particularly cute one here.
  • And an example of mistaken for customer.
  • Apparently, knowing anything about a popular book series means you work at the bookstore.
  • This angry bookstore customer mistakes another customer for a worker, and it rapidly gets worse when the other customer tries to point out the first customer's mistake.
  • Anything with the title "I Don't Work Here, Does Not Work Here". It's up to Part 30.
  • Inverted here: Even though the submitter is wearing a uniform, the customer refuses to believe they actually work there and aren't just using an elaborate method to cut in line.
  • This customer actually reports the submitter to their manager for refusing to help her at a completely different store - judging by the fact that, a few days later, she goes to the submitter's store and demands that they take a return for something she bought from the other store, she apparently thought the submitter being at that other store means they work at every store in the state.
    • Similarly happens in this story, where the submitter and the other customer both know each other (the submitter works at a library the lady frequents) and yet the lady still comes to the conclusion that meeting the submitter somewhere else automatically means he must work there as well.
  • This customer learns that simply wearing a name tag will make anyone and everyone mistake him for a worker, even if the name on the tag is something like Inigo Montoya.
  • This guy wearing a tuxedo is mistaken for a valet by a customer at a dollar store, who gets angry when the guy won't park his car and tries to get him fired even though he doesn't work there. As someone says in the comments, "What sort of dollar store would have a valet in the first place?"
  • An author doing a book signing is mistaken for a store employee... despite some fairly obvious signs, such as the fact that said author is sitting at a desk right next to a large poster featuring both the book cover and their own face.
  • This guy at an anime convention is mistaken for a mall employee (the convention was across the street) because of his lanyard. The actual mall employees were ten feet away and don't even wear lanyards.
  • Apparently, drunk person logic dictates that Asda employees shopping in Tesco are Tesco employees and must help fellow Tesco customers.
  • This woman finds a way to exploit this trope, as she used to be an employee at the store in question, but left, and for some reason, her employee discount was never cancelled, so she decided to buy things on the 30% discount and return them without a receipt for a full price refund. She implies that nobody ever bothered to do anything about it before, but the manager in the story calls up the main office on the spot and gets them to finally cancel the discount.
  • This woman has a chronic case of this, as she misidentifies nine customers as employees, ignoring the two actual cashiers frantically trying to clear their lines, and then storms out because even after being told this she's mad because none of the 'employees' are helping her.
  • This grocery store customer, whose cart is dripping blood from improperly-packed meat, starts off by mistaking a fellow customer in medical scrubs for an employee and demanding she clean up the mess, but after it's pointed out to her that the second customer doesn't work there, she still expects her to clean it up (because she's still a "worker") and claims she's being "lazy" for not doing so.
  • This customer somehow managed to mistake a nine-year-old, dressed in an elementary school uniform, for a store employee, and starts demanding to speak to her manager. The kid's mother intervenes and explains that they are both shopping, but the woman refuses to believe her until the mother points out that her daughter is a fourth-grader. Weirdly, this apparently went on to become a recurring problem for the girl for the next six years, as she was mistaken for an employee roughly every third time she went to a store.
  • This young woman responded to such a situation by pretending to mistake the other customer for an employee. The other customer still managed to not take the hint before a manager from the store got involved.
  • For whatever reason, this man actively invokes this trope, hanging around in a store wearing clothing very similar to what the staff wear just so he can make fun of people who confuse him for a staff member.
  • A refreshingly "nice" example: A customer mistakes the submitter for a supermarket employee, but she asks her question politely, and the submitter happens to be a culinary student picking up ingredients for a baking project, so he's able to give her some useful advice. The woman then tracks down a manager to tell them about the excellent customer service, and even apologizes for wasting the manager's time when it turns out the submitter didn't work there.
  • Similarly, another case of this happening actually did lead to the submitter being hired by the store.
  • This one is noteworthy for who is being mistaken for a low-level employee. The poster points out that the man has been the only one doing the job for several years:
    Mistaker's husband: Honey, are you nuts? He’s not the janitor; he’s the mayor!
  • This woman for some reason decides a random person walking down the street near her is a street cleaner and starts demanding they clean up a pile of dog crap.
  • A rather disturbing example here, where after the inattentive woman is corrected by the person she is mistaking for an employee at a grocery store, she somehow tracks him down to his real job and begins demanding to his manager that he be fired for not helping her at the grocery store. She keeps barraging the workplace with angrier and angrier calls (even after the workplace blocks her number) until she manages to call the CEO of the company itself to demand the man's immediate termination. The CEO instead calls the police, and while we never actually learn what happened to her, neither the man or his workplace ever see or hear from her again.
  • An inverted example here, where a customer goes up to the submitter to ask for help with something, only to apologize when she sees they aren't wearing a store shirt. Turns out, the submitter does work at the store; their shirt just hasn't come in yet since it's only their first day. Everyone has a good laugh over it.
  • This crank takes the song-and-dance a step further by claiming the "employee" is trying to get out of helping him by hiding their uniform under their jacket. He then escalates the confrontation to the point of violence and winds up getting arrested.
  • This customer is apparently on the receiving end of this trope enough that when the submitter tries asking them for something (they wanted the customer to move so they could get something on the shelf), they bite their head off.
  • A bizarre example (by site standards) in this story, as a Shrinking Violet customer approaches an off-the-clock employee, and apologizes when the submitter tells them they're off the clock. However, another customer isn't so understanding and begins shouting at the first customer for bugging the submitter, even when the submitter tells him to knock it off.
  • This subway passenger thinks the submitter works for the transit system… because they're standing up.
• Mistaken for Toilet: The bane of every retail worker: a hapless customer mistaking the fitting room for the bathroom.
  • Thankfully, this man was stopped in time.
  • A customer thinks that the handicapped sign on a room means that it is bathroom and gets annoyed when the worker offers to show them but explains there is no toilet inside the fitting room.
    Customer: Well, why do you have a washroom with no toilet?
  • Bizarrely Inverted by this woman, who thinks that urinals are there for women to set their purses in while they use the stalls.
• Mistaken Nationality: One manager tells a racist customer that she is not Mexican, she is Romani, and if he's going to be racist he should learn the difference. This is as he's being dragged away by the police, after she managed to intimidate him when he tried to do the same to her.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Not actually what a turducken is, but you can probably forgive this customer for thinking it might be.
  Customer: I was wondering how they got those animals to breed.
• Momma's Boy: "Quit bein’ mean to my mama, poop head!"
• Mondegreen Gag: This customer gets a mondegreen in Eminem and Rihanna's "The Monster" but is corrected by another.
• Mood Whiplash: Among the hilarious mishaps of service workers, the sad ones really stand out. Case in point: Would You Like A Foot To Go With Your Mouth.
  • This entry goes from normal put-the-customers-in-their-place, to heartwarming I-apologize-for-their-behaviour, to outright funny, to bittersweet (if not sad altogether).
• Mood-Swinger: Thanks for helping me... I'll kill you! Here and here. Also here.
  • And here.
• Moral Myopia: Sure, it's rude to tell you to move and honk at you when you're blocking both lanes of a two-lane drive-thru by being stopped while chatting for several minutes with some guy on foot in the other lane.
  • Again here. Combined with Wants a Prize for Basic Decency. Customer #1 claims that she "let" three people go in front of her, so this automatically means that she can leave the line, go browse the store elsewhere, or even leave the building entirely, but should she find the cashier helping someone else, especially someone who is ready to complete the transaction while at the counter, when she returns, it means the cashier is the "rudest person [she] ever met." The comments suggest Customer #1 has never looked in a mirror...
• Morton's Fork:
  • A self-inflicted one. This woman doesn't know what to do with the peanut butter she bought; she won't eat it because it's too many calories for her, but she won't give it away either because she "paid good money for it".
  • Following a sub shop getting a stricter allergy policy, this customer has a choice between not getting what she wants, or admitting she's been regularly lying about allergies to get free food. She chooses the latter ... and is told her options are now to pay for every sandwich she's ever got free, or leave.
• Motor Mouth:
  • Sometimes the best way to handle them is to give them a taste of their own medicine. (With a little help from The Other Wiki, of course.)
  • This customer spends ten minutes rambling about what sort of books he's looking for and why, seemingly not noticing that the employee he's talking to is busy struggling with a load of heavy books.
• Mummies at the Dinner Table: Appears to be what this woman is up to.
• Mugging the Monster: Several examples.
  • Mugging The Gun Shop Owner: Some people are indeed stupid enough to make violent threats toward the manager of a gun store. Those people, thankfully, are not Too Dumb to Live and flee when they see the manager walk out with a shotgun on his shoulder.
  • In a milder example of this kind of trope, there's also a few examples of what we can call Mugging The Human Resources Manager, wherein an applicant for a job barges into the place and starts rudely throwing their weight around, only to discover that the staff member they've been treating poorly is actually someone they should have probably been a bit more polite towards if they want to stand a chance of getting the job. Such as this person or this genius. In an oblique version of this, Mugging the Target Audience.
  • Alternately, threatening that you're going to complain to the manager when that's who you're talking to.
  • This naval lieutenant decides to throw his weight around in a civilian restaurant and makes the mistake of antagonizing another diner... who happens to be a Rear Admiral stationed at the same base.
  • Perhaps the straightest example yet.
  • R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Sometimes, a reputation as a "man-beater"^note Earned by the lady in question defending herself against a former co-worker, and sending him to the hospital can be useful when dealing with certain problematic customers.
  • In an example overlapping with Bullying a Dragon, this robber made the mistake of trying to rob a bookstore owner who also happened to be a champion fencer. He remained unintimidated when the owner pointed that out and even when the owner drew a sword from his cane. It isn't until the owner flicked his glasses off that he wisely chose to surrender.
  • This guy tries to threaten a Romani manager with a knife. She's... unimpressed.
  • A big six-foot-tall man vs. a nine-year-old kid. Turns out the kid knows karate.
  • A lighthearted example here. A student cuts in front of a man in a lunch line. When the man points this out, the student starts throwing their weight around, claiming to be someone important and asks the man who he thinks he is. The man then says that he's the Governor of the state.
  • An almost literal, albeit offscreen, example.
  • This man tries to take some training pads from a small woman, because he clearly needed them more and because of those reasons had no need to be polite. Too bad he underestimated her ability and got himself pinned and humiliated.
  • This father of a young boy in the hospital (falsely) accuses a teenage patient (who can't speak above a whisper due to mono) of gossiping about his son and threatens physical violence against her. Too bad for him she's the daughter of the head nurse for that floor of the hospital.
  • Here, a woman tries to scam her way into a discount by claiming she's the owner's sister, assuming the person serving her was some lowly employee. Unfortunately for her, that employee happens to be the owner, who calls her out on her lies.
• The Münchausen: Apparently, this customer.
• Mundane Solution: This submitter at an amusement park reports a couple of line-jumpers to the ride operator, who sends them to the back of the line (which has by this point doubled in length).
• Must Have Caffeine: A disproportionate number of entries under It's All About Me and Jerkass involve somebody trying to get coffee and ignoring basic decency and respect in the process. One assumes this trope is in play. Not that that's a good excuse for that sort of behaviour. Specific examples below.
  • This woman needs coffee so much that she's willing to break into the staff break room and tear the place apart for some.
  • From "Trucker In Need Of Break Fluid":
    "I'm sorry, we're all out of 'coffee now'. All we have left is 'coffee please'."
  • This one even comes with a Lampshade Hanging from the cashier.
  • This customer holds up a drive-thru line to the point of a tow truck being called, all because she wants a free coffee in a deal that isn't valid at that hour.
  • Presumably the case with this customer, who isn't more coherent with his order than "coffee". At a coffee shop. As a result, he ends up receiving the most expensive drink on the menu.
• Must Have Nicotine:
  • This mother tries to book a smoking room at a hotel only to find that the smoking rooms are booked, much to the dismay of her children, who were hoping to stay at the submitter's hotel since it has an indoor pool.
    Customer’s Kids: “But they have an indoor pool here! We want to go in the pool!”
    Customer: “That’s all you do, isn’t it? All you do is think about yourself! I gotta smoke!”
  • This guy, on finding the store closed, smashes his way into the store and demands that the submitter sell him cigarettes, then threatens violence on the submitter when they refuse. Naturally he's completely oblivious as to why the submitter's calling the police.
• My Beloved Smother:
  • Really? REALLY? Trying to stop your 28-year-old daughter from going on a date?
    Mother: You don't understand... he's a Democrat!
  • Or this one, who doesn't seem to grasp that her son's a grown man.
  • This mother accuses the staff of a housing facility of kidnapping her son and forcing him to work for them (the son in question is thirty-four, living there willingly, and works at a nearby recycling center). She subsequently calls the police, accusing the facility of kidnapping her son, as he's refusing to allow her to visit, which would "only" happen if he were under duress. When the police come to the son, he confirms that he is there of his own free will and that he does not want to see his mother. This gets the mother arrested when she attempts to attack her son.
  • The customer in this story enters a bookstore in order to buy a present for his grandson. The boy's mother has provided the customer with a list of rules that books or other presents must adhere to. The list is so exhaustive that the customer cannot buy anything and leaves with nothing.
  • This mother charges into the poster's store, demanding the name of the person who sold her teenage son an age-restricted item so she can have that person arrested. The son had spent his own saved money on an iPad, which for the record is not age-restricted. For bonus points, before charging into the store she'd called her lawyer (presumably to start the ball rolling on legal proceedings) and the lawyer had told her the iPad is not age-restricted and the sale was perfectly legal.
    My son should not be able to just buy what he wants without my permission!
  • This groom's mother, on seeing the items in the wedding's gift registry, tries to force the submitter to change the entire registry. It's heavily implied that she doesn't approve of her future daughter-in-law, as she blames her for them.
    Customer: “I am the groom’s mother! I have the authority!“
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: “This is horrible! I would expect this to happen in some uncivilized country, like Mexico, or Florida, but not here in AMERICA!”
• My God, You Are Serious!:
  • A woman in a cafe requests "infinite sugar", prompting a laugh and amused comment from the submitter...until the woman reveals that she was dead-dog serious and refuses to leave until the submitter fulfills her (impossible) request (until she is forced to leave by the police). The ending reveals that she still comes back and requests the same thing.
  • Normally when someone claims "There's no price tag, so it must be free!" they're just repeating a joke that every cashier has heard a thousand times. This guy, though, turns out to actually mean it, to the astonishment of the cashier — he claims that the printer he's found not having a price tag is the same as it having one for $0, and demands that the store "honor [their] policy" and give him it for free. After being told by both the cashier and the manager that they're not going to give him a $400 printer for nothing, he storms off in a huff, shouting insults, threatening to call the police, and saying he's never shopping there again. (Of course, he's back the following week.)
  • This guy buys $1200 worth of lottery tickets and asks the cashier "If I don't win, I get my money back, right?". The cashier, having no reason to think he isn't joking since other people have made similar jokes in the past, does nothing but laugh and nod at him, only to be surprised when he returns the following day with his not-winning tickets to demand his money back (and then throws a violent tantrum when he is told that all lotto-ticket sales are final).
• My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: In response to a bigoted father who pulls the "it's a free country" card to get out of facing the consequences for his bigotry:
  Father: It's a free country, and you HAVE to serve me!
  Owner: You're right, it is a free country, and as the owner of this shop, I have the freedom to tell you to get the fuck out or I'll call the police.
  • This law student tries to invoke this on a customer service agent for a utility company in order to get out of paying their electric bill. His first attempt is to claim utilities are covered under his rent, causing the customer service agent to ask him to read off the contract, even stating where to look. Once they read off that utilities aren't covered, he tries to state that it's still the landlord's responsibility since he never personally signed a contract with the electric company, going so far as saying if the landlord signed it for him it would be fraud. Once it's stated that the landlord or tenant has to inform the utility provider when a tenant moves in, the student refuses, stating that they didn't sign anything agreeing to pay utilities without realizing the next line of his contract with the landlord stated exactly that. The realization that he had to pay for his electricity and that he, supposedly the top-scoring student in his class, was outsmarted by the agent causes the student to fly into a rage, refuse to pay their bill since it's "illegal" to charge him since he pays rent, and threaten to attack the agent before trying to make them lose their job while ranting "I know my rights, I'm a law student!"

N

• Naked People Are Funny:
  • Except when armed with plastic guitars. Well, okay, they're still funny, but also painful.
  • Subverted here when a female front desk clerk at a hotel initially laughed at the fact that a recent check-in had answered his door naked after calling for a TV repair and complained about her sending a male staff member.
    (We both laugh, but the gravity of the situation hits me.)
• Named Like My Name: A young Caucasian woman named Morgan Freeman. Her customers can't seem to grasp that she's not actually claiming to be the actor^note at least, the husband can't - the wife instead actually thinks she is the actor, and eventually refuse to do business with her because of this "dishonesty".
• Narrative Profanity Filter: A drunk and very angry caller at a tech service, compounded by a Language Barrier since he's either speaking Welsh or has an incomprehensibly thick accent.
• Neat Freak:
  • Sometimes get emphasized on "freak".
  • "See?! No viruses!"
  • This woman raises a fuss over how untidy a store's bathrooms are. The submitter goes in to look and finds...a single clean square of toilet paper on the floor of an otherwise squeaky-clean bathroom.
    I go back to my duties, just a little peeved.
• Never Heard That One Before:
  • This person works in a theater where the restrooms have a marquee over them identical to the marquees over the individual theaters, reading "Restrooms." The tone of the story suggests that the person has gotten far too many people who think they're funny by asking if "Restrooms" is a good movie, so they have fun with it: "I thought it was OK, but the reviews have been in the toilet."
  • An Exploited Trope by the manager of this coffee shop, who has taken the most common "funny" answers to "Is there anything else I can get you?" and named expensive speciality drinks after them^note The story mentions drinks named "The Million Dollar", "The Winning Lottery Numbers", "Your Phone Number", and "World Peace". Faced with either admitting they were making a joke so predictible the shop had prepared for it in advance, or pretending they were actually ordering the drink, a surprising number of people go for the latter.
• Never Mess with Granny: Do you carry flamethrowers?
  • This old lady routs a bunch of punks picking fights over their tattoos, by showing everyone her tattoo... from the concentration camps.
  • Granny trumps mom in dealing with a misbehaving little boy.
  • This is one of those tiny old Scottish women with a headscarf nailed on and muscles like steel wires. They are a common sight in the East of Scotland and are almost immortal. Only the slow action of the wind off the north sea will gradually erode them.
  • "I had my hand on my pepper spray the whole time. You say the word and I'll run out there and get him while his window is down!" (It wasn't necessary.)
  • This one carries an unpowered taser to scare off attackers, apparently because of a previous Black Friday event.
  • When harassed by a stranger over her Parkinson's Disease (he claims she's lying about it to cover a drug high), this lady opens a pressurized can of soda onto his clothes and blames it on a muscle spasm.
    I may have Parkinson's, but I can still deal with an asshole or two!
• Never My Fault: It turns out that people will blame anyone and anything (and we mean anything) rather than a simple "Oops, sorry there, I seem to have misunderstood/made a mistake, etc."
  • The end of this story aptly sums it up:
  "Welcome to customer service, where everything is your fault and the reason doesn't matter."
  • A particularly Face Palm-worthy one.
  • The aptly-titled It's your fault that it's my fault.
  • "Oh, you made it small? When I said small, I meant big! I thought you would understand."
  • How were we supposed to know a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on our door meant housekeeping wouldn't come into our room?
  • This businessman would like you to know that it's never the customer's fault when they fail to notice where the register actually is; it's always the fault of the workers. Somehow.
  • It is somehow not this woman's fault that her house collapsed when she took a chainsaw to a load-bearing wall.
  • This guy gets a wrong number, argues with the person on the other end for minutes, and then when he finally realizes it's a wrong number, blames them for wasting his time.
  • This mother doesn't even understand the concept of discipline. Her son decides to treat some cereal boxes on display as his own punching bags, and when the submitter asks her to make him stop, she flips her lid and tries to blame her son's behavior on the submitter's "bad attitude", refusing to pay for the damage. She's banned from the store until she pays.
  • This customer and her daughter decide the submitter is a "self-hating black" because they were both jabbering on their phones and not paying attention when they were greeted, which in their minds translates to the submitter ignoring them and only greeting white customers.
  • This woman, when asked to clarify whether she is spelling a name with an m or an n using phonetic spelling, blames and yells at the operator for “making” her use a racial slur when the operator never even hinted at it.
  • This guy blames the submitter for ruining his marriage. All the submitter did was clarify an extra hotel charge to the man's wife, who he hadn't told about the other hotel visit, which was with his mistress. Somehow it's the submitter's fault for doing their job, and not the man's fault for cheating on his wife and being dumb enough to use her card behind her back for his affair.
  • A couple at a service station accidentally puts diesel fuel into their Ford sedan (causing it to break down) and decide to bawl out the submitter (who mans the register in the convenience store) for not telling them that they were using the wrong gas hose (which the submitter points out was clearly labeled as pumping diesel fuel), even though the employee was not only helping other customers at the time but couldn't have seen the pump or the couple's car from the register in the convenience store anyway.
  • In several movie theatre-related stories, a parent tries to buy a ticket to an R-rated movie for their young child, ignoring the cashier's warnings that the movie is not for children. When the parent realizes halfway through the movie that it's not for children, they inevitably storm out of the theatre and yell at the cashier for selling them the ticket. This happened at a showing of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut in 1998.
  • This dad at a pet store flippantly ignores the signs and the employee's repeated warnings to not touch a nervous rabbit with a history of biting, then has the gall to blame them and attempt to sue them once the rabbit bites his son. (Fortunately, another customer who was a witness to the incident vouches for the employee and gets the employee and the pet store out of trouble.)
  • This mother fusses at the submitter (a cashier at a fast-food restaurant) for politely asking her to keep an eye on her three-year-old child, who is running around the restaurant and in trouble of getting hurt. When the kid trips and slams into a trash can hard enough to have a seizure and end up with both a concussion and big gash on his face, however, the mom bellows: "THIS IS YOUR FAULT!" and tries to sue the restaurant. Her case was thrown out once the submitter and some other witnesses to the incident gave their dispositions.
  • This woman tries to blame her car when she backs into a power pole.
  • An impatient angry woman snatches her food from a fast food restaurant employee so violently she sends half of it spilling onto the floor and ruins it, which she of course blames on the employee (and not her own bad mood) and complains to the manager over. (Fortunately, the manager doesn't want to hear it.)
  • This woman, having been told that the place she's trying to deposit her week's earnings is a grocery store rather than a bank, claims it's the store's fault for looking like a bank (because all banks have displays full of food and drinks, right?) She even claims the grocery store somehow owes her compensation for this.
  • This man books the cheapest stay in Japan that he can find without looking at the details, and then blows up at the hostel staff and the travel agency when it turns out he's booked a bed in a shared dorm room rather than a private room as he assumed.
  • This fellow nonsensically blames the cashier checking him out at a grocery store when he forgets his PIN, enters it wrong three times, and gets locked out.
  • This guy is irate that his brand-new washing machine has broken down after only a week, and gets even angrier when the techs sent to examine it conclude it's the result of customer abuse, which isn't covered by their warranty. It can't be his fault — after all, he only washed one thing in it. Said thing was a bowling ball.
  • This customer blames a store for their abandoned trolleys clogging up the lobby of their apartment building - trolleys that they themselves have been stealing in order to take their shopping home.
  • This idiot cut his computer open with a blowtorch and apparently thinks it's tech support's fault for not expecting him to think opening something automatically equals blowtorch.
    Submitter's coworker: No, sir, I will not be taking the blame for this.[...]Because it's generally understood that when you're asked to open up your computer, you are to do so in a manner that doesn't damage the delicate electronics inside and not to attack it with a flame that's designed to cut steel.
  • A computer has liquid damage because the customer's rabbit "had his way with it?" Clearly it's the tech company's fault for having open computer ports!
    Manager: “The cost stands. Please ask [the customer] to take her ‘LoveBook’ away with her.”
  • The customer mentioned in this story attempted to get an employee fired because they thought their salad portion was too small. This was at a self-serve buffet, meaning that the customer served themselves too little salad and somehow put the blame on an innocent employee.
• Never Say "Die": "KILL?! How dare you, say that in front of my children?! You are damaging them for life!" This was the parent's reaction to the employee saying that her kids were going to wind up killing the exhibit's butterflies.
• New Media Are Evil: This customer asks a Doctor Who fan to stop watching the show because her church says "it's evil" and wants people to "support gay marriage and be an Atheist". Needless to say, she gets kicked out.
  • A later entry, also involving Doctor Who, starts out very similarly... But then the customer comes back to apologize, and admits she just has a negative reaction to the show because she was a fan growing up, but her parents refused to let her watch it, saying it was against their religion. The submitter responds by recommending her a memorabilia shop that could help her catch up on the 30 years of the show she's missed.
• Nice to the Waiter: Inverted by this parent. "Ugh! He's not supposed to be polite to people on minimum wage!" Played straight by the child, though, who gets rewarded for his politeness.
  • The "Awesome Customers" tag is explicitly for this kind of thing, since the point of the site is to rant about the bad customers.
  • This customer averts it and suffers the consequences: the customer he mistook for a staff member and was rude to turned out to actually be his boss's boss, who promptly put him on a two-week supervisory period for his bad behavior.
• Ninja: Someone heard about "mall ninja", but took the term too literally.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
  • "I'm a vampire mermaid! Gaaargh!"
  • "Okay, can I be a clown monster werewolf vampire?" "But not a zombie?" "Oh yeah, and zombie!" "How about we stick two of them together? You can be a werewolf zombie, or a clown monster, or a vampire clown, even."
  • A little girl dresses for Halloween as a vampire space cowgirl who was genetically spliced with a cat. Title Guy puts it best: "We Need A Ten-Part Series About This Character NOW!"
• No Animals Were Harmed: ...during the building of this table.
• Nobody Here but Us Birds: And they buy bird seed, at that. Wereravens or raised by a flock — take your pick.
• Nobody Poops: At least, women don't outside of their own homes according to this customer, who hears/smells another customer using a public toilet, automatically assumes it is a man, and has a mental breakdown on discovering it isn't.
• No-Dialogue Episode:
  • This story has no spoken dialogue. Justified as the antagonist and viewpoint character are both in separate vehicles, and the third party is a policeman directing traffic. The closest thing to speech is the viewpoint character honking his horn at the driver in front of him; everything else is completely visual.
  • Since 2016, non-dialogue stories have become increasingly frequent, and there is even a tag for them.
• No Guy Wants an Amazon: This customer seems to think so.
• No Hero Discount: A customer learns this in With Great Retail Power.
• No Honor Among Thieves: Word-for-word in the title of this story, where two attempted shoplifters have an all-out brawl when a bag check reveals that among one thief's stolen items is the wallet of the other one.
• No Indoor Voice: And it even got her thrown off the bus.
  • This kid at the drive-thru
  • This woman speaks so loudly — on a plane — that the submitter hears everything she's saying loud and clear despite wearing noise-cancelling headphones.
• Non-Indicative Name: A snake named Mouse.
• No Sense of Direction: This fellow who doesn't seem to understand the concept of next door.
  • This one seems to have trouble following directions. At least the guy's got a sense of humor about it.
• No Sense of Humor:.
  • Apparently, this woman, upon being told jokingly that her jumpy dog is part kangaroo.
  • This customer too, regarding a joke about credit cards.
• No Sense of Personal Space: This woman tries to show an employee how sweaty she is by grabbing their hand and wiping it across her sweaty forehead.
• Not Helping Your Case: This woman tries to return a stuffed toy claiming it unravelled on its own, but the damage on it says otherwise.
  Submitter: “Ma’am, I’m afraid I can’t offer you a refund since this clearly didn’t unravel for no reason. It looks like your dog ate it. Did your kids maybe leave it where it could get a hold of it?”
  Customer: “She’s not a dog; she’s a goat!”
  <Beat as she realizes she's sunk herself>
• No True Scotsman:
  • Or should we say, No True New Zilander?
  • This guy claims you aren't a true Cajun unless you can chug a bottle of Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce.
  • Invoked here by the poster, who insists that "(Real) Texans don’t do ketchup; it’s mayo or mustard, period."
• Not Where They Thought:
  • In "Not So (Do)Nuts About Burgers", a customer walks into a burger place, mistaking it for a donut store. They fail to notice the pictures of burgers until the OP points them out to them.
  • In "Had No Doubt She Was in the Wrong Place", a woman goes to a clothing store to buy a No Doubt vinyl record, mistaking the place for Hot Topic (despite the fact that she'd been looking into the windows for fifteen minutes). The OP then informs her that Hot Topic is to the door to the left.
  • In "Right Place, Wrong Menu", a man goes to McDonald's and asks for popcorn chicken, mashed potatoes, and drumsticks, only for the OP to tell him that they don't have any of those there. The man asks if this is McDonald's, the OP says it is, and the man leaves, indicating that he didn't intend to come here.
• Noodle Implements: Ping-pong balls and Vaseline? That can't be good.
  • These two items in conjunction cannot lead to anything good.
  • "I guess she had very pressing plans that required jelly beans, masking tape, and a banana".
  • In an unintentional example, the commenters aren't sure what, exactly, is a "condenser treatment" for roofs.
• Noodle Incident: Butter... inside a cellphone?
  • Rabbit blood???
    • How do you expect HABIT to update his Twitter if his phone doesn't work?
  • No, not the bagels!
  • "Do Xboxes come with cup holders?"
  • Due to difficulties returning from a petting zoo, my mother and I had a 3-month-old calf riding in the front seat of our truck.
  • “Honey, when was I bitten by that duck?”
  • Whatever happened that caused this cellphone to be jammed inside a printer...
  • For some reason this woman carries around a taser to scare off a crazy customer (though it is inert).
  • This guy somehow manages to wreck two snowblowers in the same manner. The result was that they looked like they had been shredded with a large cheese grater, as the submitter puts it.
  • A lady harasses a furniture store for not watering their decorative fake plants. While security escorts her out, another employee comments that at least it's not what she did on Arbor Day, and you do NOT want to know what she did on Earth Day.
  • This woman managing to somehow return two miniskirts in a sealed vacuum bag, requiring scissors to retrieve them. Surprisingly the clothes were pristine and she had a receipt.
  • "These pants have a defective zipper. I want my money back.", says a customer returning pants that look as though multiple flamethrowers were used on it.
  • invokedThis woman returns a bag of clothes that she claims was "left it in [her] car for a week and then left in [her] kitchen for a week" before she decided she didn't need them and returned them. The clothes smell absolutely rancid and are covered in maggots, and the sight and smell is so gross that the submitter pukes. Nobody is able to find out how and why the clothes ended up in such a disgusting state.
  • invokedThis store has had too many incidents involving crazy customers to count (unsurprisingly, the store is in Florida). The submitter (a customer) only learns about the details of two of what are implied to be many customer-related incidents from a friend who works at said store ^note one is extremely disgusting and required much of the pharmacy to have to be sanitized, while the other involved a set of triplets shooting up milk cartons (and the manager) with BB guns in the middle of the store, while other incidents such as "Farmer Chicken Blood", "The Herpes Harpy", "The Mask-Rumbling of '21", and "The Great Mayonnaise Spill of '22" go entirely unexplained (other than that The Great Mayonnaise Spill apparently resulted in much of the store's staff quitting).
  • The submitter of this story works in Customer Service for a car insurance firm, and has to call the Underwriting Department to check if it's the customer is covered if there's a pet goat in the van. They ask the underwriter if that's the oddest call they've ever had, and get the reply "Myself, yes; not Underwriting as a whole, but you don’t want to know."
• Not a Morning Person: This man.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: This person has a woman strip and try to seduce him to get out of an overdue rent payment. It doesn't work.
• Not Growing Up Sucks: This poor guy does not even bother with his ID anymore.
• Not So Above It All: A boss that normally advocates "professional" behavior shelves it in favor of "good customer relations".
• Not With the Safety On, You Won't: This cashier pulls the trope on a drunk wielding an airsoft gun.
• Number of the Beast: A few accounts of superstitious customers trying to avoid paying $6.66, or getting $6.66 in change.
  • "Well, I'd say that's the Lord's way of telling us to get dessert!"
• N-Word Privileges: Taken to a(n il)logical conclusion here: apparently, having a black President means this customer can shout vulgarities and sexually harass women without consequence.

O

• Obfuscating Disability: Assumed by this customer. She was wrong.
• Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Several stories about every type of this trope possible and the saner worker/coworker/relatives/passerby's struggle against them. The usual range is between entitled parents and scheming crazies.
  • This woman is described as fitting the bill to a tee.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: He doesn't exactly call them...
• Offscreen Inertia:
  • This customer really doesn't take well to someone doing their job without her physically seeing every little detail of it.
  • This guy thinks his son is still three years old, when he has not seen his son in five years.
• Oh, Crap!: "All the color drains from his face. He manages to squeak out some words: 'Hi Mama.'"
• Oh Wait, This Is My Grocery List: Literally. "No, no. Your prescription. It says 'cheese, yogurt, chunky peanut butter'."
• Older Is Better: This old man still believes in this trope despite the submitter's attempts to explain to him that modern DVD video cables have much better quality, and are smaller and cheaper than the lower quality and bulkier VCR cables he has that were made in the 1970s. (The old man considers modern cables to "Cheap Plastic Crap.")
• Older Than They Look:
  • One story features a 33-year-old customer who looks like a teenager, trying to buy an M-rated game.
    Customer: "[...] I even quit drinking because it’s too much of a hassle to buy beer!"
  • It's the case for this caricaturist.
    • And this actress too.
  • This department store worker takes a minute to realize her coworker has mistaken her for a teenager and is worried about her dating a man in his mid-thirties. She's thirty-two.
  • This convenience store clerk tells alcohol buyers she won't make them show ID if they can guess her age within five years. None of them guess over sixty; she's seventy-three.
• Omniglot: This man, even when he has no idea what language they're speaking.
  • "Se Habla Japanol".
  • To understand the conversation and tell the (hilarious) story, this person had to understand English, Polish, and French (oh, my!)
  • Also this worker.
• One Side of the Story:
  • This mall-goer asks a kiosk employee for the location of the post office. The employee begins to say that it's inside a camera store, but the mall-goer assumes that the employee is trying to drum up business for the camera store and repeatedly cuts off the employee before they can complete their directions. When they finally manage to explain the whole thing, the mall-goer berates the employee for not being clear.
  • This man assumes that a grocery store employee is tired because she was partying too hard and that it's entirely her fault for being tired. He doesn't let her speak until he's finished ranting, at which point the employee explains that she's tired because she was working overnight and usually didn't do so. To the man's credit, he realizes his place, apologizes, and walks away.
  • During a prom, a teacher accuses a dry bar of selling alcohol to minors, but it isn't too long until the bartender manages to get in that the beer the teacher took was non-alcoholic, and there are no actual alcoholic drinks anywhere near the bar. At least the teacher gives the bottle back.
  • A man walks up to some Boy Scouts selling popcorn and demands some Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies. He interrupts the Boy Scouts' every attempt to politely explain that they are the Boy Scouts and not the Girl Scouts to demand the cookies they don't have until the boys' scoutmaster finally intervenes. The man then bawls them out for "not telling him" and calls them idiots before stomping off.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot:
  • The title of this story says it all.
  • This guy, who is clearly too angry to think his words through as he tries to force the tire store he is at to get some tires for him rather than driving to get them:
  Customer: "My tires are unsafe. If we all die in an accident, you will be liable and we will sue you."
  Mechanic: "How are you going to sue if you are dead?"
• Operator from India: A few stories involve call center employees being mistaken for this (or something similar) when they're actually from the same country as the caller.
  • "I want to talk to an American! I don’t want to talk to someone in India."
  • "Your accent is appalling! I hate talking to you Asians!"
• Oracular Urchin: Um... this woman seems to think her child has supernatural powers and requests a credit card transaction be canceled just because the child said the card was unlucky. And she was right, in a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy sorta way. Making the purchase and then asking instead of the other way around, then being too unreasonable to do the paperwork to undo the purchase - meaning it stands, even though the customer stormed off and didn't get the service - means a significant amount of money was wasted. So in the end the kid was right, though it was less the fault of the card and more the fault of the stupidity.
• Orgasmically Delicious: Mmm, oh yeah, kung pao chicken!
• Our Vampires Are Different:
  • Here's one Twilight (2005) fan that doesn't know about this trope.
  • "About the vampires: they should have some stakes and garlic on the truck, unless it's a Twilight-type vampire in which case they have whiskey and a Motörhead CD just in case."
• Outlaw Couple: This man and woman are trying to check into a hotel. They get mad upon being told there aren't any rooms available. They almost steal the desk phone (the submitter was concerned about that) and go to the basement to use the payphone. On their way out they steal a leek from the staff room (an employee went out to buy some groceries). They then go to another hotel, which is also sold out. They then proceed to steal that hotel's outdoor speakerphone by ripping it off the wall and then running away with it. They were surprisingly fast and the owner had to replace it herself.
• Overcomplicated Menu Order:
  • One entry involves a guy ordering a complicated drink and then bullying the barista when she got confused over it.
  • For an inversion, this guy orders a cheeseburger without cheese and gets angry when the cashier responds that it would just be a hamburger.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • I know that! That is a SMALL coffee with 11 MILKS!^note Then 3 more were added.
  • A long, long transaction in a drugstore.
  • The "This Is Why We're In a Recession" series, in double-digit numbers, with no signs of stopping.
    • Three digits and counting.
  • BAGEL BAGEL BAGEL BAGEL BAGEL!
  • Over 45 minutes spent at a convenience store checkout by a 78-year-old woman. Starting off with only one cashier, a notoriously slow cash register, a purchase in three transactions, each of which requires ID to be scanned through; for the first transaction it takes her five minutes of digging about in her purse to find her ID after complaining about needing it because she's 78, the second time three minutes after complaining about needing it because she's 78 and the cashier just saw it (after dumping it into her purse after using it the first time), and the third time two minutes (after not taking on board what she was told the first two times, and, yes, complaining because she's 78 again). Add in some time between the second and third transactions sorting her shopping bags and carefully perusing the candy bars. Two other customers in line have stormed out by this point. Then, when her final transaction is complete, she decides to occupy the cash stand to sort the contents of her purse, blocking everybody else and reminding them for the fourth time that she's 78. She's finally convinced to move aside, but she's still there sorting by the time the submitter leaves.

P

• Panicky Expectant Father: Inverted here, where the guy is not going to let the fact that his wife is visibly in labor and ready to drop stop him from arguing over a discount on a duffel bag. And the worse thing is the bag has nothing to do with the pregnancy; he needs it for a trip the next week.
• Papa Wolf: This guy.
  • Invoked here to get rid of a customer who was apparently bad-mouthing the staff.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • This lady not only falls for one, she points out something different that wasn't even changed.
  • Just swap name tags and presto! You're a completely different employee!
• Parental Neglect:
  • There are four stories so far with the series title "Some parents are way too comfortable leaving their kids with strangers", in which the parents intentionally expect random people they've never met to look after their children.
  • And we have this mother who was called by a museum and immediately blasts them for not reminding her to take her coat that she left behind. The only reason the museum was calling in the first place was that she also forgot her young son there. The worse part, this was after at least three hours and a trip across South Dakota.
  • Meanwhile, this mother ignores her sons fighting each other with metal poles, blows up at the submitter for taking the poles away (and subsequently lies to their manager when she feels she's being judged), and then after a while leaves the store with one of her sons to do several hours more shopping elsewhere in the mall - completely unaware that her other son is lying unconscious and bleeding back in the original store thanks to another ignored fight.
  • This woman severely neglects to pay any attention to her five-year-old child, completely ignoring both him causing havoc around the print shop she's waiting in and the staff when they ask her to keep him under control in favor of her phone. The reason this falls into this category is that she continues to pay attention to her phone even when her son has slipped into the back of the print store and sliced his finger off on a print machine. Even when the injury becomes apparent, the wellbeing of her child seems to come at the bottom of her priority list; her first reaction is to yell and scream at the staff, by the time he's been taken away in an ambulance she still hasn't checked on him, and she only even attempts to follow once she's finally collected her order.
  • Yet another example of a place being mistaken for a daycare, with a mother too busy talking about personal business on the phone to care about the fact that her son was beating up other kids.
    Co-worker: “No wonder he has problems; his mom cares more about her boob job than taking care of her own kid.”
• Parent with New Paramour: "Turns out his daughter canceled the order because she doesn't like Dad's new girlfriend."
• Parking Payback: While there's nothing over-the-top, some jerks who decide to disregard parking etiquette do get their comeuppance.
  • This jerk who parks in not one, but two handicapped spaces gets ticketed in the end.
  • In this story, a young man cuts off another woman who was going to park in a handicapped spot, with his car that has nothing indicating that he's allowed to do so. The woman gets her payback when she sees the man and confronts him, and lets him see that she's very old. The man then offers to help her into the store.
  • This woman parks her car in a fenced lot, which is for customers only. The submitter warns her that she can't park there, but she ignores the warning and threatens to sue. She leaves her car there overnight, so he calls and reports her to the police. In the morning, she returns and scales the fence, starts her car, and tries to ram down the gate! She damages the car and also gets fines for illegal parking and damaging property.
• Pass the Popcorn: An occasional comment theme on stories speculated to have divided comment sections.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": In some cases, "Swordfish" would be a major improvement.
  • Oops. O-o-ops.
  • A call center worker suggests to a Sikh client that maybe he shouldn't use his mother's maiden name as his identifying question: since it's part of Sikhism that women must use the surname "Kaur", it would be very easy for anybody familiar with the tradition to guess and hack his account.
• Paying in Coins: "THEY'RE BREEDING!"
• Peking Duck Christmas: Discussed and inverted.
• Periphery Demographic:invoked "Bu-But, you’re old. And a girl!”
• Person as Verb: This story is called "Gonna Totally Homer Simpson This Thing".
• Persona Non Grata: Many of the stories end with the unruly customer banned from the store. A few stories even deal with customers that are/were banned.
  • "Yeah, I'd say you're still barred".
  • This customer is very much not clear on the concept of being banned from a place.
  • One customer managed to get not only herself but her entire church banned from the restaurant they frequented because she (either intentionally or unintentionally) escalated her habit of using fake money with religious messages in them from only replacing tips to replacing her entire meal payment. The ban was eventually lifted once the restaurant implemented additional security measures to prevent a repeat.
• Perspective Flip: Of a sort; this one is a customer submitting their own ditz moment.
  • This one, likewise, starts out with the submitter admitting they're the dumb customer of the story.
  • Not Always Working is one for Not Always Right, in a meta sense.
  • This story is suspected by many to be a flip of this story; the fact that the one doing the intercom firing says the exact same thing in both stories, complete with pause, is a pretty hefty clue.
  • This story and this one^*Wayback Machine link, as the original has apparently been removed were posted on Not Always Working and Not Always Right years apart and appear to depict the same exact situation from the perspective of the woman and then the registrar. In the first NAW story, the registrar for the activities is depicted as an angry misogynistic Jerkass who deliberately signs up the woman's daughter for ballet instead of soccer and then swears at the mom when she points this out, while the supervisor for the activities is portrayed as clueless about the organization's practices, followed by the woman alerting her friends to the organization's misogynistic practices, resulting in many families pulling out. In the second one, the registrar exhibits no such ill-tempered or misogynistic behavior and the supervisor is a Reasonable Authority Figure, while the woman is an Obnoxious Entitled Housewife who throws a hissy fit over the price for her daughter's ballet outfit and then lies about the registrar being sexist to the manager by claiming that he deliberately signed her up for ballet instead of soccer. Then when she still doesn't get her way, she sabotages the activities out of spite by lying to the other parents about the organization being sexist (costing the organization 600 dollars in refunds). (Of course, this is assuming these really are the same incident, and not two separate incidents that happened to occur around the same time; given that there's at least one other story from around the same time centered around a similar program, it's also possible it was some kind of larger initiative across multiple locations and each story deals with a different specific program.)
• Phlebotinum-Handling Equipment: Inverted. Save It On A Flesh Drive mentions inability to use a capacitive touch screen while wearing gloves.
• Phony Veteran: This one gets busted by an eagle-eyed manager.
• The Pig-Pen: This delightful guy complains about the pine-scented perfume he bought for himself, as apparently people made fun of him for smelling "like somebody had taken a s*** in a pine yard". As it turns out, they weren't far off — he expected the scent to act as a substitute for taking a shower, meaning he smelled of pine and unwashed BO.
• Pintsized Powerhouse:
  • This kid. "I'll let you know what my sister thinks of the toy!"
  • A "tiny Asian woman" who slams a violent customer's head into the counter before he can hit the cashier and returns to her place in the line so fast that nobody even knows what happened.
• Pirate Parrot: This customer adopts a parrot around Halloween while dressed as a pirate. He returns a few days later to show the submitter the pirate bandanna he gave the parrot.
• Placebo Effect:
  • When this customer complains about their coffee being too light, and ends up being served the exact same coffee she sent back the first time. Apparently the waitstaff has been doing this to her for years and she never catches on.
  • This customer at an optometrist's is sure the demo glasses they're shown are improving their eyesight — despite the OP repeatedly trying to explain that they don't have prescription lenses in them, just plain pieces of plastic. Unfortunately, the demo lenses are badly scratched (due to being a display item), and the customer, convinced (despite the OP's assurances otherwise) that they'll be getting these scratched lenses, leaves without buying anything.
• Platonic Prostitution: This guy calls a phone sex line... and ends up talking about video games.
• Playful Hacker: This eleven-year-old REALLY didn't like her parents controlling her Internet access. Even the PC tech they hired to figure out how she was bypassing the Windows control software was impressed that she'd installed a second hard drive with Linux on it.
• Pluto Is Expendable: Apparently Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet was a socialist conspiracy.
• Poe's Law: Exactly how many of the stories are genuine, how many are exaggerated/embellished versions of real events, and how many are actually pure bullshit made by trolls or somebody with an axe to grind?
  • Even assuming for the sake of argument that all the stories are true, there is also the fact that sometimes, the person submitting the story is unclear as to whether the customer was trolling them or serious, such as when "new age" vegans entered a sausage shop.
  • The site's runners are sometimes unclear on this, as well, as indicated by the story titled "A Heavy Dose of Misogyny or Laziness?" - was the problem customer simply lazy (refusing to help until asked, driving off in a huff when "helping" with one object isn't enough) and angry at the submitter for daring to ask her for help, or was she a Female Misogynist (deliberately dropping that one heavy object on the submitter's knee) angry at the submitter for daring to be a woman who can do "men's work"?
• Point-and-Laugh Show
• Pointy-Haired Boss: Multiple commenters note that this story should have been a Not Always Working crosspost because the main conflict is the result of a nonsensical corporate decision to remove the branch's highly popular children's clothing section because none of the surrounding shops stock children's clothing... which is precisely the reason it's so popular. When customer complaints result in the decision being reversed, it's chalked up to an "admin error", which basically translates to "I refuse to take responsibility for my idiotic decision but I can't bring myself to throw anyone under the bus". The submitter is not impressed with that explanation because it cost the branch 70% of its profits and gave a horrible woman who didn't even have kids and just wanted to make someone else miserable because she was in a bad mood an avenue to verbally abuse them.
• Poke the Poodle: This guy dressed as Darth Vader tells a little boy that he doesn't have to eat his vegetables.
  Owner of restaurant: Sir...why did Darth Vader tell that little boy he didn’t have to eat his vegetables?!
  "Imperial officer" accompanying "Darth Vader": Well, after all, sir...we are evil.
• Politeness Judo: Used successfully here. It helps that the crook was dumb and the cashier didn't realize he was in danger until afterwards.
  • Do not wish others ill in front of a nun.
  • How to get fresh fries at the fast food shop without ordering an unsalted batch that tastes bad? Have you ever considered asking nicely, and saying please?
• Political Overcorrectness:
  • "Peacock" is a dirty word and you should be ashamed! I prefer you use the term "pearooster".
  • Also, we don't say "Indian". And a map of Africa^note Wayback Machine link, as somehow, the actual story was taken down is disturbing.
  • Inverted in another story. The store tries to be a little politically correct, selling "holiday trees", but apparently the customer wants a Christmas tree, and so will go to a store that "isn't afraid of offending people!"
  • Another customer takes racial colors a bit too seriously.
  • This worker had to stop wearing her custom-made TARDIS bracelet to work because a willfully ignorant customer believed it to be slang for "retard".
  • “Well, that was rude! It’s ‘Happy Holidays.’ Saying Thanksgiving is politically incorrect! Stupid girl!”
  • "Everyone knows 'slow' is not politically correct! Your computer is 'mentally impared'!"
  • Grammar is "racist"
  • Inverted in this story:
    Submitter: "Well, that [blanket]'s handmade, and it was a real labor of love, so—"
    Customer: <drops blanket like it's poisonous> “Ugh. Made with love? That’s some of that ‘woke’ bulls***.”
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • A roller coaster's computer crashes, and the attendant, having never had to deal with this incident before, radios for maintenance, saying "The rollercoaster computer crashed, we need maintenance", as a group of irate visitors who want to go on the ride loudly shout and fight with other attendants in the background. In an unfortunate coincidence, the attendant's message over the walkie-talkie cuts out the exact wrong words, so it sounds like the attendant said: "The rollercoaster crashed". That combined with the sound of people yelling in the background causes management to fear that there has been a horrible accident and results in many security guards, first aid responders, and managers arriving along with the maintenance personnel in a panicked frenzy. Fortunately, the misunderstanding is cleared up quickly, and the unruly guests are ejected from the park and banned for life when the managers see them abusing the attendants present. Going forward, attendants are advised to phrase computer crashes as "the computer has an error" to avoid future misunderstandings.
  • A misinterpretation from a Norwegian couple visiting a waffle restaurant in Sweden asking for "ice" on one of their waffles^note in Norwegian, "ice" is used a shorthand for the word "iskrem", the Norwegian word for "ice cream" results in the baffled staff serving them a waffle with ice cubes from the freezer served on top of it. Luckily, the couple is more amused than upset by the error.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure:
  • This customer has never seen Back to the Future and doesn't realize his mechanic friend tricked him when he told him to get a "flux capacitor" for his car. Needless to say, he's very angry upon learning the truth.
  • This bookstore customer doesn't recognize the Bible when it's shown and mentioned to him.
• Porn Stash:
  • A external drive a guy brings into a shop has 500GB worth on it. He then proceeds to buy 4 more 16 GB flash drives.
  • This girl should have made an effort to hide hers, and most definitely should not have panicked over its wellbeing after her laptop's keyboard was repaired.
• Potty Emergency: One person takes the concept a bit too literally.
  • And another takes a more... uh, "proactive" approach.
  • In this case, it's not clear whether the unfortunate result falls under Potty Failure or Bring My Brown Pants. Perhaps both?
• Potty Failure: This guy.
• Prank Call:
  • This Niko Bellic impersonator falls here at best
  • Several stories involve prank calls where the recipient plays along, generally resulting in angry bafflement because that's not how it's supposed to go. See here and (with some Exact Words) here.
  • A young prankster who drops it immediately on learning about caller ID.
  • This pet shop got rid of a prank caller who repeatedly pulled "My fish is drowning" by calling him back claiming to be a scientist who wanted details.
  • Or you can just threaten them with legal repercussions. Or worse.
  • “Well, that’s five minutes I’ll never get back.”
• Precedent Excuse: This story has a drunk bar patron try to excuse their friend's drunkenness by arguing they're more drunk than them, thus getting them both thrown out.
  Patron's friend: "Why are you kicking her out? I'm drunker than she is!"
  [Anecdote Giver]: "Then you can leave, too!"
• Precious Puppy: One commenter has taken to posting dog pictures on pages with dead image links.
• Precocious Crush: "If there's a sandwich named after you, I would so eat it!"
• Prefers Raw Meat: Inverted here A woman complains that her steak isn't cooked properly. She ordered a medium rare steak and screams up a storm before the chef yells at her to get out. The steak in question? It actually was cooked medium rare, much to the chef's dismay.
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy:
  • ... It's because I'm black, isn't it?
  • Look, I just want to be as dark as that guy so I can learn how to rap.
  • Pretty fly for a little white girl.
  • Inverted here—a white person not trying to be black is called a n*** by a Racist Grandma who's pretending to have a disability. It gets worse from there.
• Private Detective: Inverted here. The narrator is a banker who is sitting in their car. A woman mistakes the banker for a private investigator who was sent by "Harold." The woman is apparently cheating on "Harold" and hands the banker a bunch of documents that supposedly exonerate her. The banker shreds the documents and later finds out the woman has a joint account with "Harold."
• Pro Bono Barter:
  • The submitter in this story is an accountant who has to deal with a number of farmers who are "allergic to paying in cash" and prefer to offer barter transactions. Not only do they have to observe farmers paying each other with things ranging from chickens to vegetables to swords, but the submitter has had to accept payment in the form of milk or eggs themselves. They had to draw the line however, when a farmer offered to pay with a live calf.
  • On finding he doesn't have enough money to pay for a computer, this customer tries to make up for the shortfall by throwing three chickens into the bargain.
• Prosthetic Limb Reveal: This customer used a joke about his prosthetic arm to shut up someone demanding a discount.
• Psychological Projection: In a horrifying manner. This hotel guest appears to be desperately unhappy with his customer-service heavy job, so all customer-service employees must be desperately unhappy too. When the hotel clerk refuses to admit she hates her job, in fact stating that she's very happy working for the hotel, and has no desire to go to university, for training to work elsewhere, he becomes more and more agitated, grabbing her arm once, and continuing to chase her around, trying to drag her away from her job until his co-workers physically restrain him and forcibly remove him from the area.
• Psycho Knife Nut: Two of them in this story — one with extra knives, and one who's extra nuts.
• Psychopathic Manchild: A sizeable proportion of the customers.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Parody of the former Trope Namer here and here; these also fit the normal definition of the trope. The title of this one, also a reference to 300, fits as well.
  • And a more straightforward one: "Medium! Coffee! Two! Equal!"
  • I'm! In! Canada!
  • SMELL MY HAM.
  • HE. IS. A. MAN. CAT!
• Punny Name: Meet Clara Fication.
• Pungeon Master: Not in the stories themselves, but the frequent commenter Stephen has gained a reputation for doing this. This story even specifically invites him to "pun at will".
• Puppy Love: A boy who barely reaches the counter has been saving for his girlfriend's present.
• Pyrrhic Victory: A few examples crop up now and then for customers who put pride first:
  • A sabotaged price tag causes the price for a gallon of milk at a convenience store to read "$29" instead of the intended "$2.99". A woman takes this at face-value and attempts to pay $30 for a gallon of milk, and is adamant that she pay that much for it until the cashier gives up and just puts the transaction through.
  • This guy wants a particular table in a restaurant so much that he stubbornly refuses any other table offered to him, electing to wait a whole 90 minutes until the people at the table he wants finally leave.
  • This woman squanders an enormous tax refund because she thinks her accountant is incompetent and calculated her taxes wrong (and refuses to believe that she became eligible for better credit, and thus higher tax refunds, after getting a job, getting married, and having a kid), and simply does her taxes herself to stick it to the accountant. As a result, she receives barely $1000 instead of the $6.5k she was going to get.
  • It turns out a coupon for Jell-O at a supermarket is actually more expensive than it would be to just get the Jell-O individually without using it, as a cashier, ultimately futilely, tries to explains to this customer.
  • At this tourist attraction getting three individual tickets is cheaper than the saver ticket for four people, but a single dad with two kids mistakes the saver ticket for a family ticket and refuses to listen to the poor attendant as they try to explain to him why three individual tickets would be cheaper than the saver ticket, instead crying discrimination against single-parent families and accusing the attendant of thinking his family isn't a real family. The man is not placated until the attendant gives up and sells him the pricier "family ticket", which ends up opening up an opportunity for the family of five behind him to get in at a massive discount!

R

• Racist Grandma: It comes with the territory. One man somehow finds a way to be racist about shrimp.
• Rapid-Fire Interrupting: It happens here. A customer calls a pet store and demands that they fix an order of chicks, constantly cutting the employee off and assuming that they were being lazy. To the customer's credit, once he realized that he called the wrong pet store, he promptly hung up.
• Rapid-Fire "No!": This customer really doesn't like onions.
• Rage Breaking Point: This pizza place employee was willing to make a compromise for a customer demanding to have a new pizza delivered to her (after her first order was cancelled because she left to go to the store, despite her saying that she would be there, and left her teenage daughter with no way to pay for it). But then the customer, trying to get the new pizza for free, claims that the pizza delivery driver sexually harassed her daughter when he got there and she answered the door. Cue a furious verbal smackdown from the employee (who is roommates with the driver and knows that he would never do such a thing) and an insta-ban from the restaurant.
• Raging Stiffie: This guy.
• Read the Freaking Manual:
  • "You’re making fun of me for not reading directions, aren’t you?" "Kind of."
  • "I have an acronym for that. FTFD! Follow the f***ing directions!"
• Reality Is Unrealistic: No, I don't think NASA will give you a 5-minute skydive either.
  • A few entries are about women assuming that the employee's hair is fake (either in color or length) and refusing to believe the employee's hair is natural.
  • These customers assume that an unnamed island is just a theme park and not a real island with real people living on it. They repeatedly ask a resident what time the island closes, and refuse to believe that the island resident when she claims to live there, believing that she just doesn't want to break character.
• Really 700 Years Old: Or something...
  • This guy seems to be well on his way.
  • This woman might be more than 300 years old. Or it might be a typo.
• Real Men Hate Sugar: Not the case.
• Real Men Wear Pink: ... and smell peachy!
• Real Women Never Wear Dresses: Seems to be the thought behind this one.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Sometimes particularly obnoxious and/or vindictive problem customers end up on the receiving end of one of these when they take their entitled behavior way too far, whether it's from another customer or even an employee or manager:
  • This customer's niece goes for this trope when the defensive approach proves ineffective. Along with any number of other examples when dealing with bigoted customers.
  • This guy, when a racist customer goes too far.
  • This delivery driver is allowed by the company owner to write a letter to a customer who consistently makes extravagant food orders but refuses to tip and mocks the drivers.
  • In this story, a customer at a sandwich shop causes a scene over the restaurant giving her her soup in a take-out bowl instead of a nice glassware bowl. It's stated that the regional manager owns five of these restaurants^note (the description given in-story (fast-casual; specializes in baked goods, soup, and pasta) suggests that they are all Panera Bread restaurants) but prioritizes one over the other four, meaning the submitter's restaurant is stuck with the cheaper take-out bowls. When trying to explain this to the customer fails to placate her, the fed-up manager finally gives her one of these, with another customer in the restaurant whom the woman tries to get to agree with her adding his own two cents for good measure.
  • In this story, an employee who is frustrated with a regular problem customer (whom the restaurant management refuses to ban no matter how badly the customer acts) reaches their Rage Breaking Point when said customer throws their salad at them while screaming about their order being wrong. The employee unleashes their pent-up fury on the customer and then quits the next day when the management still sides with the customer afterward.
    "YOU KNOW WHAT? F*** YOU! F*** YOUR SALAD! EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS WRONG TO YOU! I'M TOO TIRED TO DEAL WITH THIS EVERY FRIDAY DURING LUNCH! LEAVE!!"
  • This woman gets one after mistaking a fellow customer for an employee, ordering them around and even grabbing at their clothing.
    OP: I said... I DO NOT WORK HERE!
    Woman: (stammering) I... I... I’m sorry. I thought you were —
    OP: Thought I was an employee, yes. Which you thought gave you the right to speak to me and treat me as though I was beneath you. Well, I got news for you, lady. Buying stuff from a store and spending a little money does not grant you license to abuse or belittle people.
  • An employee who is about to be out of a job at a Toys 'R Us that is about to close^note the store is not specifically identified in the story, but even the submitter lampshades how easy it is to guess where it took place given the context unleashes years of pent-up frustration on an Obnoxious Entitled Housewife (who is responding to the employee's earnest attempts to help her despite the chaos of Toys 'R Us stores across the country closing down with relentless swearing and insults) with the fury of a thousand suns. The customers waiting in line (who could hear the entire conversation due to how loudly the customer was shouting) can hardly even blame her afterward.
  • This manager about to quit makes their last act as manager to ban a smug, narcissistic customer who has been gleefully cheating the store via unjustified discounts and deliberately tormenting the employees (to the point that her immediate reaction to the manager telling her that they are refusing her service is to taunt them), topping it off with one of these when they manage to shock her into silence for a moment^note as a footnote, once higher management found out that at least four other employees were ready to quit alongside the manager over the customer, they held up the ban:
    OP: Get the f*** out of this store and don’t come back. We all loathe you. We’ve never encountered a human being so miserable and hateful as you and the mental anguish you’ve caused us means I am officially banning you as my last act as manager here.
    Customer: I’m going to call corporate right now!
    OP: My name is [name]. Tell them it was me. They’ll call me and I will say you’re a liability to our store and the mental health of all our staff. I will tell them that you’re the reason I am quitting and more will likely follow me if they let your spiteful soul back in. They won’t risk losing multiple staff to appease one customer who has claimed an uncountable number of unfair discounts over the years. Well then...off you f***.
• Red Scare: Way too many people seem to think this way. e.g. this silly man.
  • And this one.
  • “I refuse to accept that Pluto is not a planet anymore. I don’t care what the socialists say!”
• Reflexive Response: This one.
• Refuge in Audacity: A shining example.
  • A rare aversion here. One has to wonder what the father was trying to accomplish with all the trouble.
  • The Offend-O-Bot 3000 Strikes Again!
  • "Kid, you are one cocky little s***. If you weren't underage, I'd buy you a drink."
• Reptilian Conspiracy: This guy seems to believe in one.
• Rescue Romance: A perfectly timed submission here.
• Retail Riot: One comic strip showed "Why dealing with customers is worse than a Zombie Apocalypse". It states that "Zombies will never attack each other, even when supplies are scarce" while "Customers will attack each other, especially when supplies are scarce".
• Retired Badass: Knife-wielding shoplifter versus retired elderly Marine. The shoplifter didn't stand a chance.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: Occasionally pops up when celebrities (or would-be celebrities) try to get away with nonsense due to their fame and wealth with "Don't you know who I am?!", only for the annoyed employee to say "No".
  • "Do you know who I am? I'm the officer who will arrest you if you don't cooperate."
  • A scene from a checkout line: "Do you think I look old enough to apply for the senior discount?!" "You look old enough to have been on the Mayflower."
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: "What is this, some sort of self-service store?"
  • Several of the stories on here are about extremely stubborn customers who will pay the price posted and only the price posted, no matter what sales or discounts are in effect despite not being advertised. It's like they're hardwired to believe that no matter what the store workers do, they're trying to rip them off.
    • "I don't care how much it costs! Just do your job and give me my f**king milk for 29 dollars!" Also a Pyrrhic Victory (thus the title).
  • This upper-class woman demanded money back for their kid's private school tuition because other people were going for cheaper. Her response after being told her kid didn't get any aid because her household made $170,000, and aid is usually given to those who make $20,000 or less a year? "You fucking liar! Nobody makes so little money!" Seems like the money has made her far too sheltered.
  • Strange example here. A customer accidentally threw out a modem's power supply, so she tries to scam the tech-support guy into giving her one for free. He'll only do it if it's broken, however. So, the customer breaks it. The tech-service guy refuses to give her one for free because he saw her break it. She then tries to bribe him, saying “I’ll pay you £30 to say you didn’t see anything.” The tech replies that a new one only costs £8 anyway. She then screams "It’s not the amount; it’s the principle!" So, in the process of trying to get one for free, this customer is willing to pay more than three times the price of getting one legitimately? Okay, whatever, it's your money.
  • This restaurant patron refuses to avail herself of a sale, insisting she pay full price.
    Customer: “I need to be able to tell my friends at dinner how much I spent on this. Why are you trying to take that away from me?”
    Wow, rich people really do have different problems.
  • These customers, who apparently went into a fast food restaurant wearing formal attire under the impression that it's "fine dining," and are utterly baffled when told that there's no waiter to bring him his water.
• Rich Kid Turned Social Activist: The scary-looking punk girl in this story turns out to be a kindhearted spirit from a wealthy family who buys sandwiches and coffee for homeless locals from a neighbourhood coffee shop and stuffs hundreds in the tip jar to the baristas who go to college. When asked, she explains that she just finds face-to-face interaction more fulfilling than signing checks to charities.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Apparently expected by this would-be hotel guest, who, on being told that the hotel is full^note  as is every hotel in the area — it's a summer weekend, can't understand why the hotel can't just build them another room.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Apparently, some people think that store employees are these.
• Ridiculous Procrastinator:
  • When is the paper due? Midnight.
  • This groom-to-be booked hotel rooms for his wedding party, but then delayed contacting them to let them know that they'd actually pushed the marriage back a couple of months, figuring that the hotel would just figure out that he'd be coming another time and hold all those rooms empty for him. It then transpires that not only did he not contact the hotel, but he also failed to inform everybody else providing services for the wedding that the date was moved. The ultimate fate of the marriage is never discovered, but given that he states the relationship is rocky already, it's not likely to have gotten any better.
• Right in Front of Me: Two soldiers badmouth a civilian in front of their line over civilians shouldn't be allowed to shop at the on-base convenience store. Unfortunately, said "civilian" is actually their officer instructor who is not pleased. Cue both soldiers turning pale and running out!
• Right Behind Me:
  • This call center worker finds out the supervisor has been monitoring their call when they sass a difficult customer and hear the supervisor laughing.
  • "What kind of man-child would drink chocolate milk?!" Cue a Death Glare from a very burly fellow customer who's been drinking just that.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: "That's not how rogue is spelled!"
• Rule of Cute: This person thinks it applies to them.
• Rule of Three: This customer all but invokes it.
• Rummage Fail: This customer seems to have trouble finding the correct bills for a transaction. At least, that's what we hope is happening.
• Rule 34: This kid only knows about Betty Boop because his dad has naked pictures of her.
• Running Gag: Several entry titles come up over and over and over again, such as "This Is Why We're In A Recession, Part x"^explanationstories about customers clueless about money and banking, which is into triple digits and "Twilight Of Our Literacy, Part Xx"^explanationstories about clueless fans of the book series.
  • On Not Always Romantic there is a very long-running gag about zombies. They're all called "Till Undeath Do Us Part."
  • "With Great Bacon Comes Great Responsibility" spans multiple sites.
  • Any story that somehow involves the colour blue will have a title referring to "de ting".

S

• Sadistic Choice: So is it better to admit you stole the camera or that you use it to stalk underage girls?
• Sarcasm-Blind:
  • The offending customer in this story does not seem to realize that the cashier is making fun of his ridiculous request.
  • This customer has a bout of sarcasm from another customer sail right over their head.
  • This customer also fails to realize that he is being made fun of when asking for black and white ink for a printer.
  • This customer:
    Customer: Uh... how many pieces are in your nine-piece bucket?
    Cashier: Seven. I’m taking two out for you asking that question.
    Customer: Seven? That’s a good deal!
  • This customer, after repeatedly asking a cashier at a gelato shop if they have pizza because "this is Italy!", has the same cashier jokingly offer to buy her a pizza for €100 (about $150 USD). She pulls out €100 without hesitation until a coworker stops her and offers to give her directions to a pizzeria.
  • This customer, refusing to believe that a hotel is actually sold out, is told, "Well... I could fix a rollaway bed up on the roof for you if you like. It’s gonna rain a little later, so I hope you don’t mind getting wet." She gladly accepts the offer without hesitation.
  • ""I’m sorry ma’am, we’ve run out of our dry water, and only have the wet kind left." "Well, you should order more."
  • Probably subverted with this one.
  • This one lampshades it in the title.
  • A restaurant attendant's typical joke response to questions asking for the restroom: "No, sorry, we do our business from the bridge" backfires when a customer actually does go to pee off the bridge!
  • This store has a silly sign stating that unattended children will be given a double espresso and a free puppy. Along comes a woman who cannot comprehend that it's not a legitimate sign and who wants the puppy. It takes a while to explain to her that it's just a joke... and then she comes back a few minutes later for the double espresso.
    Owner: Let's take that sign down. Every time I think something is idiot-proof, the universe makes a better idiot.
• Sarcasm Failure: Describing the obviously-impossible task the customer has just requested in graphic detail might make it obvious that it can't (or won't) be done. But it seems to just as often meet with a reply of "Yes, yes, can you do that?" or "Exactly, why is that so hard to understand?"
• Save-Game Limits: See the Pokémon-related example in "Socialization Bonus" below.
• Saying Too Much: A customer at a pharmacy asks for Sudafed (the active ingredient which is frequently used to make meth). When asked if she wants Sudafed or the generic brand, she replies that the recipe called for Sudafed... then, realizing what she just said, beats a hasty retreat.
• Scary Black Man: A couple instances of Invoked Trope when dealing with racist customers, and another one that was Exploited.
  • Dealing with a lady who refuses to buy a black doll.
  • From the custserv desk: “Thank you. Oh, and before you go, you ought to know that I’m the biggest, blackest mother-f*** you’ll ever meet in your life, and I know where you live. Good day.”
  • “Uh, no. The nice man behind the counter asked you to leave the store. I suggest you do so before I decide you need some help getting through the door.”
  • Never pull the racism card in front of this guy.
• Schmuck Bait: "Don't look at my feet."
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!:
  • Invoked here.
  • And also here.
  • And here. Physically assaulting a person because they won't randomly do inane tasks for you? If you're old, that's A-OK!
  • And here, only to get epically told where to put it.
  • This 80-year-old man acts mean because he can't do anything else.
  • This man tries to bully/shame two teenagers into giving up their seats, but they (justifiably) refuse to cave, pointing out that the bus is nearly empty.
  • This charmer throws a tantrum in a library over students using the microfiche readers, claiming it's somehow unfair that other people get to use them. What's worse is that she ends up believing — and positively gloating — that her aggressive attitude got her what she wanted, when in reality, she simply hadn't noticed that the machine in question was already unoccupied.
  • One old lady is apparently so demanding, that when the cab company hears her voice, they pretend to be a wrong number and hang up.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • “Did you just say someone was x-raying some meat?” "I'm going on break."
  • A double-case, where a coworker passes the phone to the submitter rather than try to answer the customer's question, and then the submitter hangs up upon hearing it (asking if a little boy could fit in a dog cage or carrier).
  • A variant here, where a pair of customers cap off their hilariously-inept shopping trip by forgetting how to move through an open doorway they have already passed through three times. The submitter and the other customers all stare in shock for a moment, and then the submitter decides to just stop acknowledging their existence and move on with the line.
  • As this library patron throws a tantrum that she "didn't come [here] to READ", her boyfriend immediately bails.
  • This submitter quits their job when a flasher throws a bottle of juice at them (for not ringing him up at a closed register), and upper management force them to work all day in their juice-stained clothes as punishment for not avoiding the conflict (by letting the man walk out without paying).
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: These abusive customers get thrown out of the store despite them being about to make a big purchase (over $1000 worth of merchandise).
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Uh, no, you really don't. Here is a case where the actual manager was right there at the time.
  • This customer did have a connection (a manager), and abused it to get free food (by coming in to the deli, looking for something they have that is not ready, then complaining to that manager and getting a meal free). Eventually, however, the store manager catches on (he noticed that the other manager kept signing off on no-charge purchases on the deli production sheets for that specific customer, plus security camera footage showing him deliberately looking for things they didn't currently have available), bans the customer from the store, and gives the other manager a one-week unpaid suspension.
  • The final straw in this Humiliation Conga: not only does he not have connections, but the fellow customer whose removal he's demanding does^note As in, the customer he was trying to hit on and then assault was the bartender's sister. The bouncer at said bar was the bartender's husband.
  • This is an odd example in that the customer seems to have honestly deluded herself into believing that she is the vet's girlfriend, or she's trying very hard to become his girlfriend. She's set, er, straight, by the vet's sister, and later the vet himself.
  • This caller demands a new free computer, even though the issue with his current computer is easily fixed, and then claims to know the founder of the company and be having lunch with him the next day - only to be informed that the founder is dead.
  • This woman flat-out states that she is "above the law, and with one word, can have your entire company shut down".
  • This customer constantly broke a movie theater's rules by choosing whatever seat she wants to sit rather than take her assigned seat since she always bullied the manager to make them give in. Unfortunately for her, her bullying doesn't work this time since not only did the submitter refuse to give in but his supervisor, who happens to be the employee that served her in the past and knows about her bullying, finally has the authority to tell her she can either take the seat assigned to her or leave.
  • This woman gets kicked out of a coffee shop for paying from a collection jar. The woman demands a manager, claiming that the manager always allows her to pay from the collection jar. An employee calls the manager (who is also the owner), the latter of which does recognize the woman … and that he had banned her from the shop for trying to pay from the collection jar.
  • This customer attempts this trope, but he seems completely unable to keep his story straight about who he supposedly is.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!:
  • See it here.
  • A wealthy golf player hits a golf ball into another man's backyard. The golf player then proceeds to use the backyard as if it was part of the golf course. The owner of the backyard is angry with yet another rich jerk thinking he can just walk right on in like he owns the place. He gets fed up, so he bodily throws the golfer back onto the golf course. The golfer threatens to sue because he "paid good money", as he reminds the owner every time he opens his mouth. The backyard owner says he'd like to see him try, countering with Screw the Money, I Have Rules!.
    Golfer: That’s assault! I am calling the police on you! I paid good money!
    Backyard Owner: I don’t give a d*** how much you paid; this is private property and according to the state penal code, I can remove you just like I did.
    Golfer: I'll sue! I paid good money!
    Backyard Owner: Go ahead. I’ll be your lawyer.
  • This woman steals a coffee pot from a library because she believes that poor people don't deserve coffee or tea, and uses the same "logic" to steal roses from a flower shop.
  • Similarly, this woman tries to buy a backpack that the submitter had gotten to first because in her mind, the submitter looked too poor to afford it. Well, that and the submitter "wasn't holding onto it enough."
  • "I have a £85,000 BMW! My car is the most expensive car in the car park. I can park it however I like!"
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: This blackjack dealer learns the hard way that no, she doesn't.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Beautiful!:
  • "Beautiful people should have their hair done first! The ugly ones should wait!"
  • This young woman believes she's entitled to a discount just for being "the hottest girl in town", and always goes to a male cashier because most of them went to school with her (it's a small town) and lusted after her the whole time. When she gets one who just moved to the area, doesn't know who she is and informs her that she'll be paying the full price, she's completely thrown, apparently unable to process the idea that not everyone is swayed by her looks.
• Screw Yourself: Best idea I've heard all day!
• The Scrooge: Over a flipping NICKEL.
• Scunthorpe Problem: This lady thinks that "peacock" is a bad word.
• Secret Identity: For a unicorn.
• The Siege: When a woman trying to escape an Arranged Marriage and her abusive family tries to take refuge in a fast food restaurant, her family – more than twenty strong – responds by forcing their way into the building. By the time the police arrive, the woman, the submitter, and their co-worker have had to take refuge on the roof – even the fire doors weren't enough to hold them back.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Some people will submit stories where they are the ones carrying the Idiot Ball.
  • This customer.
  • "I've become what I hate."
• Self-Serving Memory: The customer in this story goes on a huge rant when she's not allowed to buy alcohol because her teenage daughters chose it, while they stand silent and embarassed. Four hours later she returns, all smiles ... to apologise for their behaviour, and say she's now explained the law to them and it was a teachable moment.
• Separated by a Common Language:
  • Somehow, this couple doesn't even recognize the employee is speaking English at first.
  • A mismatch in regional terminology is the most likely cause of this; "Coke" is a common term in the American South for any kind of soda.
  • A customer with an English accent walks into an American department store, asks for the location of pants, and refuses to elaborate on which meaning of the word she's using. It turns out to be neither. She's looking for socks.
• Serious Business: Sales, discounts, and refunds are serious motherfucking business. Attempts to dupe an employee into giving you one of these make up at least a third of the site.
  • Who cares if there's an emergency, the game's on!
  • "You're all a bunch of wimps! I risked my life getting here. I need to buy these petunias!"
  • "We don't have time for that. My wife is in labor!" Also an example of Hypocritical Humor.
  • "Did she actually come all the way back here to save ten cents a game...?"
  • This client is very insistent that the submitter remove Sherlock Holmes' hands from a theater poster, not seeming to care how blatantly ridiculous the end result will look.
    "I can’t overstate how okay I am with a floating notebook."
  • In a display of the classic Coke vs. Pepsi rivalry, this submitter witnesses the customer they are serving leaving the restaurant because it only served Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi.
  • “I don’t want a pizza made by a Queenslander.”
• Servile Snarker:
  • A fair few employees.
  • This guy yelling at Siri.
• Sex Sells: Self-inflicted in "Talking Shirty"
• Shaming the Mob: This unshakable kid.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • Here.
  • Liquid drinks are made of liquid. That's what makes them drinkable.
  • Unless it's too much like itself — dirt is too dirty, salt is too salty, and food smells too much like food.
  • And the cakes contain cake.
  • This customer calls an electronics store and asks for the electronics department.
  • This E-Sports team manager gives his middleman very little instruction as for what the team's logo should be like, and just wants "something E-Sporty."
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Used as a retort to one customer demanding that a call centre employee "get someone who can speak English."
  Submitter: “I assure you, ma’am, that I am utterly competent and fluent in the English language, as demonstrated by the irrefutable fact that we have been conversing in the Bard’s tongue for the last half hour. However, if my discourse is incomprehensible to you, I’m amiable to your suggestion of deploying the assistance of another colleague who may be better equipped to assist you. Would that be to your satisfaction?”
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Here.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • This one was successful.
  • This person was shipping the poster and her brother right up until she realized they were siblings. Even after she learns the truth, she seems reluctant to let go of the idea.
• Shockingly Expensive Bill: This customer calls to complain about their bill being incredibly high, which turns out to be because their seven-year-old daughter had ordered about thirty pay-per-view cartoons (mostly Spongebob Squarepants, Peppa Pig, and Disney Princess movies) without her parents' knowledge or consent.
  • There are several similar stories where the culprit is an adolescent/teenager discovering pay-per-view pornography and getting busted when their parents call the credit card company about a sudden spree of charges from "Girls Gone Wild" or similar services.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: This guy falls victim to one:
  Customer: No way, I bought this because it's a phone that doesn't need the web. All they have these days are smartphones that go on the web. But I'm not smart.
  Me: Did the guy in Boston [who sold you the knockoff] tell you that?
• Shotgun Wedding: This elderly lady doesn't drink Jim Beam (a brand of bourbon whiskey) because "last time [she] drank Jim Beam, [she] had to get married!"
• Shout-Out: The title of the story "When They Act Tough, You Call Their Bluff" is a lyric from the opening song of RENT.
• Shrinking Violet: This poor library patron has to sum up the courage to ask for a book (a book on how to be more assertive, no less!).
• Shutting Up Now: A very frequent reaction among bad customers if and when they get put in their place is for them to go dead silent (sometimes after dithering in protest at first) and quietly finish their transaction and/or slink/stalk/stomp off, usually out of either embarrassment upon realizing they were making a fool out of themselves or reluctant frustration over not getting the last word in an argument.
  • For instance, the submitter manages to shut down an entitled customer trying to scam her way into free fries by simply responding with "Not here, you're not" and a hard stare every time the customer tries to bully them into giving her the fries.
  • A trio of influencers enter a high-end Las Vegas steakhouse and attempt to cause a scene and embarrass the submitter on their live-streams when one of their steaks is not medium-rare...even though it clearly is. The submitter manages to get them to knock it off when they point out that a celebrity chef eating at the same restaurant, not named but heavily implied by the description^note "...a famous British chef, known for not mincing his words..." to be none other than Gordon Ramsay, has ordered the same exact meal and is perfectly content with it.
• Silent Snarker: "My colleague just backs away and gestures that [Problem Customer's] breath stinks."
• Silly Walk: "You walk like an employee." Followed by several attempts to walk like a customer. Bonus points for the story being named after the Trope Namer.
• Similarly Named Works: In-universe. In "Anatomy of an Idiot", a customer returns a copy of Grays Anatomy to a bookstore. "It was terrible; it’s not at all like the television show. ... I don’t know what they were thinking with this book."
• A Sinister Clue: Um... no comment.
  • Also here.
• Skewed Priorities: Quite a few customers, in the face of disaster or fierce weather, will demand service or wonder why nothing is working despite the immediate danger. Enough in fact, to warrant their own page.
• Slut-Shaming: This jerkass customer drops some very vulgar comments of this sort on a cashier, just because the uniform shirt is tight on her ample bosom. She handily puts him in his place.
• Small Name, Big Ego:
  • A few customers like to pull the "don't you know who I am" card when refused service for any reason. Even on the very rare occasion that they actually do hold some importance, there's Always a Bigger Fish to put them down; otherwise, the usual response to this is something to the effect of "no, and I don't care either".
  • Some customers think that their buying something funds the employees' paychecks, and thus lets them get away with any behavior they desire. What they don't realize is that they're just one person out of many who buys things, and sometimes, they're not even directly responsible for the employees' paychecks.
  • Some customers like to boast about their large salaries and hold it over the "lowly" workers, like here. Like making more money is somehow a valid reason to insult the people who are probably more skilled than them.
  • A specific case here: a woman who seems to think that her child staying at the daycare means she gets to set which rules apply to her child and that she can even force them to switch cleaning supplies based on her preferences, just because. Naturally, she's forced off the premises after swearing at an eleven-year-old girl for daring to try to uphold the daycare's actual rules.
  • And then there's this woman, who is no name and all ego - and when someone else puts her in her place she tries to kill him.
  • This guy seems to think that having known the former owner of a coffee shop means he can get free drinks and do whatever he wants, and then when the head barista and the actual owner force him to leave he tries to tell them they'll somehow be "missing out".
  • This writer thinks he's the greatest writer ever and has written a great story that needs to be published. But when the publisher reads it, it turns out to be very, very bad, with grammar mistakes, no characterization, a Mary Sue protagonistinvoked, using made-up words, and being too short - and that's only five reasons. When the publisher sends the writer a rejection letter, the writer tries to sue the publisher, claiming discrimination because he's dyslexic. The charges are later dropped when the publisher's lawyers contact the writer's lawyer with the news that the conversation listing the reasons for rejection was recorded.
  • Every other word out of this asshole's mouth is reminding the other person they're a doctor and they know the speaker, and are therefore better than everyone else.
  • This lady is told to leave the restaurant by a manager after she sees an employee wearing hearing aids, is too dumb to realize they're not headphones, and decides this is somehow disregard for the customers that require said employee being fired immediately. She starts on the whole "you just lost a lot of business" spiel when the manager refuses, claiming her husband is a solicitor, only for the husband himself to interrupt her and tell her to just go so he and the rest of their guests can eat in peace. Turns out he'd actually been an accountant and her a shoe shop worker before they won it big in the lottery, enough so that they're able to live off their winnings without working, which sent the lady's ego into orbit.
  • On a certain Air Force base, the guy in charge of the truck dock had a "everyone can eat" policy for the regular potluck lunches. And he meant everyone, from the military staff to truckers to a random tour group that happened to be in the area. This wife of a just-out-of-basic-training airman tried to pull her husband's rank on the wife of her husband's boss to ban truckers from those lunches. When the husbands were pulled in, the airman's wife doubled down: "You have no authority over my husband! He is going to take your job in less than a year because you obviously don’t know how to run a professional military operation!" The airman's wife became the first person ever banned from the potluck lunches and any other events held at the truck dock.
  • This idiot is convinced his position on the homeowners' association board means he can ban a paramedic from parking in a reserved-but-vacant spot when the paramedic is there responding to a medical emergency. He then forces his way into the residence where the emergency is taking place and tries to interrupt treatment with more demands that the paramedic move their vehicle right now. When the cops finally get him out of the residence, he apparently doubled down — the poster didn't see what happened (being busy with a patient at the time), but Mr. HOA Board wound up tazed and charged with trespassing, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, and interfering with the scene of an emergency.
• Smug Snake: Many customers believe that because they are the customer, they are automatically right - sometimes even past the point when the authorities have arrested them.
  • In this one, an elderly customer attacks an employee for wearing sunglasses indoors after the employee in question politely and directly states that he is wearing the sunglasses on an optometrist's orders as he is recovering from laser eye surgery. The customer accuses him of lying, even after the manager confirms the employee's claims. The manager calls the police right there, and the customer stays there, fully believing that she is in the right. She is arrested after the police come, as she confirmed what the manager and general manager said, and even when she is being dragged to the police car, she is yelling about how the employee she attacked should be arrested, not her.
  • In this one, a woman drops her two dogs over a five-foot fence outside an animal shelter (which she mistakenly believes is a boarding kennel), in order to circumvent the surrender fee. Five weeks later, the woman returns, only to find out that her dogs have been neutered and given to new owners. She refuses to believe that they are not a boarding kennel and calls the police on them. Unfortunately for her, the shelter had video cameras, and the customer is arrested. Even after this, however, she still abjectly refuses to believe that the shelter is not a boarding kennel and that she is any way in the wrong, and so is charged not just with animal cruelty (for dropping the dogs over the fence, injuring one) and neglect (for making no effort to ensure anyone was actually there to care for them), but also two counts of contempt of court for yelling at and spitting on the judge when the court sided with the shelter.
  • This woman is convinced the submitter has committed a criminal act by giving away one of her shop's dresses to another customer for free and tries to blackmail her to sell her the dresses for half price or she will report her to the owner. In reality, the customer already paid for that dress online and came to pick it up. And the owner, who is under the counter the whole time and hears everything, is so disgusted and angry that the woman not only accused his employee of being a thief but also tried to blackmail her, he bans her from the store.
• Snipe Hunt: Quests for things like left-handed golf balls, mostly self-inflicted.
  • A straight example: a flux capacitor for someone's son's Xbox.
  • A caller to an office supply/tech business requests hard drive fluid. It's the salesperson's boyfriend making a prank call, which backfires because she fails to recognize him and transfers the unfamiliar product request to someone in Technology.
  • Backfires big-time on this company as it turns out the random item they sent him out for ("Skyhooks", meaning hooks that hold up the sky) is also the name of a very real, and very expensive, piece of equipment, and that, in keeping with the manager's demands, he'd ordered six of them at £300 (about $500 US) apiece. The manager was forced to rush off to shut down the order, and this was apparently the last time this particular type of prank was attempted in this workplace.
• Soapbox Sadie: This woman makes a scene demanding that the owner fire an employee because he is serving everyone but a Camp Gay customer. When she's done talking, the owner tells her that the employee is his son, and that the flamboyant "customer" is his son's boyfriend, who has come to pick him up at the end of his shift.
• Soap Within a Show: With the show being real life, that poor woman.
• Socialization Bonus: The unavailability of starter Pokémon after starting a new game, combined with the limit of one save file per game card, leads to destructive behavior in "Gotta Catch His Son".
• Some of My Best Friends Are X: A bizarre example here, where a woman ordering a sandwich is convinced that asking for white bread will be interpreted as racist by a customer "of another ethnicity", and is only too anxious to make it clear that she is "not prejudiced". Why, only the other day she ate some "properdoms", and they were lovely! (As soon as the other customer leaves, she looks relieved and orders some "good, God-fearing white bread").
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Well, this customer thinks he does.
• Spell My Name With An S: A man called Pheven or maybe Stesen.
• Spoiled Brat: Many.
  • One who seems to think that since daddy lets her have everything she wants, everyone else in the world has to do the same. And "daddy" is all too happy to fly off the handle at anyone who disagrees.
  • The boy in this story, big time. He is forcing his haggard father to buy what sounds to be at least several dozen copies of the same exact Spongebob Squarepants DVD (costing what is stated to be at least around $550), with the dad seemingly unable to do anything about it.
    Dad: (when asked by the OP about the identical DVDs) Oh, don't worry about it. I hate my life anyway.
• Spotting the Thread: This restaurant worker notices a man in his late 20s or early 30s trying to get a veteran's discount by wearing a military ribbon indicating he served in the Vietnam War.
• Spraying Drink from Nose: One entry involves one of these en masse, courtesy of a female restaurant diner overheard saying:
  "But I can't testify! I don't have testiculars!"
• Standard Female Grab Area: Averted here. Not only does it do nothing to stop the woman from disabling her attacker, but it counts as assault.
• Stay in the Kitchen:
  • A few examples.
  • Everyone in the office is female? This place is doomed!
  • Almost literally.
  • This man would like to remind you that "women ain't 'Merican".
  • "Ain't no women in guns. Mens the only ones who can know anything 'bout my situation!"
  • This is apparently this customer's train of thought, spending eight hours hanging up just because the person responding was female.
  • One man's philosophy seems to be to beat women into submission when they don't do what he wants. When this woman stands up to him, draw bar in hand, it completely freaks him out. Thanks to the cops conveniently choosing that moment to arrive, his history of domestic violence catches up with him.
  • This man refuses to believe that a female tech support worker actually helped him, and decides that there was some man who told her what to say instead, despite the worker and the supervisor saying otherwise.
  • Inverted in this case. This man encounters a female tech support worker; since he doesn't encounter them very often, and this is a stereotypically "male" occupation, he decides she must be good at her job. Whenever he calls in the future, he requests to speak with her specifically.
  • This customer says the phrase while demonstrating his bigotry.
  • This one comes from a mother - she refuses to let her daughter buy a dragon or dog toy, saying that girls should only get pink or girly things.
  • In this one, a man is trying to get a toilet rough, and refuses to believe anything the female submitter says, demanding a manager. When the manager confirms what she said, the customer then, rather than dropping the issue, asks her why she didn't tell him that, at which point a male coworker reveals that she did tell him several times, but he refused to listen because she was a female. After the customer denies any wrongdoing, the manager refuses to do business with him.
  • Inverted here. An elderly woman tells the police that the submitter is "disrupting business" at the fabric store simply because he's a man. When she chews out the submitter for being "evil" and "sexist," the police instead ask her to get in the car.
  • Another gun-related example, where a man believes simply removing the magazine makes the gun completely harmless, ignoring the employee's insistence that the round in the chamber could still be fired simply because she's a woman. He quickly leaves the premises when the manager comes and proves him wrong - and for extra hilarity, the gun in question had a big warning stamped on it saying it can still be fired without the magazine in.
  • This guy takes the cake by randomly calling a dog grooming salon and demanding that the person who answers the phone make them a cupcake, because everybody who works at such a place must be female and therefore should be in the kitchen.
  • The customer in this story supposedly comes from a country in which this trope is the norm.
  • This elderly husband wants to know if there's an alternative to his wife being given a plaster cast — as it will impede her ability to do the housework, which he apparently expects her to carry on doing with a broken arm.
    OP: You seem alright. Why can’t you do the work? She is your wife, not your slave.
  • A sexist client is confronted with either admitting he made a typo to the female graphic designer he hired or just straight-up admitting to his own misogyny (instead of writing "win expensive appliances and housewares" in the written description of a company contest he gave to the designer to create fliers around, he instead wrote "win expensive appliances and housewives"), and opts to just sit there in stubborn silence before eventually hanging up instead of answering the designer when she asks him for clarification on what he meant.
• Stealing from the Hotel:
  • There's a story where a guy complains about the towels he stole to hotel management (by phone, a while after he'd stayed there).
  • In another story, some guys clean out their entire hotel room before leaving, taking lamps, bed linens, towel racks, and even the toilet paper holder. When caught by the police (who had pulled them over for speeding), they claim they thought they were welcome to all of the stuff in the hotel room since they paid for the room.
• Stealth Insult:
  • "Ma’am, you clearly are just as intelligent as you present yourself to be." "Well, I’m glad you realise it."
  • This rude customer complains about her pizza but refuses a new one, saying, "I owned a restaurant. I know what you do to people’s food when they complain." The OP responds with, "I’m sorry you were forced to work in such unprofessional conditions."
• Stealth Parody: It can be very difficult to tell whether some of these people are genuinely crazy or just real-life trolls.
• The Stoner:
  • This customer is either this or a Valley Girl.
  • This store seems to get them a lot.
  • "Ah, no man, I need my money to get my weed."
  • I see kayaks in the kayak room!
  • "Every Saturday night, a young guy would come in, flying on chemicals, seat himself on the floor in the chips aisle, and proceed to have hours-long philosophical conversations with the chips."
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:invoked
  • This guy practically says the trope by name.
  • This customer accosts another for buying a Halo game.
• Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: This woman threatens to kill herself if tech support doesn't send a technician out in 48 hours, declaring victory when the submitter freezes because one of their closest friends took their own life recently before the supervisor claims to have called the authorities on her for a welfare check and terminates the call on their behalf.
• Straight Gay: This guy seriously regrets coming out to a female friend who doesn't seem to understand this trope.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: A sandwich shop worker with obsessive-compulsive disorder recognizes a problem customer's demands about the ingredients on her sandwich being placed "wrong" as the same, and offers to hide the sandwich until it's finished so she doesn't get triggered. The comments point out that this would only make sense to someone else with OCD and that particular tic; to the other coworkers, the customer seemed to be difficult for no apparent reason.
• Straw Vegetarian: Occasionally and unfortunately.
  • These airheads mix this trope with abject stupidity, objecting to using feeder mice to feed snakes, pointing out that they give their dogs vegetarian meals.
    Submitter: “Er… you know [Brand] dog food has meat in it, right? I mean, it’s probably got more meat in it than a lot of other dog foods.”
    Customer #1: “NO. It does NOT have meat in it! We only buy the kind that has venison in it!”
    Employee: “Venison is meat, ma’am. It’s made from deer.”
    Customer #2: “You’re so stupid. It’s not deer; it’s venison. All-vegetable dog food!”
• Stripper/Cop Confusion: A group of firemen answering an alarm at a restaurant are mistaken for strippers by a group of drunk partygoers. Things get worse when one of the women in the group attempts to force herself on one of them and has to be dragged off by a police officer. The poster notes that, fortunately for the group, nobody ended up being arrested (much to the ire of the commenters, who point out that what happened was sexual assault, and she absolutely should have been).
• Stunned Silence: The audience in this after an anonymous singer in a talent contest sings a very crude and racist version of "Jingle Bells."
• Stupid Crooks: Has a few stories about stupid criminals in its database. Like these guys.
  • This genius was attending police academy and did not connect the dots that 1) he would not be allowed to borrow a gun for firearms training without a valid ID, 2) it's illegal to drive with a suspended driver's license, 3) the suspension was for missing a drunk driving court date, for which he was also actively wanted for arrest. He openly acknowledged receiving notice of the last one and was still shocked when the supervising deputy handcuffed him.
  • This woman steals an expensive electric shaver and successfully carries it out of the store. How was she caught? She came back when an employee called her, she claimed to have lost her receipt but paid by card which is easy to prove, she claimed to have used a cash register the furthest from the entrance, and obediently followed the employee to those registers, all but removing her chance of bolting once the theft was obvious. (In the end, she continued insisting she'd bought it until security was involved.) She likely would have gotten away if she'd just kept going. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory indeed.
  • This guy tries the old "I-paid-with-a-fifty" scam. He's so determined to get away with it that he refuses to believe that there's video evidence against him, and even comes back the next day with a cop in tow. Even after viewing the video, he refuses to believe it's correct, and the cop eventually has to arrest him for trespassing when he refuses to leave.
  • This guy slaps the pricing barcode from a $2.69 bag of grapes on a $1,999 TV and expects the cashier not to pay attention to a television appearing to be so cheap. He flees to 'get his wallet' when the cashier calls out the scam as a 'stupid prank' without directly accusing him.
• Stupid Good: "[The donation drive is] going on 'til September, but you know, you're allowed to say 'No' when we ask you." "No I'm not!"
• Stupid Question Bait: This worker has the perfect answer to an attempt to invoke this trope.
• Summon Bigger Fish:
  • A recurring creep at a game store isn't banned despite openly harassing the female clerk, and even tries to coerce her into a storage closet (her athlete father is present, thankfully). The manager refuses to do anything even after the latter incident… so she calls corporate office and the police. Both investigate the next day, and the manager and creep are never heard from again.
  • The submitter threatens to do this in this story when a "serial puker" tries to pull the "do you know who I am" card. The submitter retorts that they do know who he is, and that they also have his sergeant's^note whether he works for the police or the military is never made clear phone number, and threatens to report him if he doesn't clean up his mess.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: A lot of customers will continue on some very dumb courses not out of stupidity, but because they don't want to admit they're mistaken/wrong.
• Super Drowning Skills: If this caller is to be believed, he drowned while taking swimming lessons.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: A common 'let's just get them the hell out of here' tactic once a customer's stupidity has gone too far.
  • “Yes, ma’am. That’s exactly how it works.”
  • “Sometimes you just gotta lean into the crazy.”
• Suspect Is Hatless: Several stories filed under Crazy Requests have customers who describe products in extremely vague ways and expect the employee to know exactly what they're talking about.
  • Case in point: a blue book about a teenage girl.
  • "I think I've found the fraud line equivalent of 'I once read a book. It was blue.'"
  • Several nonspecific attempts to identify works of media, such as "Do you have that movie with that guy?", "Excuse me, I'm looking for a movie, it has two actors in it.", "Do you have those books in that series?", "That book Sophomores read.", and "the action movie that stars a guy and a girl, where the girl gets kidnapped by a bad guy and the good guy has to save her".
  • This customer describes the employee at the print shop who has been helping him as having "long brown hair and glasses," and he later adds that she also has tattoos. The submitter notes that this could literally be any of the employees in the shop, except for the one who doesn't have any tattoos. (Ironically, that's the employee he actually wants.)
  • This customer doesn't know what the book they're looking for is called, what it's about, or who wrote it... but they know it's a paperback.
  • This customer goes into a home improvement store and asks for a shade of paint matching those of some lampshades he saw on "that home renovation show with that guy with the face" the previous day. Even figuring out the channel the customer saw the show on (HGTV, a network known for its many home improvement/renovation shows) doesn't immediately narrow it down until the customer names the specific show and the steadfast submitter luckily manages to find a clip of the episode on YouTube that features the lamps.
    Submitter: Was this the lamp, sir?
    Customer: Yes! Finally! Now was that so painful?
    Submitter: Not in ways you could imagine, sir.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • Here and here.
  • I'm not stupid!
  • "...He was never chased by any dogs because I don’t HAVE any! I’m not home, so he couldn’t have found me. Besides, the dogs were TIED UP! I can see them right now from my WINDOW!" Bonus points for starting the denial before the callers could confront him about it.
• Suspiciously Specific Sermon: This pastor lectures his entire congregation about the dangers of greed and false charity after one of his parishioners decides to pay their restaurant bill entirely in fake notes with church messages on them, resulting in the restaurant dumping every fake note they've ever received in the collection tin along with a notice that all members of the church are banned from the restaurant.
• Sustained Misunderstanding:
  • "Why is there a clothing store where your Short Hills store used to be?!"
  • "It means, 'I don’t speak any French because I’m not from France.'" "Oh, you! You French have such great senses of humor!"
  • This person accidentally calls a library, thinking they called a bank. After being corrected, they call again, mentioning bank business again.
  • Some people just don't understand the phrase "we doesn't sell cakes."
  • "[Having kids] at age twelve? You should be ashamed of yourself!”
  • Police department?! I was calling Dr. ***’s office! How DARE you answer his phone!
  • This jerk customer stubbornly keeps calling the viewpoint customer drunk.
  • This customer repeatedly refuses to believe that she's pulled up to a store that's under construction, and presumes that food is available because the workers are eating. She also assumes that a random bystander who supplied said food is the manager, and is equally oblivious to the traffic cone she ran over on the way in.
  • This person refuses to believe that she's called a generator company and not her power company.
  • This lady calls a home improvement store, asking what they do for birthdays. She refuses to believe that she's called a wrong number, but the employee is at least able to provide some help, for which she still says thanks at the end of the call.
  • This customer, upon asking why a store doesn't have any live recordings of Beethoven, is told by another customer "all the live copies of Beethoven burned up in his estate fire" and "the sheet music was luckily printed on fireproof paper," leading to the response, "Wow, they had fireproof paper back then?"
  • This woman tries to get her magazine subscription cancelled by calling a company that runs an ad in the magazine. She finally stops calling two months after everyone in the company stopped answering her calls.
  • This guy freaks out over an "Obama '08" sticker on the submitter's car, calling the submitter a terrorist and Obama a terrorist and an illegal immigrant.
    Submitter: “Sir, why would we have an illegal immigrant terrorist as president if the government were on his side?”
    Customer: *gasps* “You’re right! Everyone’s a terrorist!”
• Sword Cane: This bookstore owner is also a former fencing champion, and uses his sword cane against a guy trying to rob him.

T

• Tampon Run:
  • Why Cashiers Should Rule the World. Bonus points for how the cashier handles the poor guy's heckler.
  • Discussed in this story, which also features an understanding cashier – one who encountered a much more clueless boyfriend in the past who thought that babies come out of the mother's belly button.
• Tantrum Throwing: At this banquet for college donors and retirees, the college president's wife throws her expensive plate of food on the floor when she's not served first, screams at the server that "LADIES ALWAYS COME FIRST!" and then sits and pouts for the rest of the evening, refusing to eat.
• Tastes Like Purple:
  • You should have told him it tastes like red.
  • Electricity scented.
• Tautological Templar: The Customer Is Not Always Righteous.
• Technologically Blind Elders:
  • This gentleman describes DVD players as "those fancy video players[...]that play CDs but with films on them" and seems to be under the impression that a supermarket would sell a DVD player with a disc changer, a very niche product that would only be sold by a store specialising in AV equipment. The submitter has to direct him to a more specialist store when it becomes clear that the supermarket won't be able to help him.
  • Meanwhile, this customer in 2009 is surprised to learn that his wooden box TV from the 1970s isn't considered 'the usual kind' any more, and that any new TV he gets will have a color screen, more than four channels, and a remote.
  • This woman has to be taught what the internet is.
  • In "the days when technology is still mostly analog," this elderly woman has to have it explained to her that no, she can't fax a birthday cake to her grandchild.
  • This this elderly customer is a double example. To begin with, when she calls about a virus scan, she takes the term too literally, thinking it's like an MRI scan and asks how far back she should stand from the computer while it scans. Then, she inquires about a "hole" in the bottom of her computer, and it turns out that she forgot to buy a battery for her computer, not realizing that laptops could be used unplugged.
  • This old lady is gobsmacked to learn you can buy things online.
    Old Lady: “Huh. I thought the Internet was all just naked people and Facebook.”
  • This old lady's grandson tricks her into trying to buy a "DVD rewinder."
  • This old couple try to warm their hands over a 4K TV's display of a fireplace, then ask the submitter if there's any risk of the fire jumping out of the screen.
  • This older woman can't tell the difference between her TV and her microwave.
  • Somehow this lady used computers for years without learning that you could right-click.
  • This octogenarian is a train wreck; he doesn't realize his mouse needs batteries, he doesn't connect his computer to power, and he periodically uses his mouse in reverse.
    I’ll give the guy credit for trying to keep up with technology and being online with Facebook, but man… it gets frustrating working with people sometimes.
  • Subverted, and in fact inverted with this 96-year-old, who was mistaken for this trope by other workers, but it turns out he teaches computer science to other senior citizens.
  • This old woman thinks that instead of plugging in the adaptor for a wireless mouse, you push it through the slots of the computer "like a coin machine."
• Technology Marches On:invoked "No. We should wait until next year, when they come out with the 4D TVs."
• Telepathy: Played for Laughs here after a little boy watches the employee "predict" a regular customer's usual order.
• Tempting Fate:
  • "...seriously, can you imagine if I was as stupid as him and spilled these!" [crash] "...I guess I deserved that."
  • This one has it with a side order of Failed a Spot Check.
  • "Let me know when there’s a great flood, and then you can skip my lunch!"
  • This store has a "X Days Since a customer asked a stupid question" sign. Said sign manages to make it to 99 days, but only has space for two digits. The story is posted by the person who grabbed the Idiot Ball and asked a stupid question.
    • Similarly, this story:
      Manager: “…when I said there were no stupid questions, that wasn’t a challenge for you to prove me wrong…”
• That Came Out Wrong: Several stories have cases where a customer slips up in this manner.
  • "Oh, wow. I gotta watch how I phrase things."
  • Ten virgins, please.
  • Hopefully this one.
  • Young man, do you have balls?
  • New jugs
  • Someone calls a help desk and refers to an 802.11g WLAN hotspot as a "G spot".
  • The customer in Sure Thing, Sweet Cheeks mentions a "rack"... of newspapers.
  • This customer wants to see the cup size... of a blender. Amusingly, he says this in the presence of his wife.
  • "Strip down, facing me"
  • "Excuse me, but where are your vibrators?" The poor guy was actually looking for massagers.
  • "Can you delete my butt pictures?" "You know, photos my phone took with my butt, kind of like when you butt-dial someone!"
  • "I know it’s bad, but I really need a good whipping!"
  • A woman in her sixties comes to a hobby shop and asks if they sell "adult toys". Turns out she wasn't looking for sex toys but was looking for a model kit for her husband.
• That Liar Lies: Too many times to count. Can't get your way at a store? That employee is obviously just lying in order to weasel out of having to do any work, the lazy bastard!
• That's What She Said: Turns up on occasion. Can backfire.
  • This one is a particularly ridiculous one.
  • And it's best not to ask about this one.
  • Check the title.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: This customer thinks she'll need a hard drive with a million terabytes storage for her grandson's photos, not quite understanding what terabytes are.
  Submitter: “Uh… how many photos, roughly?”
  Customer: “Ooh, lots! At least fifty!”
• Thermal Dissonance:
  • This customer apparently believes that a toasted sub should exhibit this if it is "toasted right", and is irate that hers went cold during the thirty minutes or so between when she bought it and when she actually ate it. She demands a refund over this (despite having already eaten the sub) but doesn't get one.
  • This person complains about the Chinese food she bought failing to exhibit this after about four and a half hours in the fridge.
• They Just Dont Get It: Stories in which customers are seemingly unable to comprehend anything that doesn't agree with their worldview are far too common – common enough to warrant their own page.
• Third-Person Person: "The Batman, would you like a chocolate milk?" "Yes. Yes, The Batman would."
• Think of the Children!:
  • This woman's excuse for banning kilts.
  • This mother's reasoning for not stopping her kid from bumping a cart into an elderly lady ahead of them. The customer behind them thinks differently and shows what might happen if the mother never disciplines her son.
  • Another mother uses this as an excuse to deny two other moviegoers the seats they paid for, because she's decided that they're pedophiles who are out to touch her kids. (The other moviegoers in question are teenage girls.)
  • To Insane Troll Logic levels here. This woman doesn't want her son to watch Frozen (2013) in the children's play area, claiming the boy himself doesn't like it. When the clerk, OP, refused to change the movie, pointing out all the other children who are clearly enjoying it, she comes back, "have you no empathy for children?" At which point OP points out that his empathy for children is precisely why he's not changing the movie. Halfway through a typical NAR "This is so rude—" rant, the Manager yells "We're not changing the f-ing movie!" The woman grabs her son, who is sitting quietly in the play area, and leaves promising never to return.
  • This mother wants a store to interrupt a pair of ducks that were mating outside on grounds that her children might see them.
  • Similarly, this mother is angry with the zoo for allowing their bull elephant to be… aroused, while her children were visiting. She insinuates that the elephant is "a pervert and needs to be locked away" and accuses the zoo of "abusing" him to make him that way.
• This Explains So Much: The response when this customer admits he still lives with his mother.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: "IN. MY. HOUSE. BITCH!"
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • Shoes. Crap.
  • "60. Some adults, mostly kids." *she breathes deeply in and lets it out slowly with a whoosh* "Got it."
  • "Hello, I need shoes for all seven of my children. They're each a different size, I'd like to purchase three pairs each, and can you make sure that all the shoes are different? My children don’t want shoes that are like each other's. And hurry up, I don't have all day!
• This Is Wrong on So Many Levels!: "There are so many things wrong with that statement that I can’t even list them."
• Threat Backfire: Many stories end with the customer yelling "I'm never shopping here again!" and the staff saying, either to each other or directly to the customer, that they only wish that were true.
• Three... Two... One...: The OP's sister counts down under her breath when an idiot customer insists on eating outside next to the sea. While seagulls are watching. Let's just say they have to reorder, and the woman reams out her idiot customer partner for not listening to the sister's warning.
• Throw the Book at Them: This psycho customer.
• Time Travel: Enough that there's a top-rated collection of these stories.
  • There's definitely demand for future newspapers and future TV shows. Also good for sneaky scams.
• Title Drop: A surprising number of customers literally say "The customer is always right" as if it were some kind of magic spell that always makes it so.
  • The saying "The customer is always right," when it is applicable, applies to business and business ONLY. Customers seem to think it applies to everything from religion to sexual orientation to opinions of any sort.
    Customer: I think that [misguided opinion].
    Worker: That's fine. I happen to think that [better-informed opinion or actual fact].
    Customer: Why? That's obviously wrong!
    Worker: Um, not really...
    Customer: Yes, it is! The customer is always right!
  • This one actually adds the "not always" to the mix, when customers try to argue how old the cashier serving them actually is by this logic.
  • And this one, where a customer tries to call a bank, gets a veterinarian office instead, and refuses to believe he had the wrong number because "I just gave you my account number", as if dialing the actual phone number for the bank is just a formality and his account number is the magic set of numbers that actually turns them into a bank.
  • Inverted here: a customer tries to price-match turkeys with a competitor, insisting on getting their price even though this store's prices are actually cheaper than said competitor's. The cashier does not fight this because of the "customer is always right" logic.
• Toilet Training Plot: This customer gets caught by a deli employee trying to potty train their kid in the middle of an aisle! That's a new one.
• Tomato in the Mirror: The (Korean) client for a photo restoration service is upset that the only photo of her grandfather has faded his hair nearly to white. The photo restorer realizes at a glance that the grandfather was a white man with blond hair, nothing is wrong with the photo, and the client is mixed-race. (The comments debate possible reasons the client may not have been informed of this by her parents or grandmother.)
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: Or rather, Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak. (Then again, is a zebra black with white stripes or white with black stripes?)
• Too Dumb to Fool:
  • This cashier, who admits to being quite socially naive, foils a quick-change scam taking the form of the scammer paying for a tiny purchase with a large bill, suddenly deciding they want to pay with smaller bills when change for the large one has already been made, then have the cashier be distracted enough to give them both the large bill and the change. The cashier simply assumes the scammer wants to break the large bill and has more than enough change in the till to do so, so the scammer doesn't get to swap the large bill for smaller one and only gets their proper change back.
  • This cashier foils a similar scam, again without realising it's happening, by not being good at math — they already have a system in place to stop them getting confused when giving change.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • This woman has absolutely no idea how to take care of a child. She calls Tech Support for help on changing a diaper, thinking she needs to put in some code or that the submitter pressed some magic button that apparently solves all of life's problems. Here's hoping she never had children of her own.
  • Are those wires live?
  • When this submitter buys £250 worth of fireworks, another nearby customer accuses him of being a dangerous vandal who's going to blow things up — and then goes on to stomp on said fireworks. Fireworks may be relatively inert without an external ignition source, but that doesn't make stomping on them a safe thing to do.
  • Possibly a literal example. Driving, while talking on one cell phone, and configuring another, with hot coffee between her knees. She was t-boned by another car. No word on what happened after that.
    • The best part? The accident was the other driver's fault (the other car ran a red light).
  • This customer recommends starting a fire in a barrel for warmth in the middle of a gas station.
  • An example by proxy: This man's son ends up with a concussion very early in the morning. The man is perfectly aware that a concussion patient should not fall asleep — so he keeps his son awake all throughout the morning instead of immediately taking him to the ER, ensuring that it will be that much more difficult to keep him awake. (According to him, it's because he didn't realize the ER was a 24-hour-a-day service, so he decided to wait and bring his son in only once he was sure it was business hours.)
  • This woman is apparently too busy with her upcoming 3-month tour of Europe to worry about her skin cancer. In that time, said cancer, if left untreated, could develop into a much worse form or even spread to her other organs.
  • "I can't believe I picked [chunky peanut butter] up. I can't have the one with the chunks in it. I'm allergic to peanuts!"
  • This person seemed to be under the impression that tourists are exempt from natural disasters. Sure, just wait at the pier until the tsunami has passed, and continue the tour where you left off.
  • These parents ignore warnings about ordnance from the two World Wars, at their own peril and the peril of their children — especially their seven-year-old son. They don't even get why the submitter is so alarmed about what they've found.
  • Have you ever seen those cartoons where someone confuses a skunk for a cat? Apparently, it can happen. Even if it didn't spray, a skunk could potentially be rabid.
  • This. Trying to rob a liquor store and using a company vehicle as the getaway car may not be immediately lethal, but very, very dumb. The shoplifter assumed that retail employees can't read.
  • This "customer" takes the doughnut. He comes up to the employee and complains about fruit flies swarming the sample doughnut display. Fair enough. When the employee starts removing the infested doughnuts, per store policy (and probably a few health codes), the customer angrily demands that the employee "just spray some poison" on it because he really wanted one. Right, he doesn't just want the doughnut, he wants it seasoned with fruit flies and a dash of poison.^note Possibly he meant DDT, which was at one time considered safe to consume.
  • This guy is so computer illiterate that he doesn't understand how the forward and back arrows are supposed to work on Internet Explorer! One has to question how he's even smart enough to use a computer.
  • This guy clumsily tries to pump gas into a vehicle while holding a lit cigarette in the hand he's using to pump.
  • This couple at a B&B gets a cheesecake to celebrate the girlfriend's birthday and get the idea to use a sparkler as a candle in their room, on the bed, while they are implied to have been in it. The boyfriend ends up with severe burns on his arm, the bed is ruined, and the smoke alarms go off and wake up everyone else in the B&B.
  • This customer had been advised by their doctor to curb their salt intake because of their blood pressure. However, the doctor is seemingly not aware that the customer thinks what is actually salt is called white pepper, and the doctor didn't mention that, so it must be okay to have it!^note As the comments point out, white pepper does exist, but is visually distinct from salt.
  • This person's response to a carbon monoxide alarm going off was to chuck it in the garbage disposal, and calls the manufacturer before doing anything else.
  • This woman bought peanut butter despite having a dangerous peanut allergy because she thought it wouldn't contain actual peanuts but rather artificial peanut flavoring. Had she checked the jar, she would have seen not only an ingredient list that included actual peanuts but a peanut allergy warning.
  • To show airport security that the sharp edge on her pate knife isn't sharp, this lady SLASHES HER WRIST WITH IT. One fountain of blood later, airport security's point is made, but the lady refuses treatment beyond paper towels.
  • This kid's mom throws an absolute snit when told that the "candy" her son just stole from a daycare worker's backpack is actually medicine for their chronic condition. The child gave up as soon as the worker told him it was actually medicine, but Mom seems to think the worker was lying just so they wouldn't have to give him the candy and sustains this Insane Troll Logic until the daycare manager threatens to call Child Protection Services for feeding a child random drugs.
  • This man's back hurts, so he would rather physically walk over the train tracks at a station and risk being run over than go a little bit further and use any of the station's disabled access options to cross to the other platform.
  • This customer sees a sample station in a warehouse store, and drinks from a cup... while the employee is busy explaining that it's hand lotion.
  • In an attempt to get his external drive working, this customer decides to try and wire it up to the inside and takes a hacksaw to the back of the tower, going straight through the main board, the expansion cards, and even the power supply.
  • This guy attempts to light a kerosene lantern that has been filled with gasoline, resulting in (in the guy's words) "a big fireball" and the lantern not lighting. Despite this, he refuses to use the proper fuel from the lantern when the submitter points out what he was doing wrong. Even the submitter's manager admits that it was probably for the customer's own good that the submitter processed a return on the (now-unusable) lantern.
  • This story's title asks "How is this person still alive?" The man at the centre of the story appears to be hopelessly incompetent; he sees nothing wrong with stealing the parcels from his seasonal job at the post office (they'd been given to him!), honestly believes that he cannot be fired and jailed for the same theft, sees nothing wrong with reapplying to work there under the assumption that after a few years everybody will have forgotten what he did, and lying on that second application form in an attempt to make himself look better. This includes altering his date of birth to make it appear as if he was born on a Saturday instead of a Monday (as "Saturday's child works hard for a living"), even though the date he gave wasn't actually a Saturday.
  • This woman finds two cans of tomatoes in her cupboard dated from 2013 and 2006^note (assuming the story was posted in August of 2023, as the story takes place in August, that would put the latter can at nearly if not potentially more than 20 years old) and calls the food manufacturer to see if they're okay to eat. The employee at the company's call center who answers tries to discourage the woman from using the canned tomatoes, but the woman for some reason refuses to accept that answer and announces that she is going to put the tomatoes in pasta for her husband's dinner, hanging up before the employee can get another word in (leaving them unable to do nothing but hope the husband is okay afterward).
  • This nut, tired of not having cable and internet and too impatient to wait a few days for a repairman, tries climbing the telephone pole himself to fix the connection – while it's raining, no less!
  • This woman in a car absolutely insists that she must call her phone company about something she could easily do from home and refuses to stop her car since, due to company policy, the employees cannot process what the woman needs if she is in a moving vehicle. She continues to try to call and gets angrier and angrier...and more and more distracted until she ends up getting in a horrible car accident because she was too busy shouting at the employees. To make matters worse, there was a baby in the car with her (as evident by the baby's crying being heard over the phone by the employees during and after the accident). Fortunately, neither the woman nor the baby were seriously hurt, but the poor employee who was on the phone with her when the accident happened is traumatized and has to take a very long sick-leave to recover.
  • The staff at a certain hardware store have come to dread the arrival of this customer. He's suffered multiple self-inflicted wounds from using power tools to the point where the staff now routinely ask him what he plans to do with the tools he's buying before allowing any sale. Understandably, they refuse to sell him a chainsaw when he explains that he plans to use it as part of a Leatherface costume for Halloween.
  • This gentleman seems to have very poor judgement.
• Too Much Information:
  • "I've just had a horrible stomach ache all day, but I just farted and I feel much better!"
  • "I'm sorry you had to hear that."
  • An odd juxtaposition of wanting to do something in private... while publicly announcing exactly what you're doing. And yes, the description does fall under this trope.
  • A customer of a restaurant decides to tell an employee about how he misses his wife since her death, and that she regularly breastfed him, as a kind of sexual game, since the birth of their child until her death. It disturbed the employee (and a coworker who learnt about this a bit later), especially since the customer is a very frequent and well-liked regular.
• Touché: There are a few examples of customers eventually conceding the point (sometimes even graciously), but this one, upon being given a hypothetical that illustrates exactly why the bank has to ask for ID, actually says the very word.
• Tranquil Fury:
  • This mother upon learning exactly why her son's gaming account got suspended.
  • The groom at the wedding in this story manages to combine this with Big "SHUT UP!" as his Momzilla mother had all but wrecked the submitter's professional makeup case. She describes his tone as "eerily calm" as he uninvites his mother to the wedding.
• Translation by Volume:
  • The phone shop customer in this story, who doesn't speak English, just keeps on repeating "heean", eventually rising to a shout and clearly believing the cashier is an idiot for not understanding him. He even angrily refuses to speak into a translation app when offered, which most tourists are said to be happy with.
  • Implied here, as the submitter has to clarify to a caller with an indecipherably thick accent that they can hear him but can't understand a word he's saying.
  • This caseworker for a refugee family claims to also be their translator, which turns out to mean yelling "FILL THESE OUT!" at them when handing them forms. Luckily, it turns out they and the receptionist all speak French, and they cut her out of the conversation entirely.
• Translation Convention: Being an English-only site, whether someone is speaking a language other than English will usually only be noted if, say, multiple languages are being spoken in the example.
• Translation: "Yes": "Wow, he said all that in one little sentence?"
• Trash of the Titans:
  • A family somehow manages to render a hotel room completely uninhabitable due to ankle-deep trash and dirty laundry, a destroyed smoke detector, and ruined beds within the span of two days.
  • This theater is perfectly clean and patrons are calmly putting their trash in the trash can...and then one funny-man decides to throw his trash on the floor right in front of the employee who is going to clean the theater just to be a Jerkass. Then the guy behind him shrugs and follows suit, and then the next person does as well...and from that point on nearly every patron leaving just continues adding to the pile despite the poor employee quite literally screaming at them to stop. The theater is an utter pigsty by the time the infuriating exercise in herd mentality is over and it takes more than half an hour to clean up the mess.
• The Treachery of Images: "A card? Well, you shouldn't say it's a plant then. It's misleading."
• [Trope Name]: This conversation between a customer and employee pretty much sums up the usual NAR story.
• Two-Person Pool Party: This (intoxicated) couple thinks this is the perfect way to celebrate their anniversary. Unfortunately, they didn't use their own hot tub, but a hotel hot tub, and it was in clear view of everyone else there. Every time they're told to knock it off/get back to their room, they run back to the hot tub and get back to the sex. They end up spending their anniversary weekend in jail instead.
• Tyrannical Homeowners' Association: This HOA board member objects to a vehicle parking in a spot. The problem? They're paramedics responding to a call. Naturally he either doesn't notice or doesn't care, and in the end, has to be tazed by police.

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