Not Always Working / Tropes A to E

Tropes A to E | Tropes F to L | Tropes M to S (Mean Boss) (Pointy-Haired Boss) | Tropes T to Z

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A

• Abuse Mistake:
  • Happens to this customer, who is dining with his family and wearing a hooded sweatshirt in a warm restaurant. It's revealed that the long sleeves are to hide large arm bruises — he's recovering from chemotherapy, but the waitress thinks otherwise.
  • This entry, where a cashier learns that a white woman is the mother of a little black boy, and hands her a pamphlet for a rape crisis and domestic abuse helpline. Mother is outraged, cashier gets fired, and his grandmother, who taught him to think like that, gets banned from the store.
  • Another one. This time, a waitress assumes that, because the little girl takes after her white father (who had not yet arrived at the restaurant) instead of her Middle Eastern mother, she was being kidnapped. The waitress ended up being arrested for slapping the girl, who had responded to the waitress grabbing her by biting the waitress.
  • Yet again. An employee sees a white woman with two black men (her boyfriend and best friend) and immediately assumes she's been kidnapped and is their sex slave. They overhear and immediately pretend to be her sex slaves, just to mess with the racist employee's mind.
  • Once more. A cashier calls the cops just from seeing a black man in line with a young Asian girl, refusing to believe she's the man's stepdaughter. The cashier is fired for his idiocy.
  • This veterinary technician thinks the submitter is another idiot mistakenly neglecting their doodle because the puppy farm lied to them about how her fur is supposed to work. Said "doodle" is actually a puli, a Hungarian herding dog famous for their long, corded coats (i.e. they're supposed to look like mops). The dog was actually a puppy in the process of growing the fur into cords, at which point the coat looks hideous even with proper care. The technician acts on that wrong assumption without the vet's knowledge or the submitter's permission, and ends up fired for doing so. Luckily, the puppy was not a show dog, meaning the only consequences on the submitter's end are an unnecessary haircut that, thanks to the consequences if she had been, seems to have bagged her free treatment for life.^WarningTread carefully when reading the comments, as there are a number of stories posted there which are much less amusing and light-hearted than this.
• Accidental Public Confession: This employee turns to their coworker and quietly hisses about a customer, only for the coworker to have turned their tannoy on just as the employee was beginning to vent.
• Accidental Innuendo: invoked "What's the biggest package you can take?" They were trying to ship a motorcycle, but the worker misinterpreted and assumed it was a prank call.
• Accidental Misnaming: This boss can't seem to remember his new worker's name.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • The employee nicknamed 'Wizard' in this story managed to accomplish an impossible task his boss set for him in an attempt to get him fired, and had absolutely no idea he was being set up to fail.
  • This kid was careless with his glasses, and much to his dad's annoyance, needed a new pair every few months. Both the dad and the optometrist think this problem will be solved by a (very expensive) pair made from a titanium-based memory metal alloy, which are supposedly indestructible and always spring back to their regular shape, no matter what you do to them. Yet within a week, the kid has somehow managed to bend them permanently into a right-angle, something which should be physically impossible without specialized heating equipment.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • For this reason, the manager can't discipline his staff over the prank they pulled on the new guy.
  • Said word-for-word here when the manager a coworker is complaining about is Right Behind Me.
  • This restaurant owner got a laugh and a Running Gag out of a new hire accidentally answering the phone as their previous fast food job.
• Adaptation Displacement: invoked
  • "Um, this is a BOOKSHOP. We don't sell DVDs!"
  • Somehow, when this cashier sees the title "Romeo and Juliet", the first thing she thinks of is... the 1996 film. Worse, it seems she hasn't heard of the Shakespeare version. The manager she calls in to deal with the customer's "lie" puts it best: "Unbelievable."
• Aggressive Categorism: This HR worker only signs up male employees for sensitivity training, claiming that women can't be insensitive and apparently not realizing that by saying that, she is the one being insensitive. Management immediately signs her up for the next program and makes her write an apology letter.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy:
  • These drunk guys all pay the pizza man a twenty for their pizza without taking it, each seeming to think that the guy before him didn't (some walking by and paying a twenty more than once!). The pizza guy tries to explain, but the last drunk guy simply takes the pizza and slams the door in his face. The pizza guy ended up leaving with a "tip" totaling more than $300!
  • A worker mentioned in this story had drug-induced idiocy, as when he accidentally set off the burglar alarm (something apparently every new hire in the restaurant has done), he got worried the cops would find out he was on drugs and tried to rip the alarm off the wall. He would subsequently be fired.
• All Animation Is Disney: invoked One coworker had to explain to another which animated films were not made by Disney. Surprisingly, the one he guessed was not Disney, The Black Cauldron, actually is.
• All Germans Are Nazis: When this co-worker finds out the poster's surname is German, he immediately jumps to this trope. The name might be German, but the actual ethnic background is Ashkenazi Jewish, and several of the poster's relatives were killed in the Holocaust. (At least the co-worker apologized.)
• All-Natural Snake Oil: "It can’t be drugs; it is all herbal and all." "Sure... remind me: what are opium and marijuana made from?"
• All Periods Are PMS: Discussed in this story. A delivery driver advises his trainee that a woman ordering tampons, tea, and chocolates to her door is probably having a bad one and will be cranky, so they need to be extra polite to her.
• Almighty Janitor:
  • The cleaning staff at this museum know more about the building than the curators do.
  • On a military base, nobody without paperwork or identification outranks the gate guard. NOBODY.
  • It doesn't matter if you're the chief executive of a transport company and can ride for free, the driver still has the authority to kick you off the bus if you don't tap your staff pass on the ticket machine.
  • A not-so-protagonistic example in this story, where an IT guy temp named "Joe" leaves and his successor – the submitter – slowly discovers that he was performing all kinds of criminal activity on company time to the point where at the end of the story, the FBI confiscates Joe's computer as evidence.
• Almighty Mom: This story — in which the poster was working at an Italian restaurant owned by two brothers, only for the brothers' feuding to end up upsetting customers, alienating the staff and ultimately wrecking the business — ended up having a sequel a couple of years later. The same OP discovers that the brothers have opened up a new restaurant — now supervised by their mother, who, on hearing what happened, crossed the Atlantic to knock some sense into them. The food is better than before and everyone is kind and polite. Oh, and the terrifying matriarch who brought about this change? She turns out to be a frail old lady with "one of the sweetest, gentlest voices I’ve heard".
• Alpha Bitch:
  • Two of them, working as receptionists for a popular hotel. They falsely claim that they need to take a $700 deposit from the submitter as she checks in. When she calls them out on their lie, they proceed to take the deposit anyway, leaving her with only a small amount of money. When the submitter confronts them the following morning, they try to blame her for "spending" all of the money that they wrongfully took, and she ultimately has to call her mother to cover the bill from home. Thankfully, after leaving, the submitter files a complaint with the hotel chain; they give her the deposit back and suspend the two receptionists for taking it without the submitter's permission in the first place.
  • Another two working as receptionists for a medical office try to tell the submitter's mother that she ran off without paying — but then, asks the mom, why would she have called her to make the payment for her if she wasn't planning on paying at all? Turned out the receptionists had gone off to lunch, forgetting the submitter was there and leaving the desk entirely unattended, and tried to shift the blame for the incident on the submitter so the doctor wouldn't know about the latter bit.
• Always a Bigger Fish: A lot of stories dealing with abusive managers or bosses end with said supervisor getting caught out by someone higher on the corporate ladder than they are and receiving their comeuppance.
• Amalgamated Individual: Following this story, some other stories about particularly ditzy co-workers took to likewise using the name Clive. The titles "Clive Strikes Again!" and "The Latest (and Possibly Last) Adventure of Clive" suggest it's the same Clive, on three different continents.
• Ambulance Chaser: This guard is apparently so worried about these types that he tries to stop emergency services from saving a person's life. Unfortunately for him, obstructing emergency services in that manner is a serious crime, which means he'll probably never work in that capacity ever again.
• Anchovies Are Abhorrent: In this story, one customer attempts to order an anchovy pizza, and the employee, under the committed belief that nobody eats anchovies, first accuses them of making a prank call and then throws a tantrum.
• And a Diet Coke: This worker makes the assumption that the customer must be doing the "health benefits" version of this trope, and that no one could possibly want Diet Coke on account of its taste. The customer is not amused.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: This boss apparently thought his subordinate should have been this way about her grandmother's death... because of the bad relationship he'd had with his own grandmother. After another coworker explained how different this situation was, the boss took several days off out of shame.
• Angrish:
  • The vet in this story apparently lapsed into this after catching two assistants shaving a puli on the orders of an ignorant technician who mistook her for an unwittingly neglected doodle. (Note: the comments on this post contain disturbing stories about other animals at the vet. Viewer discretion is advised.)
  • After an employee follows advice to quit, their manager (who had been giving the employee abuse for something beyond her control, prompting the advice in the first place) melts down so badly that they stop using words and screams so loudly that they overwhelm the phone's capability to transmit sound.
• Anti-Education Mama: This unfortunate young man can't get a job because his parents never taught him how to read and his entire homeschooling education consisted of being read stories from the Bible.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Two back-to-back, to filter honest interviewees from those only pretending to look for a job so they can receive unemployment pay: "What's the name of the company?" and "What do we do?"
• Army of Lawyers: In this story, the company's worker is embroiled in a legal dispute with two banks and the IRS. All of the people involved were bringing in battalions of their own lawyers. Despite not being in any legal trouble himself, the manager at the company felt "under-represented" and had three of his employees put on suits and stand behind him looking intimidating, even though all the manager had to do was answer five questions while all the other involved parties argued amongst themselves.
• Artistic License – Animal Care: This cat "expert" doesn't seem to understand that cat litter traps moisture, nor do they have a plausible plan to get the cat to stop burying spiders in the litter box. The "expert" also commits Female Feline, Male Mutt by failing to realize that the cat in question is male.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • This nurse is apparently unaware that "water breaking" doesn't always happen when a woman goes into labor.
  • This worker thought toes can grow back just like lizard tails.
  • Apparently, food can contain "enzumes."
  • This preachy vegan thinks that milk is made from cows' blood.
  • This person thinks that a pregnant woman who was craving ice froze her insides by eating it and had to be thawed out by eating chili peppers, not realizing that natural body heat would melt any ice.
  • A co-worker reports this poster to the boss for "slacking off" by going to the restroom, on the grounds that "women don't have to s***" and therefore the (female) poster had no need to ever go to the restroom.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: This story's first comment thread points out that it is definitely a fake, as there is no way that someone could have failed to notice an amount of chlorine to that extreme (or worse, that they would have died before coming into contact with an amount that strong), especially since the scenario doesn't seem to have generated anywhere close to enough to have caused the described results (burns on 15% of the body).
• Artistic License – Economics:
  • There are still too many people who don't realize that the United Kingdom uses the pound sterling, not the euro.
  • These two indoor amusement park employees somehow think it's perfectly fine to charge customers again with the new price set up by the park even though the customers had already paid a month ago. Their manager was not pleased.
  • This agent doesn't seem to understand that its impossible to pay off zero dollars on an account.
  • This cashier can't tell the difference between one-dollar and two-dollar Australian coins, even though the value is printed on the coins.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • London is the capital of France, apparently.
  • So, if you speak Danish, are you from Finland then?
  • This receptionist fails to understand that the Middle East is not part of the US. Given her answer, it seems she mixed it up with the Midwest.
  • This cashier thinks New Mexico is part of Mexico.
    • This one thinks that Ohio is in Europe.
  • This cashier believes two forms of ID are fake because, apparently, no one lives in Washington, DC. ("It’s just government buildings and monuments!") This version was particularly problematic for the customer because the cashier attempted to confiscate and destroy said forms of ID ^note Especially since the customer had to fly home in a few days, forcing said customer to call the police to intervene.
  • “And to clarify, Canada is Australia, and Russia is above you?”
  • "That’s a trick question! Mexico's not part of the United States, so it doesn't have a capital!"
  • The store owner in this story doesn't seem to grasp the concept of other countries being different from the one he is currently in (in this case, Canada) — wondering why his store in Oregon isn't closing early for Canada Day (July 1st) and subsequently being confused when it does close early on the 4th (Independence Day).
  • This police officer. Who cares if he's in North Carolina, the vehicle he stopped had a New York license plate and therefore he's ticketing the driver for not following New York law (NY requires vehicles to have front license plates; the owner removed the front plate upon leaving NY) even though no law of North Carolina, the state he's actually in, has been broken. Not even his sergeant pointing this out to him is enough to get it through his thick skull, since this is apparently far from the first such complaint.
  • This unemployment office apparently assumes that "white" automatically means "American citizen."
  • Just because Hawaii happens to be "overseas" doesn't mean it's not a US state.
  • This bank representative doesn't understand Hong Kong's status as a special administrative region of China (somewhat understandably)... but has also somehow never heard of Tokyo, Japan, assuming the submitter was making up a country.
  • In this story, the submitter's coworker doesn't believe there's a country named Denmark and, when shown proof, somehow thinks its official name, "The Kingdom of Denmark," means it's part of England. The boss is even worse, thinking that Denmark doesn't even exist and was made up by the submitter.
  • This coworker believes that the US has 57 states (including Mexico).
  • This bartender is so stubbornly ignorant of the fact New Zealand exists that even a Google search can't change her mind, which becomes a problem when a group of Kiwi tourists try to use their passports to prove their age. A problem as in the group has to go to a different bar having wrestled an inappropriately confiscated passport out of her hand.
  • Where to begin with this one? Amsterdam is in the Netherlands, not in Germany, and the manager he's asking about whores and drugs isn't from either, he's from Austria!
• Artistic License – History: Not only does this coworker confuse Elvis Presley with Adolf Hitler, but they don't know who Mussolini was.
• Artistic License – Law:
  • This manager thinks he can scribble "corrections" (such as cutting the contracted payment in half and adding an extra 13 years to a warranty service) on an already-signed contract and have them be binding — which is extra hilarious when he complains that the submitter already signed the (pre-"corrected") contract, to try and get out of him enforcing the terms to which they actually agreed. The judge got a laugh out of the situation before very quickly ruling for the poster.
  • This police officer gives the submitter a ticket for not using their blinker at an intersection, when the submitter repeatedly stated that they were going straight. The ticket is contested and quickly thrown out, with the implication that the police officer still didn't understand why he was scolded by the judge for writing stupid tickets.
  • Another police officer stops a young girl whom he believes to be a car thief or an underage teenager with no driver's license. When she proves him wrong on both counts, the police officer refuses to apologize for his mistake, and even goes so far as to issue a citation for wasting his time. Luckily, the officer's superior tells the submitter and her father to ignore the ticket, before inadvertently letting slip that it was the fourth such ticket the officer had issued that month.
  • As above under Geography, this officer doesn't seem to understand that traffic laws in New York — such as the requirement of front license plates — do not necessarily apply in another state like North Carolina just because it has New York plates or because he himself is from New York.
• Artistic License – Religion: This hospital receptionist thinks all Muslims are inbred and share the same last name.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: An illustration of the pitfalls of this trope — a person just might take your answer seriously.
• AstroTurf: In this story, the submitter enters a restaurant, has nobody try to help them, and then leaves. The manager calls them to try to bargain with them to remove the one-star review, which just pushes the submitter to post another one-star review about the conversation, which causes the restaurant to go from 4.9 to 4.8. After this, the restaurant is suddenly barraged with numerous anonymous five-star reviews, several of which directly slam the submitter. In the submitter's words: "I wonder what sad and pathetic person would have to resort to that."
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!:
  • This casino has tasty food, but is the lowest-ranked option on a popular food delivery app for the area. It's a mystery to everyone… until it's observed that one of the delivery drivers collects the food but then gets distracted playing roulette for 15 minutes. It might even have been longer had one of the managers not walked past and noticed. After that the managers started keeping a closer eye on the drivers.
  • This university guest speaker is late to his speech because the IT office was projecting World Cup matches on a screen. The office would be banned from showing World Cup matches after that.
  • The staff at this pub forget about the submitter's order because they're too busy watching a soccer game.
• Ax-Crazy: In this story (which may or may not be based on a true story), on being denied an employee coupon that had expired, an employee gets so mad that she has to be escorted off the premises (though oddly enough she isn't fired… yet). She then comes back with with a knife, a shotgun, and a blowtorch, in hopes of killing her managers and co-workers and then setting the building ablaze. Fortunately, she's unlucky enough (or inept enough) that she loses her knife, her shotgun jams, and all she's able to do is set the store's entrance mat on fire with the blowtorch before she's arrested (and then fired).

B

• Bad Boss: Unfortunately, every now and then, you'll see a boss graduate from a Mean Boss to this.
  • This boss expects a worker to clean up an active biohazard without any sort of protective gear, because calling the city about it would cost too much, yet loaning the worker equipment they're not trained in, or letting them buy the equipment themselves, would be illegal. The worker quits on the spot.
  • This boss tries to send an employee out for carts in the middle of a severe thunderstorm, and then screams at and fires them when they (rightfully) object. Luckily, Laser-Guided Karma kicks in right away when her boss finds this out, and, thanks to an extensive history of screaming at workers in front of customers and, according to two other stories implied to be about her, generally being a Mean Boss, she is immediately fired the next day for intentionally putting the employee's life in danger, and later gets thrown behind bars for assaulting her ex-husband over a lost custody battle.
  • The bar owner in this story refuses to reschedule a mandatory meeting (which turns out to be just an hour of patting herself on the back for the bar's performance during a busy period, ignoring the staff's efforts) despite a two-foot blizzard being forecast, and threatens to fire anyone who doesn't attend. Despite their obvious reservations, the poster manages to get in just one minute late... and gets a write-up for it. The poster quits on the spot. Those who failed to attend — most of the staff — are indeed fired, but promptly sue for wrongful termination and win; it also comes up that the staff weren't paid for attending the meeting. The Department of Labor gets involved, and not only is the bar forced to close, but the owner ends up having to sell her home and many of her possessions to cover legal fees, damages, and back pay. At the end, the poster notes that none of this would have happened if she had just taken their advice in the first place and rescheduled.
  • The grocery store manager in this story won't allow the poster, a lot attendant, to come in for a drink of water, despite being in the middle of a July heatwave in Florida. After four hours of this, a passing gentleman convinces him to go inside, offering to speak to the manager in person and even buy some water. The manager immediately spots the poster and fires him. However, said gentleman, who turns out to be the regional director, steps in, angrily berates the manager for her reckless endangerment of an employee and gives her a fourteen-day suspension — which soon escalates to her dismissal, as it turns out that she has been forcing underage employees to work longer than labor laws allow and denying them mandatory breaks.
  • This supervisor refuses to let the OP, whose Psycho Ex-Boyfriend is always waiting for her by the door at closing time, leave through an alternate exit, laughing in her face when she has had enough and threatens to quit. She does (sending her resignation to the "big boss" who completely understands), and even goes through the unemployment process... but the supervisor refuses to accept this and treats it as her going AWOL, finally calling her up and threatening to fire her if she doesn't show up for work, and ignoring her protests that she doesn't work there any more; the poster finally agrees to come in just to shut her up (but doesn't do so, obviously). After her number gets blocked, the supervisor starts sending employees to the OP's house to demand that she come in to work, though all they do is "chill" at her house (and get paid for doing so). The poster eventually moves (and the ex is dealt with legally).
  • This craft store manager's treatment of employees can be gauged from the fact that when he mistakes the submitter for an employee, he violently grabs her and tries to drag her away. The submitter is forced to yank him over and trip him up to defend herself. By the time the police show up, the manager is yelling threats of physical violence. Turns out (surprise, surprise) he's got massive anger issues and only got his job thanks to Nepotism.
  • The submitter only hears about this story secondhand, but this video store boss wound up in court in the past after punching an employee in the face.
  • This call center director was already a dictatorial Mean Boss, but her draconian policy of keeping phones in lockers, turning off all TVs, and keeping the curtains closed means that the building is nearly caught flatfooted when a tornado heads for them. Thankfully, a customer alerts the center, but even then, the director tries to tell the workers to stop evacuating and get back to work and doesn't stop ranting until part of the building's roof comes off. The whole debacle results in her being terminated in an instant.
  • A group of call-center managers arrange to mute the fire alarms on their floor, jeopardizing their employees' lives because they're worried a brief interruption to operations will affect their call figures and thus threaten their end-of-year bonuses. This only comes to light when the building is evacuated after a bomb threat, and a shocked firefighter making an inspection finds an entire floor full of workers still at their desks. One of the managers even attempts to threaten the OP as they get up to evacuate (and later attempts to get them into trouble over it). The threat turns out to be a hoax, thankfully, but the managers end up not only fired, but jailed, as what they did was very illegal.
• Badge Gag: This delivery driver arrives at the submitter's house smelling heavily of weed. When he asks for the submitter's ID, the submitter pulls out their passport, and the driver panics, drops the pizzas, rushes to his car, and peels out.
  Submitter: “What? What did I do?”
  Submitter's friend: “You flicked that open like they do in the movies when they show some FBI badge. Poor guy probably thought you were a narc or something.”
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: This standoffish coworker harshly rejects pleasantries, so the submitter instead greets him with profanity, making him laugh.
  Good morning, everyone! And a big special 'fuck you' to (Coworker).
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The beginning of this story made quite a number of posts think it was actually another story (never mind the fact that the odds of someone else witnessing the same circumstances and submitting them to this website are astronomical). To elaborate, the older story involved a Designated Hero standing in line at a supermarket and holding everyone up because she was observing Remembrance Day, whereas the later story also had a woman holding up a supermarket line, but that was because she was having a seizure. In the latter story's case, the cashier refused to help the customer even when the submitter, who happened to be a doctor, said that she was having a seizure, because "if she was having a seizure she'd be writhing on the floor, wouldn't she?". The cashier also voided both the sick customer and the doctor's purchases because they stepped out of line, saying that "they must be joking if they thought she would give them their shopping back."
  • This story begins by introducing a married gay manager and a married lesbian coworker, both apparently comfortable in their sexualities, and how the submitter walks in one day and both their office spaces are empty. Given the content of other stories on the site, it's easy to jump to some form of bigotry resulting in their termination. However, it's quickly revealed that a janitor had walked in on the two of them Making Love in All the Wrong Places (they thought it didn't count as cheating if they were doing the deed with someone of the opposite gender to their spouse), and they'd been fired for having sex in the office.
• Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults: In this story, the OP's wrongful firing is overturned by the manager and the supervisor who fired her is written up for violating policy. The supervisor takes this as a personal slight and follows the OP into the ladies' room, where she fires her again out of spite, claiming her standing in the company has been ruined and she's not going to let the manager stand in the way. At this point the manager herself emerges from a nearby stall and takes the supervisor away for a "little talk", which ends with the supervisor being fired for retribution.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Utilized by this delivery worker to bypass a client's multi-layered security system that still hasn't flagged them as an allowed person from an allowed supplier. Possibly because they keep bluffing past security?
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: invoked This submitter, when held up by TSA employees because of a Star Trek salt-and-pepper shaker, has to quote the trope name because said TSA employees have apparently never heard of Star Trek, and as such can't recognize lines that actually were spoken on the show.
• Beast in the Building:
  • A possum at the drive-thru made the submitter think something serious was happening in the restaurant.
    • An oddly similar story here when another opossum scares the bejeezus out of a couple workers and leaves a stockroom looking "the aftermath of a horror movie."
  • An escaped hog bursts its way into a restaurant – during a health inspection no less!
  • Speaking of health inspections, the chicken being served in this restaurant was very fresh indeed, as it turns out they were keeping an illegal chicken farm in the building's attic. Suffice to say, once the inspection discovered this, they were shut down.
  • A group of raccoons crash through the ceiling of this restaurant.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • "If you can prove yourself, you WILL have my job, and then you can do all this work all the time."
  • This story. Want 2000 units of a certain product to be manufactured in under a month, with no overtime, heedless of the floor manager's attempts to warn you that quality control will be impossible under such circumstances? Hope you like every single one of those units failing a surprise inspection deliberately timed to fall on the same day the shareholders you were sucking up to are visiting!
• Belief Makes You Stupid:
  • “But who doesn’t celebrate Easter?!” Uh, the Jewish, for starters.
  • This Jewish duty manager threw out £15,000 worth of food because it wasn't kosher, despite the fact that restaurant wasn't a kosher-only restaurant. Worse, she is rather hypocritical where she calls another Jewish worker "not a real Jew" because he called her out on her actions - she wants people to respect her beliefs but won't respect other faiths, and when the submitter meets her again after she was fired, she was seen eating a bacon sandwich, a very non-kosher food.
  • This teenager never learned how to read or got anything vaguely resembling a proper education thanks to his religious parents, who homeschooled him only by teaching Bible stories orally and telling him there was no need to learn how to read. As a result, he got his girlfriend pregnant (presumably because he won't have developed any concept of safe sex from a collection of texts predating Anglo-Saxon England), can't find a job since he can't read, and has a criminal record. The woman who introduced the teenager to the submitter is also this trope since not only did she expect the submitter to give the teenager a manager's position, but also expected him to help the teenager learn how to read. And when the submitter understandably refuses, since he has no time to teach someone he doesn't know when he himself is busy with his own job and would be fired on the spot for hiring someone who isn't even capable of being a functioning member of society, she calls him unchristian and blames him for the teenager's lack of education. The submitter states that had he known the parents' names, he would have reported them to social services for their failure to adequately educate their children.
  • This landlady thinks "My husband doesn't work on the Lord's day" is an acceptable reason to not immediately repair non-working heating in the middle of winter.
  • This new hire objects to bonfires on religious grounds because they think such displays are "linked to witchcraft and pagans". Their religious convictions cost them their new job before their training is complete because the app their would-be new workplace requires them to use happens to be called Bonfyre and they refuse to let the submitter train them to use it.
• Benevolent Boss: In some of these stories, where a lower-level employee is the culprit, the employee's manager will step in to intervene. And in a few of these occurrences, the boss will subvert this by being, in his/her own way, nearly as bad as the employee.
  • Here's one such boss that manages to get a Mean Boss (and his girlfriend) fired when, after their mistreatment and wrongful firing of the pregnant submitter, he discovers them Making Love in All the Wrong Places.
  • This gym owner finds that a homeless man has been living in the gym's locker rooms and begging food from other gym members (the man lost his previous job when he caught his ex-wife sleeping with his boss). The owner hires the man as a live-in maintenance worker so that he can repay those other members and get back on his feet.
  • The owner in this story had been actively bending every rule he could to treat his employees generously. When one worker gets greedy over bonus checks, the owner simply gives them exactly what they'd asked for— merit-based bonus checks (the greedy worker hadn't contributed much to the project), and a departure without being fired (making them ineligible for severance pay).
  • The store director in this story puts a Mean Boss in her place after the submitter is wrongfully fired for effectively refusing to work off the clock.
  • The head chef in this restaurant allows his staff members to freely take leftovers for themselves. When he sees the submitter taking leftover tarts by the dozen, he immediately shows concern they have nothing else to eat. When the submitter admits they actually want to give the tarts to homeless people at the train station, the head chef packs up even more leftovers for them, and later sets aside several lavish Christmas dinners for this purpose!
  • This hotel owner make sure to personally visit and inspect all five of his properties, treat every employee like a friend, and make sure all their concerns are addressed as well as the guests' are.
  • The new district manager in The Epic of the Impossible Store is quite eager to start fixing the mess the previous one left (he was retiring soon and slacked off), which involves personally visiting all the stores she manages. Even when faced with the titular Impossible Store, she doesn't quit and helps the two acting store managers get the thing working again.
  • The CEO in this story is mentioned to be very family oriented and lets his employees have holidays off. When one of his vice presidents doesn't get the message and forces the IT team to work on the Fourth of July, he personally goes over to the VP's office to yell at her- and, it's implied, fire her.
• Beware the Nice Ones: The Quality Assurance team at a poultry packaging plant generally stick to pulling out problem shipments so they can be fixed without a hold tag (saving the workers a lot of hassle) ... until the workers start bullying one of the QA people for doing her job. Then they start tagging every problem they see, resulting in a major backup because only QA people can place or remove a hold.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: This usually quiet worker gives a Jerkass, opinionated worker a withering "Reason You Suck" Speech before continuing on like nothing happened.
  And I am now very afraid of her.
• Bilingual Backfire:
  • "...and she's an ignorant moron."
  • Particularly epic example here that got two jerks fired.
  • "Nah, she's just some dumb American girl! We'll give her [high price]. She doesn't understand us."
  • One worker tries to use the foreign language-trick to make some sexist remarks about a client. Oops.
  • This restaurant server mistakenly assumes that some tourists are American and not French-Canadian, and tries to pass off underhanded remarks in French. Her unamused manager responds by making her pay for the tourists' meal.
  • Some Vietnamese beauty store employees try to rip off a customer. Too bad they didn't count on her knowing their language.
  • A taxi driver makes racist and misogynistic remarks in Punjabi towards a customer during a phone call. Too bad for him that she speaks fluent Punjabi because of her Indian stepdad, meaning she's understood every single remark he's made about the "white b***" - including the Implied Death Threat which was the final straw - and, although his mandatory camera is illegally deactivated, she's been secretly recording most of the conversation, which goes on to thwart a Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
  • It's almost as if some kiosk employees pick up new languages just for the purpose of getting customers, at least according to the submitter's mother.
  • “So does my Dad.”
  • One boss was convinced that his Italian supplier was lying about production delays, so he pulled strings to get the only employee who knew Italian assigned to the next meeting "to take the minutes". Said employee took notes on all the side conversations in Italian about how the other company had deliberately ripped them off and turned them over to the boss. The Italian delegation had a very uncomfortable two days of negotiations.
• Blatant Lies:
  • This lady lies about her qualifications to get a job, lies that her boyfriend is a lawyer, and then after getting fired, lies to her new employer that she was assistant manager at the store that fired her after seeing through her lies.
  • This CSR is pretty desperate not to have to do a return.
  • This manager tries to claim credit for the submitter's work for helping a customer's order. Too bad the store manager knew he was lying due to the fact that the customer knew the submitter's name.
  • This person gets rid of a telemarketer by saying that their mother was "mauled to death by a horde of angry platypi" led by Perry the Platypus. The telemarketer believes it, offers condolences, and hangs up.
  • "There was a bear."
  • This agent is politely told to call between specific hours if they want a manager who can answer their question. She immediately calls back and, oblivious to the fact that the employee who answered was the exact same one as the last time, claims that "the last bitch I spoke to" was being rude.
  • This waitress lies to a customer about bringing his food out when they actually never received it. When the couple objects, the manager (her father) claims they're trying to scam the restaurant. When the owner then comes out to investigate, he discovers that the waitress had been eating the submitter's food herself. The waitress and her father are both fired and the couple's meal is comped.
  • "I'm dead now."
  • "Ignore the salespeople."
  • This employee has made a habit of calling out sick, to the point where their boss (the submitter) demands a doctor's note the next time they come in to prove their "illness". The next day the employee brings a hastily typed up doctors note listing, a claim of "‘traumitic’ illness of the ‘lunges’, a 555 number and street address, and Ronald McDonald as the alleged "doctor", and then screams his head off despite his supposedly ill lungs. The unamused submitter immediately shows the lazy employee the door.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce
  • This person has a coworker steal a bottle of their hot sauce... a sauce so hot, the submitter had to buy it online and only used a drop at a time. The thief didn't know this, and while the story doesn't say how much he used, he ended up vomiting and having to take the day off (unpaid) to recover.
  • This poster is known at their job for loving extra-hot sauces. When they bring some ghost pepper sauce rated at 500,000 Scoville units to add to a fast-food burrito, a coworker decides it can't be all that hot and "proves" it by eating an entire spoonful. Fortunately for the coworker, this happened at a grocery store, so he could grab a gallon of whole milk to cut the heat.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: The manager of an international software company's translation department failed to keep the employees, and instead of rehiring, contracting a temp agency, or outsourcing to another company, ran a major project through a cheap translation program and distributed the resulting document with the product (which was apparently the Microsoft Windows operating system!). The client found it funny; the company did not.
• Bluff the Impostor: How one supposed satellite TV company caller gets caught.
• Bothering by the Book: When the subject of a story isn't an employee being unnecessarily rude or incredibly lazy, it's probably because someone is following procedure to the letter, to the detriment of everything else. Examples:
  • A hospital calling for a baby to have their wisdom teeth removed. Because the person in question was listed as a baby the last time they were there, that means they're a baby! Ignore the birth date putting that last visit 20 years prior, or the fact that babies don't have wisdom teeth. Even more bizarrely, the nurse making the call is adamant that the supposed baby is the person they need to speak to directly, and doesn't appear to see anything strange about this. Fortunately, she realizes her mistake when the submitter points all of this out to her.
  • This flight attendant keeps bothering a passenger about wheelchair assistance. Ignore that if she were to actually pay attention to that passenger she would see that they clearly do not need a wheelchair — her booking said she needs assistance, it can't possibly be an error on their part.^note To be fair, there are situations where someone could need wheelchair assistance and not be in a wheelchair at that exact moment, but even if that's the case, they should still take the customer's word for it when she says it's an error.
  • This receptionist insists that a patient had surgery that day, rather than merely scheduling an appointment for it, despite that patient's statements to the contrary.
  • This bank representative insists that they've only accepted driver's licenses as ID. A state-issued ID, which in every other case ever works in lieu of a license, is not sufficient in her eyes because it's not a driver's license. Not surprisingly, the submitter closes their existing account at that bank and takes their business to a nearby competitor.
  • This cashier is apparently deathly insistent that every customer have a bag when they leave.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: ...from the wrong side.
• Brick Joke: "I'm going to kill (Coworker)!" "No fair! I called dibs!"
• Brilliant, but Lazy: This employee got the nickname 'Wizard' for being able to solve any weird problem his hotel had, while also doing his level best to skive off his regular work.
• Brutal Honesty: This coworker would rather give a disclaimer than a false compliment.
• Buffy Speak: Big spoony thing.
  • This one: A customer asking for an item says, "It goes on the counter; you put the things in it? You know for, like, the mix-y and the... the scoopy and the... STUFF!" After the worker manages to figure it out, he says, "I have a second job as a bartender. I don’t speak ‘Idiot’ but I DO speak ‘Drunk,’ and it’s nearly the same thing."
• Bullying a Dragon: This restaurant owner outright defies a judge's order to stop trying to fire her employee for serving jury duty even after the judge says she will be immediately arrested for contempt of court if she says another word. Not surprisingly, the owner is soon in handcuffs being berated by the judge, who only agrees to drop the charges once she agrees to let her employee serve on the jury.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Subverted with this co-worker, who's a walking health hazard who smells awful and makes his cubicle a pigsty. But despite numerous complaints, he isn't fired, because he seems to be very good at his job… until a new manager takes over who sets a better metric system, and it's discovered that he's been padding his numbers, leading to his dismissal.
• Butt-Monkey: This story, where the submitter got written up and threatened with termination over a technical issue he could do nothing to mitigate, and this one, where a manager refused to let the submitter take a break through five hours of heavy customer traffic and then told him to his face he's not getting any breaks that day once things finally start to die down enough that he could get away with one, are revealed to be the same person in the opening to this one, where he gets threatened with a write-up for not helping a customer while he's off the clock. Turns out he has a knack for identifying the bad managers by having them mistreat him in increasingly ludicrous ways, and after he's threatened with disciplinary action for not breaking labor laws, he's finally had enough.
• Bystander Syndrome: This trope shows up depressingly often, and nearly every story in the Lazy/Unhelpful section is guaranteed to have an employee just throw up their arms and go "it's not my problem", even though almost every time this happens it is their problem.
  • I was supposed to use a fire extinguisher?
  • These employees who are running a rock concert venue. The submitter and their family had bought tickets from a seemingly-illegal reseller vendor on the venue's own website. The family complains that the venue should be able to filter out the illegal vendors that advertise on the site. The employees and manager claim it's in their policy to only accept from certain vendors, but the family never found such a policy on the site. One employee even tells them that it's not their problem their website has illegal vendors on it. At the least the owner was more sympathetic and apologized for the inconvenience following the submitter posting a nasty review online.^note The comments on this story are pretty mixed as to who is in the wrong, but the majority of people say it's the venue.

C

• Calvinball: Trope namedropped and in full effect here.
• Camera Obscurer: An internal tech support worker deals with a ticket about a broken webcam, which turns out to be the privacy lid not opened.
• Canadian Equals Hockey Fan: The only country where the manager's skipping work to watch the Stanley Cup playoffs.
• Card-Carrying Jerkass: "I'm such a b***! Ha!"
• Cassandra Truth:
  • A textbook example.
  • Despite the fact that the doctor knows the patient is a virgin and her pregnancy test is negative, the student nurse helping out still believes the patient is pregnant.
  • This boss dismisses the author's flu as a "head cold" and threatens to fire her, despite the author sending three separate emails. Making matters worse, even after the author's father goes in to painstaking detail why his daughter cannot come to work, the boss screams at him over the phone, and later fires the author anyway for not showing up.
  • This store manager is so desperate to protect his recent promotion that he tries to deny that a teenage YouTuber is illegally camping in the store for a challenge video, even after being shown previous videos of them doing it in that exact store. Not desperate enough to stay late and make sure they're gone before closing, though.
  • This retail employee, thanks to a medical condition, can sense a massive blizzard building four days out. Responses from those around them range from accepting that they're probably right to accusing them of being overdramatic. The storm arrives and is even as bad as predicted, resulting in a number of apologies from the doubters. Some of the people in the comments actually invoke the trope by asking if the submitter's name is Cassandra.
• Casual Kink: "You'll make a man very happy someday."
• Catch-22 Dilemma: This manager puts one of her employees in one by writing them up for refusing to help a customer off the clock... and then firing that same employee for working off the clock, even admitting that she ordered them to do so. Upper management is not amused, and quickly reverses the firing before suspending the manager for her actions. This causes the manager to retaliate against the employee upon returning, which ends badly for her.
• Child Hater:
  • This fast-food cashier is particularly hostile towards a 10-year-old girl for seemingly no legitimate reason. The girl calls the cashier out on her immature and impolite behavior after her response to several mistakes in the order. Eventually, the cashier calls the girl an "ungrateful bitch", which pushes her Berserk Button big time. When the girl demands to see the manager, the cashier refuses. The girl flips her off and returns later with her mother, and they explain everything to the manager. The cashier is called into the manager's office, but she continues to pick on the girl, which gets her promptly fired due to her history of similar incidents.
  • Another cashier gripes to the 12-year-old submitter about having to press a lot of buttons to ring up a cheeseburger. When the submitter points out a button for only cheese, the cashier screams at them and accuses them of lying. This catches the manager's attention, and, due to a large amount of complaints and two similar incidents that same day, the cashier is fired on the spot and the submitter's meal is comped.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • "PURPLE!!!"
  • According to this customer, you can never think too much. You think?
  • Whoever from corporate sent some very tacky sheep statues. The submitter has no idea what the fuck is going on, since there's no reason for a statue to even be sent in the first place (the submitter's business has nothing whatsoever to do with sheep, nor do they have a sheep as a corporate mascot), much less two of them.
  • In a creepier example of this trope than most, this manager apparently taxidermies his dead pets and encourages the submitter to do the same, prompting the submitter to run to the nearest washroom to vomit. He's later put on probation for coming over to the submitter's home.
  • “I think there are tarantulas in your wires!”
• Clueless Boss: They show up often. Let's leave it at that, because listing them all could fill another page.
• Collector of the Strange: Car airbags with make-up stains on them.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • This person gives their street address to a pizza deliverer, mentioning Lincoln, "like the president". The delivery person mentions that Obama's the president.
  • "So you think people act a certain way based on their race? That's racist." "No it's not! That's prejudice!" The absolutely hilarious part is that he's right.
  • This manager asks a worker to water the plants during a slow point of the day. The worker points out it's raining; the manager replies, "take an umbrella."
  • This truck stop has several advertising billboards out along the freeway leading to it... but then refuses to serve anyone who is not a local.
  • This interviewer continues interviewing people for two days after the job they're applying for has already been filled, thinking just getting an interview (rather than actually working) is good job experience.
  • This hotel hires a security guard to deal with unruly guests coming from a nearby stadium. Unfortunately, the guard they hire thinks it's his job to make other people do his job for him. He's unsurprisingly gone within a week.
  • This customer asks a food counter employee if they serve alligator meat at an alligator reservation.
  • An employee is being fired for multiple causes, including threatening to kill everyone. "So, when can I apply again?"
  • This babysitter manages to combine this with Exact Words; on being told by the parents of a child she sits that they don't want their child being sat in the same house as another with chickenpox, she takes that at face value and assumes they can still be transported next to each other in the same car.
  • “If you want us to check your dog who just had puppies, you need to supply a certificate to show she’s been neutered.”
  • A hotel complies with a guest's request to leave breakfast at the door without ringing the doorbell (so as not to wake their family)... and then ring the room phone to happily confirm that they did not ring the doorbell.
• Company Credit Card Abuse: In this story (crossposted from Reddit), a company VP tries to screw over the IT department by ordering them to work in-office on the fourth of July while the rest of the company has the day off. Unfortunately, that VP then told the department head to go ahead and use his company credit card to get a few things for a holiday party for the department, as long as it didn't interfere with work and no alcohol was brought onto company property. Cue a catering bill over $6000, and the head of the company coming down hard on the VP.
• Confronting Your Imposter: Less frequent than in Right, but still around.
  • "Time to Try Another Tactic" has a caller claim to be the daughter of the owner, while the female worker that answered is the owner's only child.
  • New hires telling off the owner's actual children because they think they're catching someone attempting this is rather common, however — see here and here for examples of this form of Conviction by Counterfactual Clue.
• Consummate Liar:
  • There is something legitimately wrong with this girl. One can only hope she eventually gets professional help. One also wonders how many people are jobless and/or on social assistance simply because they can't stop lying their pants off.
  • One worker lies so much to ditch work that she was fired on the phone.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • After aimlessly wandering around a store, the submitter just happens to pass by another customer enough times that she becomes convinced he is stalking her, and reports him to a manager.
  • After turning down a transferring male coworker's invitation to go out, a female worker starts seeing him everywhere she goes— walking on the same streets, going to the gym at the same time, loitering on the corner by her apartment complex. Finally, she calls the cops and demands to know why he's stalking her... his transfer had caused him to move into the same apartment complex, and he hadn't even realized she was there.
  • In this story, the submitter is a tourist hanging out in a bar when the owner suddenly yells at him for slacking on the job. Turns out this bar has an employee who looks a bit like the submitter and shares the same first name.
  • A terrible one occurs here, wherein the projector in a theater showing Toy Story 3 experiences an error and cuts the movie off at the absolute worst possible place it could do so: Right in the middle of the climactic incinerator scene, when Woody, Buzz, and the others believe they are about to die and choose to Face Death with Dignity. To make matters worse, the projectionist cluelessly turns the screen off and the lights back on as though the movie had ended normally, leaving sad and/or traumatized children (and their sad and/or traumatized parents!) wandering around the theater lobby in a daze and wondering why the movie would end in such a dark, depressing way. The manager quickly sets the record straight for the poor families and offers a free showing of the movie again so they can see what really happened to Woody, Buzz, and the gang...and then goes to ream out the projectionist for how they handled the incident.
  • A small-town towing company has a very bad day in this story: Tow Truck Driver #1 goes to tow a minivan that had gone into a ditch after its brakes failed, but he makes a mistake when attaching the chain to the winch of his truck. This results in the chain getting caught on a stump and the bed of the truck getting twisted up, leaving the truck drivable but unable to successfully tow the van out. Tow Truck Driver #2 (the submitter) arrives in their tow truck, but as they're tying up the winch, an overloaded pick-up truck comes around the curve and flings a riding lawnmower off itself and into the second tow truck as it does so, crushing the driver door and misaligning the steering wheel. Tow Truck Driver #3 is called to bring their last remaining tow truck to get the van...and as the tow truck driver arrives, a speeding drunk driver that was behind the third tow truck rear ends the tow truck with enough force to break the rear axle. All of their vehicles rendered inoperable, the drivers are left sheepishly having to call a rival towing company to come rescue them.
• Conversational Troping: An employee is talking over a headset to their coworkers and a manager while tailing a suspected shoplifter and mentions how sneaky this is, just like in Mission: Impossible. One coworker starts humming the iconic theme to that movie, another wants someone to do an Unnecessary Combat Roll, just like in movies of that genre, and the manager bets someone $20 to do it, right now, just for the heck of it.
• Conviction by Counterfactual Clue: This shopper gets stopped at the door by a pair of greeters who ask for her receipt. She doesn't have it, but asks to go fetch her husband, who works at the auto department, but who isn't off the clock yet. Ha, say the greeters, the auto department closed an hour ago! You're lying, and we'll have to confiscate the item (an air conditioner). While it's true that the auto department has closed, the husband is still on the clock (he assists in other departments until his shift ends). But at this point, the greeters won't listen — they won't let the shopper or her kid leave with the AC (understandably), and for a long while they won't let the shopper or her kid go back into the store to fetch the husband (somewhat less understandably). The misunderstanding continues — and even escalates — until the point the (angry) husband finally walks up with the receipt.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment:
  • The "penny tip" for bad restaurant service. Since leaving no tip could be seen as poor manners or forgetfulness on the customer's part, leaving a single penny (or nickel, or dime) instead communicates that the customer WOULD have tipped, but the waiter didn't deserve it.
  • "Please remove these (legal textbooks) or we'll make you read them."
  • This woman is so fed up with her printer company (the printers frequently break down) and is forced to go through five printers in the span of two years. When it's revealed that the warranty is expired and she can't get another free replacement, the woman proceeds to chuck the shoddy printer down the stairs and then hack it to pieces with an axe!
  • This investigation reveals that while the cashiers are fraudulently registering customers for the magazine promotion against their will, the managers have been lounging in the break room instead of monitoring them, making them guilty of time theft as well as complicit in the fraud. The cashiers are fired, and the managers are forced to work double-shifts every day to train new staff before the holiday season, or else face firing and criminal charges.
  • Didn't pay attention to your mandatory training in the new specialty software? There's a wait for the instructors to schedule a second session, so you'll have to help administration clean out the file storage in the meantime.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • This cell-phone company. "You want to cancel your cell phone? Okay, that'll be $350. You say you're not paying because your father died, and it was his cell phone? Yeah, right, not falling for it. $350, please. You say you have the official death certificate in your hand and can fax it right over here? You can buy a fake one for real cheap. Nice try, scammer, you'll still have to pay. You're going to go directly to the higher-ups in Corporate and beg for them to waive the fee? That's fine, because they'll just ignore you until you've paid just as much as part of your monthly bill anyway!"
  • Oh dearie me, this is a veritable cascade of the events. The combination electric and water supplier has a monopoly on the whole town, with the mayor and other town council members sitting on the board of directors, with the narrator explicitly stating that "they get to do pretty much anything they want without repercussions." This includes the (13-year-old, at time of the event) narrator's mother being harassed about paying a bill that she already paid, with the company calling about an address on the other side of town; the same mother having issues with a meter reader calling the cost at a far higher amount than used, despite her having been out for over two weeks with not a utility running; a triple-cost bill being sent to the narrator's house, when it was intended for the bartender down the street; and the kid!narrator being left out in the rain due to the company sending in a pair of electricians to fiddle with the (malfunctioning) electric box, hence leaving the kid unable to use the garage keypad to get in! And running over some Texas Sage while they were at it. To top it all off, that was ALSO supposed to be the bartender's call! Oh yeah, it's been six years and it's still just as bad.
  • In this story, a worker is forced to leave early while they still have a ton of paperwork to do. The worker is promptly fired the next day for not doing that paperwork — and is then forced to sign a paper stating that they are leaving of their own accord, which means the worker is not entitled for unemployment benefits. Fortunately, unlike the previous examples, karma bit them fast and hard, as it was not very long before the worker found a new job and the corrupt company went out of business.
  • This company that the submitter is being interviewed for has some rather… interesting notes for them. The vice-president points out that “while we are a healthcare-facing company, we don’t necessarily ‘help’ people,” then asks a number of questions that discuss avoiding government fines. Suffice to say, the submitter does not accept employment there.
• Could Say It, But...:
  • In this story, the submitter's manager "wasn't allowed to tell [them]" that a jackass coworker was docked an hour's pay for blowing off work.
  • In this story, when this librarian is asked whether she recommends manual or automatic sliding bookshelves, all they say is "We recommend the manual ones." Eventually the submitter's colleague realizes the librarian's talking around legal barriers and goes with their suggestion. What exactly happened with the other library's automatic shelves is never elaborated on.
• Creepy Child: This little girl has invented a frankly terrifying personality for her toy unicorn and affects Dissonant Serenity when reacting to it. We hope.
• Crying Wolf:
  • The reason these employees are (at first) flippant about a serious "ceiling fan is hanging by the wires" problem — because usually it's just a housing that's come off, exposing the wires and creating the appearance that they're supporting the fan, but in reality the actual support for the fan itself is still in place. This time, though, it really is hanging by the wires... and the person who comes to fix it is practically floored when he sees it, even asking to take a picture to prove it to the people at the office.
  • A credit card user is irritated by security shutting down their card for "suspicious" transactions whenever they travel. Except this time, it really was a fraudulent transaction.
  • The workers at a store are suspicious of a temp from an unemployment agency claiming to be too sick to work... until the temp throws up on the floor. Once they realize the temp really was sick and not just making excuses, they're quick to help clean up, offer sympathies, and send them home for the day.
• Cute, but Cacophonic: This pair of kittens, who decide that the best way to get food is to surprise the nearest human by screaming their little lungs out.

D

• Delivery Guy Infiltration: One actual delivery man inverts this. The man in question regularly does deliveries for a secure building that has yet to get around giving him the means to bypass security regular visitors qualify for. One day, the very people who asked him to come fail to book him and don't answer their phones when he arrives. How does he get in? He just shows up at doors holding a big box that has the ordered items inside and get let in by other people.
• Determinator:
  • The coworker in this story, without fail, skives off in the office bathroom when their boss is out of the building. He's so committed to this that when the rest of his coworkers plot to make sure the bathrooms are 'inconveniently' either being cleaned or occupied the next time his boss leaves, he occupies the port-a-potty of the building site next door. It's not stated just how long he spent in there but it was well over an hour, until just before his clocking off time.
  • This interviewee wants his interview to be right that second even when the submitter tells him that he can't accommodate him. Eventually he uses a pizza place to track the submitter to their home to try and get an interview there, thinking that would impress them. They get caught by security and turned over the the police. Oh, and he didn't get the job.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?:
  • This store clerk.
  • “Hi, welcome to [store]. How can I lie to you today?” Oh, Crap!, the customers actually do listen!
    • Except when they don't.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • A cop stops a driver because they seemed to be going too fast... but doesn't have the radar readings to back it up. He realizes his mistake quickly enough to leave the vicinity before the driver can ask for his badge number.
  • It's generally ill-advised to post everything you do on Facebook, but announcing that you went out to the clubs after calling in sick at work is a dumb idea. Especially when you have coworkers and a manager on your friends list.
    • In a similar vein, this nightclub coworker calls out sick to attend her boyfriend's work party. The only catch? Her boyfriend works for the same company. The party is at her own workplace, her bosses are in attendance, and you can guess what happens next.
  • This new hire wonders why a coworker seemed disgusted when he tried to compliment them by telling them "you stink".
  • This manager decides the best reaction to a customer sending a complaint about their rudeness is to be even ruder to that customer - it apparently never occurred to him that said customer would complain again.
  • These two bosses come up with an idiotic plan to make their workers spend more time on work by setting up how long they can be in the bathroom doing their number one and two business based on the time they spend in the men's bathroom while forgetting about women doing number 3. The plan was scrapped due to many female workers' protests, and also because it was illegal under Union rules. (Turns out they'd been trying to crack down on cell phone breaks disguised as bathroom breaks, which would have been a more valid concern if they'd just said so.)^note Though some theorize that that wasn't the initial intent but just an excuse they came up with later to cover their ass and deflect some of the controversy.
  • Overlapping with Mean Boss, this boss repeatedly attempts to get the submitter fired without severance pay, culminating in her attempting to fire the submitter for physically threatening a manager. The only problem is that the boss states it happened five minutes before, and when called to the boss's office, the manager in question not only reveals that the submitter never did such a thing, but that she (the manager) has no idea what's going on. The submitter immediately threatens the boss with a wrongful dismissal suit, and the boss simply gives up and stops bothering them.
  • This daycare worker tries to impose her Straw Feminist beliefs on a little girl by telling her that Santa doesn't exist (apparently Santa was only a problem because he was a man). Turns out, Santa's visit was the only thing the girl was looking forward to that Christmas, after her father had died the previous Christmas. The girl's enraged mother proceeds to tear into the worker for ruining the second Christmas in a row for her daughter.
    Mother: Thank you for ruining Christmas. The first two Christmases my daughter is going to remember: seeing her father collapse on a dollhouse they were building together, and learning that Santa doesn't exist from a virtual stranger. Thank you, you self-righteous b***!
    • Adding onto that, the daycare worker didn't think about how other parents, besides the mother, would not react well to her telling kids that Santa doesn't exist. Several parents witnessed that confrontation, and they were so outraged by one of the workers callously crushing a kid's spirit in favor of her own personal beliefs that they withdrew their own children's enrollment at the daycare, crippling the business in the process. Unsurprisingly, the worker got fired for causing the whole mess in the first place.
  • This preachy vegan bakery manager tricked the hotel's guests into eating her vegan cheesecake without the prior knowledge of anyone else - including the others on the bakery staff - thinking they would all love it and go vegan after eating it. However, she failed to consider the possibilities of those guests not liking the taste, being allergic to the vegan ingredients, and/or having other dietary restrictions. She got chewed out by her boss for her stunt and was later ordered to quit since she kept putting her own agendas ahead of those of the hotel.
  • "Either the IT guy is out, or I'm out!" "I accept your resignation. You have fifteen minutes to clean out your desk."
  • "Two of our staff are talking to one another on the phone, from ten feet away, about a problem our office can’t resolve." A phone call bouncing system to prevent calls to an understaffed site from going unanswered backfires when a remote worker can't call them to report a problem, and the old site where all calls are redirected to attempts to call them to pass the message forward and ends up getting redirected themselves.
  • A photo lab manager sees the submitter (whom she absolutely hates) sell cigarettes to a regular customer without checking his ID because the submitter has sold cigarettes to him enough times to know that he is in his 40s. Once the transaction is over and the customer leaves the store, the photo lab manager immediately claims to be friends with that man's mother so she "knows" he's actually a 14-year-old boy with a "growth disease" that just makes him look like he's 40, and then she gleefully goes report it to a manager in the hopes of getting the submitter fired and arrested for selling cigarettes to a minor. Her lie immediately backfires on her for two reasons. First, the manager instantly rebukes her for standing by and letting the sale happen despite "knowing" that the customer was underaged, meaning that she made herself an Accomplice by Inaction in the crime she was accusing the submitter of. Secondly, several other cashiers witnessed the whole thing and also sold cigarettes to that same customer in the past, so not only did they know that he was indeed old enough to purchase them, they all willingly testified against the photo lab manager since they saw she was deliberately trying to get one of them fired. This means that no matter how the situation ended, the photo lab manager’s attempt to get the submitter fired would instead result in finding herself in serious trouble with the store managers.
  • This general manager at a Copy Shop agreed to a customer's requesting a discounted price for a printing job they ordered to match a competitor's price without first talking with the submitter, who is a supervisor at the shop. The submitter is furious for the manager's stupidity since the discount was over ninety percent of their usual prices and the reason the competitor was able to offer that kind of price was because they owned a large printing factory while the shop didn't. Had he spoken to the submitter first, they would have rejected that high discount and not lost a lot of money.
  • Corporate in this story heavily leans on cashiers to upsell magazine subscriptions, making it clear that 'no' was not an acceptable answer and that not selling enough would be a fireable offense. Then they're surprised when it turns out that all the cashiers just start signing customers up for subscriptions without their consent, which of course pisses off all the customers and gives them valid reason to sue the store. They eventually had to fire almost all the front-end staff for it the day before Black Friday.
  • A soldier has heard horror stories about getting cheated or ghosted by girlfriends while deployed, so he decides to make absolutely sure he'll have a girlfriend to come home to... by dating five girls simultaneously. That way, even if one or two abandon him, he'll have the others, right? He's genuinely shocked and confused the day of his departure when all five visit to see him off, all five find out about each other, and all five dump him on the spot for his infidelity.
  • One lady makes ineffectual threats to quit over the slightest inconvenience. When she actually does storm out after a performance evaluation says she needs to improve, the company wastes no time in deactivating her ID card and locking the doors. She also doesn't get severance or her final paycheck since she was considered to have abandoned her position.
  • A worker is denied his request for a vacation day. The manager's argument: He'd applied late, and they already approved so many vacations for that day that they'd be short-staffed if they approved his. The worker's argument: It doesn't matter if he's there or not, because he doesn't do his assignments anyway! He even gets a coworker (the submitter) to prove they've been doing all his work for him. After a short investigation, he gets all the days off he wants— he's fired.
  • This manager intends to get the submitter fired for her autism, under the guise of insubordination. The problem? She never had any documentation proving the submitter was being insubordinate. Between being unable to provide said documentation to the head chef—who happens to be autistic himself—and her own act of insubordination (telling him that the submitter's firing was none of his business just beforehand), she's no longer a manager by the story's end.
  • This boss attempts to subvert union policy to wrongfully fire the submitter for poor attendance (they had been in the hospital for three days and had a doctor's note), by giving the submitter a warning and then stating that he intends to fire them after coming back from his vacation, and that his decision is final. The submitter interprets this as not being welcome there any more and quits, leaving their department shorthanded, to the horror of the higher-ups.
  • It seems there are a startling number of managers who operate stores near universities or colleges, hire students of those places, and then decide not to give them the day off for exams. Some of them even force them to choose between their job and their education...and then are completely shocked when the workers decide their education is more important.
  • This small town elects a mayor who spends a good chunk of his budget on supporting the recreational fishers in this town by buying more diverse kinds of live fish and dumping them in the lake. It works for one fishing season, but when the next one rolls around, all they find in the lake is a bunch of very fat pike. The mayor would lose his reelection bid.
  • This theatre has a large, very realistic tree as a set piece. Eventually they decide to weld some more branches on… when the leaves are made of paper. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
• Dine and Dash: This manager's appalling treatment of a waitress (screaming at her because he, seemingly a narcissist who thinks only events he personally witnesses happen, didn't see her working on tables other than the one she was serving at the time, stealing a $10 sympathy tip, and loudly firing her for receiving said tip) results in several guests walking out without paying their bills.
• Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery:
  • This co-worker thinks he can say what he likes, including insulting customers, because (he claims) he's autistic. He's out of a job by the end of the story.
  • Similarly, this co-worker claims to have some kind of mental disability that he uses to avoid facing the consequences for making inappropriate comments to co-workers despite multiple complaints. Eventually, after being prodded one last time, the submitter's patience runs out and they loudly chew the co-worker out. The co-worker complains to management, and they consider firing the submitter, who begins to look for new emplyment. However, the co-worker pushes his luck too much and he sexually harasses a customer, leading to him being fired and any disciplinary measures against the submitter fails to materialize. The submitter still quits anyway due to other issues with the store.
• Disabled Means Helpless:
  • And apparently, in the view of the woman in this story, not an actual human being deserving of human treatment. Having arrived at an office for a job interview, she sees a man in a wheelchair and promptly decides to take the "differently-abled person" for a walk without his permission, ignoring his protests and telling him he shouldn't be talking. When the man's brother intervenes, she accuses him of assault and calls him a misogynist, still treating the wheelchair-user as if he were a small child in her care. When she states she's there to interview for an IT technician job, the wheelchair-user starts laughing hysterically, which she takes as a sign he's "depraved"; it's actually because he's the IT manager, and, unsurprisingly, she's not getting that job. As security escorts her off the premises, she screams, "WHO WOULD WANT TO WORK FOR A CRIPPLE, ANYWAY?!" — to which half the office replies, "ME!"
  • This barmaid, when a customer with cerebral palsy orders a beer, promptly asks the friend he's with if he's allowed it. Said friend responds by sarcastically phoning the first customer up and asking him if he's allowed beer.
• Disaster Dominoes: A plumber called to fix a leaky toilet at a family's house drops a part down said toilet, but doesn't bother to take it out and just leaves it. This leads to the part blocking the pipe and causing it to burst, flooding and trashing the interior of the entire ground level of the house and causing the kitchen ceiling to cave in, forcing the family to live in hotels or with relatives for three months until the house is habitable again. During this time, the submitter ends up losing their job because it ends up costing too much for them to take a train to their workplace when they only make minimum wage. When school starts back up, the submitter's parents go through a lot of trouble to get a hotel closer to the submitter and their sister because until now they were well over an hour away from each other. The family goes through all of this trouble just over their plumber dropping a part down the toilet.
• Disgusting Vegetarian Food: A preachy vegan manager messes with the cheesecake recipe when preparing a batch for hotel guests, resulting in bland, disgusting cheesecake with the mouthfeel of cornstarch. She crows to the submitter that everyone will realize "how yummy vegan food can be" after eating it, only to get chewed out by the executive chef.
• Dismotivation: A possible explanation for some stories in the "Lazy/Unhelpful" category. The employees need a paycheck, but hate working with people, so they just be rude and unhelpful so the customer will give up and go away. This obviously doesn't work, as it often gets that particular employee fired.
  • Which brings new perspective to all those Not Always Right stories involving seemingly Jerkass customers being incredibly quick to (wrongfully) accuse employees of doing this very thing whenever something doesn't go their way. They've probably run into so many people doing it for real that they've taught themselves to always assume the worst.
  • Another explanation along these lines works for this story - the employee needs a paycheck, but hates working at all, so it's just perfect for him that he's "in tight" with a manager and therefore can use that as an excuse to force other employees to do his work for him. The instant he finds someone on whom this doesn't work (namely, the owner's son), he immediately quits.
  • A justified example here. The pizza parlor is reluctant to deliver to a customer at a certain address... because the previous resident at that address had been consistently abusive to them, and they didn't know someone else was living there now. They were rude to the new customer because they mistook them for the abusive customer. Fortunately, once the delivery boy sees that the abusive customer no longer lives there, the manager apologizes to the new person.
  • Another justified example here. The employees are in no hurry to send out an electrician to deal with a ceiling fan that's come loose and is hanging by just its wires. However, once the electrician arrives, he explains that they receive calls from people who inaccurately use the "hanging from the wires" explanation on a regular basis. He's surprised that, in this case, it was actually true, and asks for permission to take a picture before he starts fixing the fan so he can show it to his coworkers.
  • This university library worker tells a patron that they don't check out books (the entire point of a library) to make them go away so that he doesn't have to serve them. Worse yet, when the submitter (his superior) asks him what he'd do if a department head came with a list of books, he says he'd do the same thing. Unsurprisingly, thanks to complaints from other teachers he refused to help, the head librarian fires him the next day.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • This bank manager who called the police when one individual accidentally took one dollar more than they were supposed to after closing the account. The two police officers who responded weren't happy when they realized what had happened.
  • Another manager reacts to a five-year-old boy who wet his pants by screaming full blast at the boy and his mother and then threatening to call the cops on them. Between this and the manager referring to them as "white trash" afterwards, his entire staff pulls a collective Take This Job and Shove It, starting with a supervisor who had a son with similar bladder problems. The manager was later reprimanded by his boss (who also had a similarly aged son) when he had to explain the situation.
  • When a new employee gets told by his supervisor (the submitter) that he's doing stock checking incorrectly, rather than accept his mistake and learn from it, he instead complains to his father, the manager, who fires the supervisor for "sexually harassing" his son, then threatens to call the police on him. Thankfully, Laser-Guided Karma comes into quick effect - because the firing was for sexual harassment, HR now has to investigate the claims. They discover from CCTV footage that the manager and his son made up the entire thing, and both are fired by week's end for lying to HR about it. The submitter became a HR-sort of person themselves and when asked to investigate a complaint at a restaurant, the submitter encounters the ex-manager's son, who promptly books it out of there.
  • This manager fires an employee just because she was having a bad day and wanted to take it out on them. The union and the business owner are not amused.
  • What is this manager's response to an employee's (rightful) concerns about their safety in relation to being asked to push carts in a severe thunderstorm? Scream at the employee at the top of her lungs and fire them on the spot. In front of customers. Luckily, the store's owner quickly learns of the incident and fires the manager the very next day for endangering the submitter, who in turn gets their job back.
  • Similarly, this aggressive general manager's response to a 75-year-old lady tipping the submitter out of sympathy for having to put up with his abuse is to grab it right out of the submitter's hand and then fire her full-blast in her face, reducing her to tears. The outraged elderly lady promptly calls the manager out and leaves. The district manager also learns what happened, and reinstates the submitter, before coming in the next day to personally and thoroughly ream out the manager and fire him instead for screaming in front of customers and stealing the submitter's tip.
  • The submitter in this story goes on a long holiday. He notifies everyone who needs to know well in advance and properly delegates his work and contacts before taking his vacation. A week in, the hotel he is visiting receives multiple calls for the submitter to turn on his phone which has multiple missed calls, texts, and voicemails from his boss. The submitter immediately calls back, believing it to be an emergency, to realize that the issue is that the printer isn't working, and after walking through the problem, it is found out that it's not working because the printer is out of paper. A week after that, the boss calls him into a meeting, where the boss fires the submitter for "crippling the company." A tribunal for unfair dismissal has the submitter come with a record of multiple voicemails to every hotel in the towns the submitter was staying at, as well as 60 texts, 40 calls, and 30 voicemails, one of which has the boss screaming a gay slur and screaming that the submitter was "dead." The submitter wins the tribunal and receives two years worth of wages (which were rather high as he was very experienced and at the top of the pay scale).
  • A flirty bank teller in this story tries to put moves on a married man and gets refused… so she locks his account on a bogus claim of violent assault.
  • As mentioned under Ax-Crazy, this worker is angry enough at being denied an employee coupon that had expired that she gets mad enough that she has to be escorted off the premises, then comes back with weapons and a shotgun and tries to kill her co-workers and set the building on fire. Fortunately, she fails at this.
  • This drive-thru cashier tries to deny service to the submitter because the submitter was wearing apparel for an NFL team that had beaten the cashier's team in the playoffs recently.
• The Ditz: Many.
  • This bank representative is obviously not very sharp. First, he suggests the debtor make a weekly payment three times that of said debtor's weekly income. Then, after the debtor makes a sarcastic comment about having to start a meth lab to make that kind of income, the representative not only takes the comment seriously, he offers a line of credit for the venture, seeming not to realize it's illegal. Finally, after the debtor calls out the bank representative for that mistake, the representative tries to make the excuse that he'd had his mind on a sporting event, but commits Gretzky Has the Ball in the process.
  • "Sfoon!"
  • This coworker seems to be totally oblivious to the concept of lesbianism.
  • This grocery store owner recommends that a customer look for pretzels in the produce aisle, then asks, "What are pretzels, anyway?"
  • This employee at a dollar store. To make a long story short, she cannot do simple tasks like facing merchandise, scanning products, or even simply putting merchandise back on the shelves without either having someone walk her through it, trying to lend friends favours, abruptly abandoning the task, or making an enormous mess. She fails to improve in any capacity and the fed-up submitter shows her the door after less than a week.
  • This employee utterly fails to comprehend how fractions work.
  • This pizza counter person steals a customer's credit card details when they call in for a delivery. They then screw up this crime by proceeding to order two meals from the same pizza store, giving themselves the employee discount, signing their own name on the receipts, and then trying to place another order the very next day with the exact same card - the last of which happens to be at the same time that the manager and the police start to look into the theft.
  • This intern answers the phone wrong, throws out other people's poppyseed bagels in the belief that they were mouldy, and makes all sorts of weird gestures to customers. He also steals other workers' lunches until he's talked into bringing his own… and he proceeds to bring a pound of raw steak, and on finding that he has nowhere at work to grill it, eats it raw, sending him to the hospital. It's implied he gets it from his mother, who charges in and knocks over a display, and doesn't acknowledge it, and is unable to understand that her son is an unpaid intern.
  • The submitter of this story had to re-run his naval physical training exercise twice because the guy who was supposed to record the times forgot to do so, and on the third time, he only did it because the submitter reminded him, and it took him thirty seconds to write down six digits, and had to have the correct spot for the numbers pointed out for him.
    In the armed forces, we are sometimes given access to some really dangerous things. Like guns. Good thing this guy was only assigned to handle a stopwatch.
  • This associate takes multiple tries to get the submitter's name right, and then gets their email wrong, and then sends pictures of the wrong equipment.
  • This new hire, on her first day alone, can't pay attention during her orientation without saying hi to customers she knows, overly shares details about her personal life, continually does random tasks that aren't part of her job instead of doing her actual job, and keeps asking the head cashier about what to do instead of her manager, the submitter. She only lasts four days on the job – and that's only because the company wouldn't let the submitter fire her sooner
• Doom It Yourself:
  • An IT-variant here. A worker's husband routinely tries to fix his wife's computer and somehow makes it worse every time.
  • The poster's coworker in this story, despite having almost no spare time, evidently believes himself capable of performing what is essentially construction work on his home, which leads him to announce he's going to install a pool by himself. It takes two years. And then he has to fix it, because it's leaking. Twice. And then he can't understand why his wife wants to hire someone to install a new set of steps rather than letting him do it.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: This one hard-working aide gets a lower "Productivity" score on her annual report than a much lazier coworker because the hard-working coworker gives 110% most of the time, with some days "only" giving 90%. According to her managers, this is apparently worse (and thus warrants a lower score) than a lazy coworker giving 50% most of the time, with some days giving 60 or 70%.
• Do Wrong, Right: If you're going to have your employees resort to subterfuge, at least make sure they understand what the word means.
• The Dog Bites Back: Presumably the reason behind some of the employees' behavior, not that this makes it justified.
  • Almost certainly the case here.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": This guy reacts really badly to being called "sir" or "boss".
  "GODD***IT, NOT AGAIN! I told you that I don’t do well with those titles! Call me 'a**hole', call me 'f***er', but whatever you do, don’t call me 'sir' or 'boss'!"
• Door Stopper: The Epic of the Impossible Store (by Not Always Working standards, at least). At a whopping 2,743 words, it's currently the longest story published on the entire NAR site.
  • Not too far behind is a 2,153-word saga of one family's struggle with their phone provider. It's called "Fair Warning: This Story Will Make You EXHAUSTED", and it most definitely will.
• Dope Slap: Mentioned by name here when a manager delivers one to a pot-smoking employee.
• Double Standard: This female coworker thinks it's all right for her to take pictures of men's crotches without their consent, but not okay when it's the other way around. She's later fired when the submitter and a male customer complain to the manager when she took a picture of the customer's crotch.
  • The manager at this hotel isn't very empathetic to a man being abused by his wife in front of their four-year-old child. They even go so far as to reprimand the submitter for calling the police, since the abusive wife is a good customer and left a good review of the hotel. Thankfully, this is averted with the submitter, who called the police and had the wife arrested, and quit a few weeks later. The final sentence of the story they submitted sums it up well.
    "I don’t care how good of a customer someone is; that does not excuse abuse!"
• Dramatically Missing the Point:
  • When a customer complains about an employee failing to wash their hands after they'd visited the restroom (causing said customer to leave the store in disgust as a result), the corporate response is to... mail the customer a gift card, with no word about what steps they were going to take to improve the sanitation practices of the employees.
  • This Housing Department bureaucrat, when the submitter alerts them to a resident who's attacked and hospitalized a number of other residents.
    Bureaucrat: “Well, we can’t evict him unless it is for something serious.”
    Submitter: “You mean that him trying to kill me isn’t something serious?”
    Bureaucrat: *Obviously not paying attention* “Not unless he actually killed you.”
    Submitter: “…”
• Dreadful Musician: Whoever recorded the hilariously awful rendition of "Lavender's Blue" in this story. The singer was so bad that, when the submitter pointed this out to several employees, everyone burst out laughing at it.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: This US Navy machinist encounters this trope in the form of a Navy Captain. Due to the latter working as a staff officer for the Admiral staying on his ship, the Captain gained an ego where he saw himself as better than anyone below his rank, whom he saw as lazy idiots. As a result, he keeps shouting and pestering the machinist to fix a recently broken antenna that was damaged during a storm despite the machinist and his crew already at work trying to make a new antenna. Fed up with the Captain for bothering and shouting at him for a job that he could have done sooner if the Captain would stop bothering him (plus the Captain's Can't Take Criticism when the machinist calls out on his actions), the machinist reports to his superiors for help, which includes the Chief Petty Officer to handle it. In the end, the machinist manages to finish the job thanks to his superiors who stop the rude Captain and punish him by forcing him to wait in the mess hall, with the Chief Petty Officer planning to report the Captain's behavior to his boss.
• Drives Like Crazy: This mechanic drives the submitter's car for a bit to try and diagnose a problem, and gives them "the longest ten minutes of [their] life."
• Drugs Are Bad: Some bosses^note The "unfiltered" version of the latter makes it clear that this is the same submitter and the same boss, incidentally think all drugs are bad - even ones legally prescribed by a doctor and needed by the employees to survive.
• Drunk with Power: This acting manager for a pizza place. She takes over for the general manager (who is on medical leave due to cancer therapy), and almost immediately begins changing things around to her liking, cutting full-time employees' hours by more than half and basically being a helicopter manager to everyone. It gets so far out of hand that the GM has to personally intervene during her leave, and then return early to kick her out after all of the regular employees at the store file complaints. The submitter and the GM (who ultimately ends up cancer-free) both quit soon afterwards due to the company's poor handling of the incident, while the acting manager is later assigned to a new store of her own, which she runs to the ground in just three days.
• Duct Tape for Everything: This construction worker, "Dave", uses duct tape and a piece of wood to set his broken arm. Because his boss told him he wouldn't get paid if he went to the hospital (the story takes place many years ago, likely when labor laws didn't protect against this sort of thing) and he couldn't afford to lose the money.
• Dumb Blonde:
  • "I’m too blonde for my own good."
  • An inversion here. The cashier treats the blonde submitter like one initially, and then learns that she's a manager at a retail chain with a college degree.

E

• Eating the Eye Candy: This car dealership manager has quite an effect on coworkers and customers alike.
• Elephant in the Living Room: "I’m seven feet tall, dressed all in black, and smell like a barnyard. You’re really going to go with the ‘I didn’t notice you standing two feet from me’ excuse?"
• Embarrassing Tattoo: This tattoo artist invoked this trope when he decided to insult a client in to have a tattoo of a man's name covered up, on the grounds that getting a boyfriend's name tattooed on her was "stupid". It was a memorial tattoo of her father's name, gotten after his suicide... which turned out to have been his faked suicide so he could run off and live with his new family. The poster rips the guy a new one and goes elsewhere for her coverup.
• The Ending Changes Everything: This story in a recording studio focuses on the studio manager having locked the submitter and their friends into the studio at night, despite having been told to not start locking up because they were still there. The studio owner and his wife aren't very happy about the locked-in people and the resulting fire brigade appearance, including being reprimanded by them. They also aren't happy that this has resulted in them not being able to take a flight they had planned for that day — said flight turning out to have been Pan Am Flight 103, which crashed after a bomb on board exploded.
• Engineered Public Confession: This manager gets ph-owned.
  • These gaming store pranksters accidentally get one from a coworker who'd been letting his friend shoplift from the store on his shift.
• Enhance Button: This office manager thinks that 2D animations can be viewed from every angle.
• Enmity with an Object: "I hate you, you stupid shake machine!"
• Enraged by Idiocy:
  • The submitter of this story is autistic and admits that he "can get unreasonably upset if [he has] to repeat the same answer multiple times", which can happen when dealing with idiots who don't understand that he's given the answer. Unfortunately, such Pointy-Haired Boss-induced meltdowns have the potential to cause a medical emergency due to a heart condition that can send him into a gasping fit, which happens when one manager who doesn't understand that the solution to a problem they had is to tell their team not to perform the action that caused it.
  • This vet is incandescent with rage when an idiotic tech thought an immature puli was a neglected doodle-poo, resulting in the dog being treated without the owner's knowledge. Thankfully it just meant that the dog got an unnecessary haircut, but not only would this have had disastrous financial consequences had she been a show dog rather than just a pet^note a show dog's fur can take years to be ready for prime-time, meaning this haircut would have basically amounted to a Career-Ending Injury, hence why the vet is so quick to offer free treatment for life, the commenters point out that a stupid tech ordering unauthorized treatments has very nasty implications.
• Entertainingly Wrong: A gossipy coworker spreads the word that the submitter got married, because of her new ring... a cheap costume ring from a prize-inside bath bomb.
• Entitled Bastard: Not as common as in Not Always Right, but they still show up every now and then.
  • This waitress has a bad attitude and zero work ethic from the get-go, making the customers wait for an obscenely long time before their food and drinks are served. When the customers receive the bill, they are furious to discover that the waitress has written herself a $30 tip on the check. Needless to say, the customers flag down a manager, who gives them their meal at half price, and fires the waitress.
  • Another waitress, much like the one above, displays rudeness and incompetence to the submitter and their friends, and tries to justify it because her father is the owner. The more level-headed manager compensates the meal, but the group opts to leave without a new order. The snooty waitress then stops them, demanding a tip and throwing a tantrum when the submitter initially refuses. The now completely fed-up submitter then places a full water glass with a $10 bill inside of it upside down on the table, and dares the waitress to take it. The manager laughs hysterically and the waitress fumes as he leaves.
  • This apprentice tattoo artist thinks that he's above doing "stupid butterfly tattoos" and actually ruins the butterfly tattoo of the woman he was assigned, just because he's mad that he, an apprentice, doesn't have people lining up to allow him to do whatever he wants to their skin and has to take the jobs that his boss assigns him. Laser-Guided Karma promptly follows - the owner of the tattoo parlor fires him on the spot and spreads word of the incident to every other tattoo place in the city, essentially guaranteeing the former apprentice that he'll never get another apprenticeship. Not only that, but the owner presses charges against him after he throws a fit, and the client he essentially mutilated sues him and wins.
• Epic Fail:
  • The IT department here upgrades the email software for their company, but the hierarchy that they use is incredibly out of line with the actual hierarchy (for example, an HSE manager is stated to be a janitor, the submitter is listed as the finance director when they are attached from a different company, and the actual finance director is listed as an intern). The IT department simply blows off the issues of the rest of the company, stating that the new way is “better.” Unfortunately, with the new hierarchy, people are getting the wrong emails, and within an hour, the company shutters the new system, and fires half of the IT department.
  • The state of the Impossible Store, caused by the manager being both lazy and a thief. Grimy, a mess, nobody knows where anything is or how to do anything right, stolen goods (manager would mark shipments as damaged, then sell the stuff anyway for a discount) for sale instead of a clearance section, the Trash Room...
  • Whatever decision led to the hiring of this confirms team, who put every stereotypical Operator from India to shame with how horribly unprofessional they are. The company eventually has to hire back its old confirms team and have them ignore the Indian team to get anything done.
  • This technician is called in to fix a laptop and not only proves too incompetent to even keep the laptop's screws straight, but he somehow makes the computer unusable.
• Eskimos Aren't Real:
  • This man believes that the Nintendo GameCube never existed. Despite working at a video game store.
  • This clerk believes that Washington DC doesn't exist - or rather, that the only things there are government buildings and monuments, instead of a sizable and thriving city. This gets her in trouble when she tries to cut up the ID of a DC resident because she believes that it must be fake, since of course nobody who works for the government has chosen to live near their workplace instead of commuting from Maryland or Virginia every day.
  • Both the cashier and the manager in this story believe that the submitter is trying to scam them into giving a military discount (even though the submitter bluntly states that he is not military and thus ineligible) because he is in a military uniform and part of the DoD (Department of Defense), which the cashier and manager believe do not exist. Furthermore, their "proof" that the submitter is lying is their belief that the proper term is EoD (which does stand for Explosive Ordnance Disposal). It takes the owner, who is a close friend of the submitter, to set them straight on the meaning of DoD.
  • Weirdly enough, no one at this restaurant has heard of tartar sauce.
• Even Evil Has Standards: This grab bag of "Screwing with a scammer" tricks includes one where the OP pretends to be a child who inadvertently discovered his mother being unfaithful while her husband's at work. The scammer actually tells the "child" to “...call your daddy and tell him. That w*** deserves it!” before hanging up. As one commenter put it,
  [Didn't] just hang up but was like "I'm a scammer, but even that s**t is too immoral for me."
• Everyone Knows Morse: This disabled employee sure does... as does his CEO brother.
• Everything Is Racist:
  • This self-proclaimed "Social Justice Warrior" takes it up to eleven. Literally everything is (potentially) racist/sexist/ableist/whateverist to her. Rather hilarious as she tried to convince the janitor that he is being oppressed. The janitor (who, by the way, is not Hispanic as she assumes) just gives her a "What the hell are you talking about?" look, and tells her he willingly applied to be a janitor and he's quite content with that job, thank you very much.
  • Asking for fried chicken apparently makes you racist, too.
  • This worker gets fired and denied unemployment because apparently, acknowledging that Muslim workers are allowed to take breaks for their designated prayer times is discriminatory and unfairly drawing attention to Muslims. The unemployment agency isn't so amused when they hear what happened, and force the former employer to provide unemployment benefits to the fired worker until they can get a new job.
  • This worker is likewise told off by a manager for assuming some customers are Russian, even though said customers are speaking Russian, are wearing jackets that say "Russia" on the back, and are recognized by the worker as members of Russia's under-21 hockey team.
  • Promising to keep the manager "abreast" of company developments is assumed by a female coworker to be a sexual comment about her. Nobody buys her complaint, she throws a tantrum, breaks a wall and a potted plant, and gets fired for destruction of company property.
  • This attendee at a work meeting thinks that the phrase "falling into a black hole" is racist. The department head, trying not to laugh, points out that calling it an "African-American hole" would be a bit suspect, and when the first person accuses him of backpedaling, jokingly claims some of his best holes are black (and breaks down laughing). The complainant tries to take it to Human Resources, but, unsurprisingly, it's not upheld.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • This police officer stops the submitter as he believes she's either a car thief or an underage teenager with no driver's license. When she shows proof the car belongs to her father and that she's old enough to have a driver's license, rather than apologize for disturbing her, the police officer writes her a ticket for wasting his time! Thankfully, when she reported this to his superior, the superior tells her to ignore the ticket. Just before hanging up, the superior inadvertently reveals this was the fourth time that month that the police officer did something like that.
  • This homophobic worker gives a gay customer a cheap wedding ring rather than the expensive ring he ordered since she believes his marriage is "fake and cheap" and a real marriage is between a man and woman. The owner, disgusted with his worker's open bigotry and scamming a customer, fires the worker and gives the customer a new ring with the equivalent price.
  • This woman has a restraining order against the submitter's co-worker, and tries to get him fired by applying for jobs at the same places he works in hopes that it'll force the co-worker's bosses to fire him so they can hire her. And at the end of the story, it's revealed that she already has a stable job; she's applying to those other jobs just to ruin the co-worker's life. Thankfully, as it turns out, she may have voided her own restraining order by applying.
• Evil Laugh: Customers are giving strange looks.
• Evil Twin: If this story is to be believed, apparently they do exist in real life.
• Exact Words:
  • "Spell it however you want"?
  • "You SAID put the MOUSE over the icon!”
  • "We ARE open! I’M here doing paperwork.”
  • In an attempt to boost production (and his own bonus) the plant manager in this story decides to make Sunday work (hitherto strictly voluntary) mandatory. Specifically, he tells them, "If any of you choose not to come in on Sunday, don’t bother coming back on Monday!" Four of his staff — knowing full well it's a bluff since a) he can't afford to lose anyone and b) he hasn't the authority to change the Sunday work rule anyway — decide to interpret this as "you can take Monday off", which they do. The manager tries to order them back into work, only to be told next time he should say what he means. After a few similar incidents, the manager gets fired.
  • A bigoted manager refuses to learn an employee's new name after their gender transition. When the manager assigns a project to their dead name and ignores a request for clarification, the employee takes the opportunity to ignore the project, since they hadn't officially been assigned to it. HR takes the employee's side and the manager is forced to work forty hours in two days to get the project caught up.
• Excuse Question: When repeatedly bothered by a telemarketer, this submitter's father decides to see what happens when you repeatedly get one of these wrong.
• Executive Meddling:
  • invoked An executive at a museum forces volunteers for a virtual reality arcade to play one specific game that they really like. The problem? Not only is the game buggy, but it's a horror game about keeping your balance on a wiggly board over a sheer drop, and all of the volunteers are elderly. As a result, several of the elderly volunteers almost fall down and get hurt, others get disorientated, one poor man gets extremely distraught after playing the game, and the hapless museum employees end up getting the blame for having to make the volunteers play the game.
  • At a research and manufacturing company, productivity in the warehouse goes down as a result of a new facility opening and the sole worker's workload doubling. Rather than connect these obvious dots, the executives have a brainstorming meeting and decide that the worker must have started slacking off and watching movies on their computer, and use that logic to report the worker to HR.
• Expensive Glass of Crap: This is such a clear example that it provides the trope's page quote. At least the barkeep is more principled than the store owner.
• Expospeak Gag: The tech in this story, upon hearing that one of their printers is down again, asks for a new "AGM-114" for it. The submitter doesn't know what it is, but the IT supervisor does.
  Supervisor: What smarta** ordered a hellfire missile for the printers?!
• Extreme Omnivore: "...it was sitting in the garbage next to all the dirty dishes, it smells like death, and it has chicken blood and fat floating in it".