Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Not Always Working / Tropes F to L

Go To

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

Back to the main page

    open/close all folders 

    F 
  • Face Your Fears: This "dog-sitter" turns out to have a massive dog phobia. She thought being a dog-sitter would be a good way of getting over it. From what little we see of her, it doesn't seem to be working.
  • Failed a Spot Check: Now has its own page!
  • Failed Future Forecast: Amazingly subverted here. The employee is paranoid that they left the oven on and could potentially start a fire, but their older brother confirms everything is fine. Later, the microwave in the staff room suddenly catches on fire (due to the manager punching in an extra zero). The employee is in disbelief that they actually made a correct prediction, but not in the right place.
  • Failsafe Failure: OP admits in this story that the sprinklers and strobe lights should have kicked in in response to the fire long before they actually did, and that was being fixed as of time of writing, but that didn't make the lack of response from the security guards any less problematic; said lack of response is treated as a Failsafe Failure in its own right.
    "When automation fails, you are always supposed to be able to depend on those who are on-site with their boots on the ground.

    Not this time."
  • Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence:
    • Seems to be the logic behind this vegan worker throwing out everyone else's lunches for not being vegan, telling the submitter to never wear their leather jacket around her again, and demanding that the director throw out her leather purse, then trying to do it herself. (This last one gets her fired before her first day is over.)
    • This coworker really doesn't take well to the submitter wearing headphones, even if it's the only way he can actually concentrate on his work with everyone else always shouting. She complains about his music disrupting her despite the fact he didn't bring his music with him that day, and rather than admit he's not actually bothering her in any way, she then accuses him of listening to music over the Internet and wasting the company's bandwidth — even though the entire building's Internet connection had been down for two hours at that point, meaning that even if the submitter were listening to music, it wouldn't have been distracting because she does her work online.
    • This coworker's attitude to a snow-themed Disney movie daring to star a gay actor. "Why do [gay people] want to ruin everything by being in it?"
    • This co-worker complains to the manager about the submitter breathing. It would later turn out that the co-worker was under the effects of alcohol and drugs.
  • Felony Misdemeanor: This coworker throws a screaming fit when the submitter drinks soluble aspirin instead of gargling it and gets frustrated when nobody else in the workplace is bothered by it.
  • First-World Problems: This woman goes on about having manicures every three weeks, despite them costing $80 each time.
    "I've had to cut back on some other stuff, though. This economy and all. I've cut my maid service down to every 3 weeks instead of every 2, I cancelled my membership to the tanning salon, and I even downgraded my membership at the fitness center."
  • Food as Bribe: It works in getting employees to work overtime when the promise of extra money fails.
  • A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: This employer seems never to have learned how to save money properly. Small wonder the potential employee simply walked out without filling out an application.
  • For Inconvenience, Press "1": A few cases.
    • Here's why using this trope for emergency services is a bad idea. At the very least, if you're going to use an automated system for emergency services, make sure it works properly.
    • This oddball option in a phone menu (sadly, it doesn't exist nowadays).
  • Freudian Slip: "Hi, welcome to [store]. How can I lie to you today?"
  • From Bad to Worse:
    • Could practically be the subtitle for this story as the submitter and their coworkers uncover more and more ways the previous store manager had been screwing over customers, their own employees, and the company.
    • This job interview for the role of 'Operations Manager'. It starts 45 minutes late, during which time the applicant notices that everybody in the office looks miserable. The interview itself kicks off with some illegal personal questions, which lead into the interviewer stating that they won't hire anyone with children, before leading into the big turnoffs, that of an expected 100-hour work week and 'correcting' the job listing's salary down from $52,000 to $22,000. After the interview, as a condition on being hired, the hiring manager wants the applicant to not only sign a contract promising the aforementioned 100-hour work week and sleeping in the office if required, but also write a three page essay on "how awesome it would be to work [there]", seemingly under the assumption that the applicant is so desperate for a job they'll do anything. The applicant runs for the hills.
    • This story has the submitter taking over after another IT temp worker called "Joe," who is missed by the other workers, only for it to turn out that he had skeleton after skeleton in his closet. To begin with, the submitter discovers that Joe was stealing computers from the office by telling the other workers they were broken and had to be replaced. Then the submitter discovers a computer at work that Joe was unable to take with him and finds out Joe was using it as a digital Porn Stash. Then Joe, being unable to hack it elsewhere, tries to get his old position back, and on finding the submitter has it, tries pestering the submitter to quit, only to be told to back off by the temp agency. Joe ignores this and gets the police sicced on him, which in turn leads to the revelation that Joe was a suspected drug dealer, and the computer with the porn turns out to also contain evidence of this. By the end of the story, the FBI has confiscated the computer as evidence and Joe is serving a five-year prison sentence.
  • The "Fun" in "Funeral": Used verbatim in the title of this story because a coworker accidentally told someone who'd be missing work for a funeral to "have fun".

    G 

    H 
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In-Universe, these employees stopped using the term "bus number" after one of their workers was actually hit by a bus.
  • Hate Sink: This manager is referred to as "Captain Evil," and seems to be every Mean Boss from Not Always Working rolled into one. Among her rap sheet is bigotry, sexual harassment, fraud, firing people for being chronically ill, trans, or non-binary, overworking her subordinates, losing clients due to her incompetence and dishonesty, blaming the submitter for everything wrong, and infidelity.
  • Have a Gay Old Time: Mentioned by name in the title of this story in which OP is supposed to meet with an employee named Gay, and when someone comes to get him, asks them if they're Gay. The employee mistakenly assumes they have been Mistaken for Gay (or perhaps outed, their sexual orientation is never specified) when OP really just wants to know if they've found the person they're supposed to meet.
  • Head Desk: The conclusion of this story.
  • He Knows Too Much: The motivation behind this person being let go by the company. The boss isn't particularly smart about the way he handled the situation, though — for starters, assuming that having the ability to do damage to the company automatically means having the willingness to go through with it, and responding by punishing the employee for having that ability in the first case, thus giving the employee as many reasons to go through with it as possible.
  • Henpecked Husband: When a worker's supervisor calls the worker's house to ask where he is, his wife screams at and cusses out the supervisor for bugging her. When the worker is informed about the call, he is horrified for what's waiting for him when he gets home. The submitter expresses hope that the worker left his wife.
  • Heroic BSoD:
    • In this story, the manager - who is noted as not being at all bigoted - has a minor mental breakdown when one of his employees has to spell out that the difference he can't work out about a regular guest is that the guest has gone through a gender transition since their last visit, and has to subsequently be repeatedly corrected by the employee when he can't wrap his mind around the change. To his credit, he has a Jerkass Realization when he gets home and counts himself very lucky that he didn't have his breakdown within earshot of the guest.
    • This new hire read the part in the employee handbook about a driver's license being the best example of ID for restricted purchases and obediently blanked out on any other acceptable form of ID, a problem when he comes to a customer who is blind and doesn't have a driving license. He goes into a BSOD when a correction is given to him by his training supervisor, still doesn't get it, and is noted to not last much longer afterwards.
  • High Turnover Rate: A number of stories have jobs where malicious, incompetent, or outright dangerous management means that no one stays at the job for long.
  • Historical Longevity Joke: While not the focus of this story, the submitter mentally makes such a joke about the elderly nurse who led his treatment once he finally received it, saying she probably treated Odin after he sacrificed his eye.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • A Jewish coworker who steals the submitter's lunch without asking gets his comeuppance when he ignores her warning that the food he just stole and ate from her contains pork. Since then, he no longer steals her lunch.
    • A female coworker who expects free food to be given to her gets a nasty surprise when she steals and eats one worker's jerky and learns too late that it's very spicy.
    • This telemarketer selling warranties for car parts refuses to reveal which car of the submitter's is supposedly about to lose its warranty, by claiming "security purposes".note  The submitter, being Genre Savvy, forces the conversation into an endless loop by telling her that he can't help her because of security purposes, until the telemarketer gives up.
    • This boss promotes a new employee who is married rather than the single experienced employee because she believes married employees are more responsible than single employees. The boss later got fired after she got a divorce.
    • This worker greedily demands to be paid at a higher rate, "or I quit". The boss and coworkers accept his resignation at face value.
    • This incompetent worker's plan to get his supervisor fired for sexual harassment that never happened goes through smoothly... until HR investigates the claim and discovers from CCTV footage that it was bogus. Both the worker and his father (the manager who fired the supervisor) are subsequently fired for lying to HR.
    • A classic example here. When a rival store who won the competition accuses the submitter's store of cheating, an investigation reveals that the rival store was the one cheating.
    • A sports bar owner demands that her staff come in for a staff meeting in the middle of a major snowstorm, threatening to fire anyone who doesn't attend. First the manager (the submitter) quits when the owner attempts to write them up for being less than a minute late and questioning her authority. Then, when the owner makes good on her threat and fires the fifteen people who didn't show up, the cook questions her and gets fired as well, leaving the bar with insufficient staff to open. Then those who were fired win a lawsuit against her for unlawful dismissal, and on top of that the cook points out that nobody got paid to attend the meeting, which gets the Department of Labor interested. As a result, the bar closes permanently, and as the submitter heard it, the owner is forced to sell possessions and leave her house to cover all the legal fees and fines.
    • In an attempt to stiff the submitter on a redundancy payout (in the hope they'd put in their own notice of resignation), this company forgets to give them notice of redundancy until the last day, resulting in them having to pay the submitter an additional month's wages after they leave.
    • The head of a small department complains that IT took too long to get their system back up after a power failure, when IT had many more higher priority systems to work on first. The only problem? While previously IT Support was public sector, it had recently become private sector. All the complaint does is alert the higher-ups that the department is still receiving free support. In their attempt to have a power trip over IT, they managed to turn a free service into a six-figure annual payment.
    • A new manager decides to have a power trip over his new employees, calling them all in for an 8am meeting (that ends up just being essentially the manager patting himself on the back for nine hours about the work he did at his last job). All his employees... who live all over the state, and who proceed to rack up a $6,000 budget hole in the form of overtime and food/travel/habitation expenses in order to attend. The manager only lasts six months before going back to his old job.
    • A human resources employee is running a scheme with a relative of theirs and two other people to let them collect wages for doing no work in a warehouse, by clocking in and out but disappearing for the rest of the shift in the general bustle of the shift change. They get away for this for over two years... until the relative when running late for the clock-in bypasses a safety rope, gets brushed by a forklift, and insists on a safety report, the resulting investigation of which unravels the whole thing.
    • The submitter of this story starts writing restaurant recipes in a "pseudo-cookbook" to make their job easier, which other chefs begin using. Eventually, the submitter's book becomes the restaurant's de facto official recipe book. Once the submitter becomes qualified to be a chef, management decides they don't want to pay the extra expense for them, and contrives an excuse to fire them. The submitter responds by taking their pseudo-cookbook with them as they move to a better-paying job at another restaurant. Without the submitter's book, the first restaurant's food quality declines, leading to complaints, a haemorrhaging of customers to the submitter's new restaurant, investors getting scared away, and eventually the majority of the kitchen staff quitting. Management at the old restaurant tries begging the submitter to come back to no avail.
  • Holier Than Thou: This night manager uses Bible verses to justify his very incorrect and jerkish actions. This act gets him fired when he steals from the store under the belief that he shouldn't follow Man's Law since he follows God's Laws.
  • Hollywood Voodoo: At least one woman out there has claimed to have been cursed by a Haitian witch on her job application.
  • Honest John's Dealership: Either this guy doesn't know how to do his job, or he's a scammer.
  • Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: She really does need the extra-long bed.
  • Humiliation Conga:
    • One boy who uses the computer in his school pool's office to sext with his girlfriend on Facebook, being 45 minutes late for his lifeguard shift as a result, gets one when he's found out.
    (...when our boss returned he was fired. It gets better: he was expelled for using the school’s computers for “illicit activities.” Then his girlfriend dumped him. Then his mother made him come and apologize!)
    • This apprentice tattoo artist intentionally ruins a client's tattoo because he thinks that he's above doing silly butterfly tattoos and that he should be able to do whatever he wants. The aftermath? The submitter, who owns the shop, fires him and spreads word of the incident to every tattoo parlor in the city, essentially making the former apprentice a Persona Non Grata in the industry. Then charges are pressed against him after he throws a tantrum. To top it all off, the client he essentially mutilated sues him, and wins.
  • Hurricane of Puns: With a flower theme.
  • Hypocritical Humor:
    • This manager castigates an employee for having water at their register (which isn't against the rules), then leaves with her own stash of soda and food (which is).
    • An example involving someone refusing to do their job while reading the site itself.
    • Two preachy identical twins bug an atheist. Turns out at least one of the twins doesn't practice what he preaches.
    • This cashier accuses the submitter and her daughter of being Grammar Nazis by giving them grief over their choice of words in trying to order popcorn.
    • This manager chews out his employees for being late, even though they were held up by construction. When the manager's boss points out that the manager was late too, the manager says that he shouldn't be accountable for that, because there was traffic.
    • “What you are is geeks.” “Says the man who did not ask me to explain the reference.”
    • A regional store manager wonders why a local manager is leaving. When an employee tries to explain using the regional manager's daughter as an example, saying that there is no way either of them went to college to work at a dead-end job, the regional manager says that their daughter wouldn't stand for that job, but still doesn't understand why the local manager wouldn't stand for it either.
      • The exact same (lack of) logic is demonstrated by this boss. Parking lot needs its snow shoveled, but there's a sketchy-looking man rooting through their trash nearby. When asked if he would let his fifteen-year-old daughter shovel snow by herself in this situation, the boss says "of course not". A fifteen-year-old employee wanting someone else to help her just in case, though? She's just being lazy for no reason!
    • "My boyfriend and I had a good laugh about being ignored repeatedly by a man explaining how important good customer service is."
    • A cashier gives a mother and her baby daughter a hard time because she's under the WIC program, until the cashier's twin sister points out how she had a son during high school and had to have their parents help her out temporarily.
    • This cashier accuses a customer of lying to get something for free, going so far as to try to guilt-trip her with "Jesus is watching you lie", when the whole reason the customer is asking for a replacement in the first place is because the cashier lied about there not being any kiwi or kiwi flavoring in their smoothie. Between this and literally telling the customer to "fuck off", she isn't a cashier anymore by story's end.
    • This barista puts a small cappuccino in a medium cup despite the submitter asking him to put it in a small cup, cannot for the life of him understand what the submitter is talking about when they ask to move it to a small cup... and then, when the submitter reaches behind the counter to grab a small cup and pour the cappuccino into it themselves, has the gall to call them an idiot. The next customer in line loudly asks for someone else to serve them in response, and the submitter has since then only ever seen that worker cleaning tables, never behind the counter.
    • This coworker "doesn't believe" in getting fireworks for a holiday because it's just setting money on fire and watching it go up in smoke. The poster points out that the coworker in question is a pack-a-day smoker.
    • This bartender adamantly refuses to serve patrons who are under the age of 25, even though the bartender himself is only 15 and has implied to have had drinks himselfnote .
    • This employee ribs on another employee for not understanding a quote from Mean Girls... only to almost immediately afterward stare blankly in confusion at a customer who also quotes the movie.

    I 
  • I Am Spartacus: After a male coworker is ordered to put on a beard net for his stubble, the female submitter argues that her eyebrow hairs are just as likely to fall into the food, and they're not requiring one of her, so the coworker should be fine. Management insists, so the female worker also puts on a beard net, causing customers to ridicule the management for requiring a woman and a man with no beard to wear beard nets.
  • I Can't Hear You: Sounds like this employee has a hearing problem.
  • I Have to Go Iron My Dog:
    • This cashier feigns excuses for not wanting to do a refund, including "maybe it's got a corset type style" (which it doesn't) and "the computer isn't working" while blatantly messing around with the POS. This then leads to "I can’t give you a refund because the IT guy is driving," after which the computer miraculously starts working again to service the next customers in line.
    • This customer encounters this trope too: after bringing a travel coffee mug into a store, they are asked to leave it with the worker so that it doesn't spill on the clothing. When the customer asks for their cup back, the worker pretends to believe that they're asking whether the store sells coffee, denies knowledge of said cup, then awkwardly says "I have to go see something" after the customer points out that the cup is right behind them.
    • This manager is helping a "skinny blonde girl" open her account. After realizing that the girl is majoring in chemistry and physics, the manager says, “I didn’t expect you to say that. I expected something fluffy like interior decorating or fashion design. If you could excuse me for a second, I, uh, need to go get something from the back." Another manager takes over for her.
  • I Know Mortal Kombat:
    "Except when I play online; I get ganked a lot online."
  • I Need a Freaking Drink: "Look, I'm in my late sixties and I work in retail. Right about now, I'd say alcohol is the least of my concerns. Now hit me, barkeep!"
  • I Never Said It Was Poison: In this story, the submitter and her friend notice that money keeps disappearing from their houses after their cleaner visits. When the friend's husband catches the cleaner stealing, the submitter confronts her about it, which she denies doing, but she offers to give her half of what was stolen, which amounts to $65. The submitter states that she never said how much was missing. The cleaner is promptly fired.
  • I'll Take Two Beers Too: This waiter assumes the trope is in effect, when it's actually a case of one person ordering for all.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: How do you fillet a person?
  • Implausible Deniability: This company rep tries to excuse being beyond useless at helping a customer by telling them said company does not have email. To repeat: they try to tell the customer that an international provider of telecommunications, which had already sent that customer multiple emails, does not have inter-office email.
    • This coworker not only denies stealing the OP’s phone when said phone is in his hand, but goes so far as to claim that OP framed him when she proves it’s her phone.
  • Improbably Predictable: A former telemarketer encounters another telemarketer working from the same script he used at his old job. So he joins in.
  • Incompetence, Inc.:
    • This story,note  to make a very long story short, involves a group of retail store managers visiting a store that was completely run into the ground by a store manager who'd slacked off and stolen from the store, before quitting just before the new regional manager came in to check on her. She leaves behind (for the visiting managers to deal with) a filthy disaster area of a grocery store full of trash, months-old build-up of gunk, unboxed merchandise left in odd places, and employees who do not actually know how to do their jobs in ways that aren't how the manager did things, some resisting attempts to learn how to do their jobs the right way (e.g. no taking extra breaks during lulls in the day, always taking out the garbage to the dumpster instead of the Trash Room) to the point of getting in fights with the visiting managers and/or quitting. It's telling that amongst NAW commenters, the word "Trash Room" has become a euphemism for businesses that embody this trope.
    • For a more localized example, the upper management of this bank tried to outsource their confirms department to India, getting a team that was probably the most unprofessional group of workers possible - highlights include leaving for lunch in the middle of training, never using the bank's system, ignoring work orders unless they came specifically from the London office, making an incredible amount of errors and refusing to fix them, not answering the phones because everyone in the office went on break without warning, blowing off customers on the phone for personal conversations, swearing in Hindi and English to people who spoke both languages, regularly making serious breaches of regulation by sending transaction lists to every counterparty, and generally being so awful that customers thought they were scammers impersonating the bank. Eventually, the status quo settles down as follows: The original confirms department receives all requests, forwards them to India, and then does the work themselves as before, immediately deleting the Indian office's response when it inevitably comes in a week late and problem-riddled - which means management sees the Indian office as a success, since as far as they can see their responses are no longer coming in more than a week late. Fittingly enough, the story is entitled 'Why do we even HAVE that team?'
    • The submitter's boyfriend seems to be the Only Sane Man at this burger restaurant, where most of the 'employees' are kids and friends of the owners and the only other adult employee 'called out sick' when they actually just got stoned and forgot they were working that night. When the owner attempts to punish the boyfriend for not picking up that shift (it was their first day off for over a month, following three weeks straight of overtime) they quit. When customers start asking where he went, the owners attempt to excuse this by claiming they had to fire him for stealing from them - only to be forced to close four months later when the person they hired to replace him actually did rob them blind, including stealing the owners' car.
    • A fast food worker agrees to come in on their day off because the restaurant needs help. The help in question is required because nearly two full shifts failed to go to work because they were hung over, including the opening manager. After doing a once-over with the frazzled evening shift manager, during which none of the other workers come in, the eventual conclusion is that two people is not enough to make actually opening the restaurant that evening worth it (since they'd missed the opening and lunch rushes, and it would take so long for just the two of them to get stuff ready they'd miss the evening rush too). Subsequently almost the entire staff is fired and replaced.
    • This restaurant is another example. It gets to the point where the submitter is told the steak they ordered has been 86'd because the kitchen staff was unable to make it properly – after three attempts. And then the staff loses the submitter's ticket, causing them and their girlfriend to give up and find somewhere else.
    • This bank's response to communication issues in their contract loans department, caused by them physically moving the more senior employees into separate offices, is to hire another layer of middlemen, and then to do that again when they open more offices for the managers and bump everybody up a level to fill the space. From its original setup of managers and floor workers working in the same area, it reaches the point where in order to refer a question to a manager a floor worker needs to talk to an associate on the floor, who talks to a controller in the closed offices on the floor, who talks to a team leader on the executive floor above, who talks to a supervisor in the executive building across town, who talks to the manager in the executive suite in the executive building across town. The only thing that stops this from getting any worse is the 2008 financial crash, which causes all of the floor workers to become redundant (but, as the submitter notes, as far as they're aware all of the more senior levels retained their jobs being middlemen for a department that no longer existed).
    • In this story,note  an ISP is taken over by an owner who only bought it just to muck around with the company so he could resell it at a profit, and launches a relocation to a new business park that no one wants to commute to. This loses the company most of its tech support staff, and their replacements are hired based on drawing exercises to determine their "passion" for the job, and are utterly incompetent. It gets to the point where the accounting department essentially does the tech support department's jobs. Then they utterly botch their creation of a tech support website that buries a much-needed phone number deep in the site, and charges the company for every click. By the time the story has ended, the company's reputation has gone from one of the top ISPs in the country to so bad that when the owner does sell the company brand to a competitor, the brand is so tarnished that it can't be used.
    • This video game store slowly gets driven into the ground by a series of decisions that cut off the store's income streams one by one – including not selling new games – in the belief it will increase turnover.
    • This pizzeria has terrible managers who "keep hiring anyone with a pulse regardless of how many brain cells are between their ears", resulting in a High Turnover Rate because these employees keep having to be fired. When this unsurprisingly results in staffing problems, the store manager alienates the one competent employee by cancelling time off for a spring break vacation in California that had been approved months ago, resulting in them, previously willing to put up with the incompetence because they're planning to move away for college soon, giving their two-week notice.
    • This dog grooming salon had recently been bought out, and apart from the submitter, just about all the staff are rather apathetic. The groomer puts a dog that has bad matting into the tub after being told not to and does only the bare minimum amount to make it look like he's done a good job. The dog winds up going home with still quite a bit of matting despite the owner being charged full price with extra. And management doesn't care so long as they make money.
    • This hotel has a severe staff shortage caused by the manager refusing to hire new staff, and the owner won't let the manager fire anyone because of the staff shortage, leading to it being a dumping ground for lazy employees who know they can't be fired. The submitter, who's supposed to only be a desk clerk, is on laundry and breakfast duty and has to clean any rooms that weren't cleaned either if housekeepers lied about cleaning a room or it led to the hotel being overbooked, leading to them having to spend their time off recovering from overworking. The hotel is also prone to do spectacularly incompetent things, to the point where the submitter remarks that the hotel staff "always [seems] to go out of their way to surprise [them] with new, exciting BS" whenever they think the incompetence has reached its limit.

      The worst is the hotel failing to register most reservations for a large wedding party even though the reservation was placed four months prior and double-booking one of the three rooms whose reservation was entered properly, resulting in the bride walking in on a gay couple having sex. This latest display of abject incompetence leads to the submitter looking for a new job, which they get almost immediately, and they don't give their two weeks' notice because anyone who does is immediately removed from the schedule, leading to the manager being blindsided when they quit.
    • Corporate at this store is implied to be this. For starters, they put a manager with only a month of retail experience who's only worked at a much smaller branch with very little customer interactions as a substitute manager at a much larger store. Not only does the new manager prove to be hopelessly out of her depth, but she throws an actual temper tantrum at an elderly customer with dementia before manhandling them out of the store – during an event in partnership with a dementia charity! Human Resources then completely botches their response to this incident by taking the new manager's side and making her substitute position permanent. It's only when half the staff prepares to Resign in Protest, the dementia charity moves their event elsewhere, and the store's reputation plummets that HR admits they made a mistake and the new manager agrees to leave.
    • This scrubs store is a train wreck of mismanagement (or more often than not, no management) during the 2008 recession. For starters, the store has three managers in a row quit within days of each other after being accused of theft just as the submitter is being hired, meaning it takes a while for them to get into the system. After this, the store is left with four employees with no management, no idea what to do, no inventory, and an area manager who hardly ever shows up and can never be reached. The store literally can barely keep the lights on. Then the area manager gives them a fifth employee… who Steals From the Till every day to pay for lunch until being caught and fired, though not before showing up to work one day with tuberculosis. Then, finally the store is given a new manager… who turns out to be a Nepotism hire who then brings in more nepotism hires and forces the four existing workers to quit by giving them only four hours and telling them that they'd have to “work harder to earn the privilege of getting more hours.”
      I learned a lot of bitter lessons from that job.
    • This bar is overdue for a visit from Jon Taffer. When the submitter and her husband visit, they see a very drunk man be let in by the bouncer, who sees a bunch of equally drunk friends, who reveal that they bribed their way in. The submitter and her husband then find out that the pool table doesn't work, prompting the drunk guy to try and "help," throwing them a number of racist and ableist slurs along the way. When the submitter and her husband try to get the bouncer to throw the drunk out, he refuses. Then the waiter throws them out for "being disruptive" on instruction from the drunk guy, who turns out to be the bar's owner.
    • This department store botches up the training process for the submitter – a new hire at the store. First the department manager mistakes the new hire for a floater and reschedules the employee that was supposed to train them for another shift. Then when the submitter comes in, the department manager offers to train her… and then forgets about her and goes to a meeting, forcing the submitter to wait by a register telling customers that she can't help them. The confused submitter keeps coming back to the cash office lady, who calls someone called Betty, who tells them that they don't have enough people in the store, and as long as the department manager is busy, no one can help the submitter. By this point, the submitter has decided she no longer wants to work there and resigns.
    • This department store takes staffing problems to the extreme, as the submitter and other customers find no one manning the cash registers, and nobody on the floor either. Eventually, they just throw their items in a pile and leave.
      The very worst customer service is not being there to take the customer’s money.
    • This company completely botches its preparation for Y2K.
    • This theatre apparently has a fire in its projector room, destroying the film.note  When the teenaged submitter and their friend run and fetch an employee, the employee is skeptical at first, thinking they're trying to sneak into a R-rated feature. Eventually, the lights in the theatre switch on, but no alarm is raised, and no announcement is made about whether to evacuate or if refunds will be issued. When the submitter and their friend ask another employee about a comped ticket to a showing of the same movie in another theatre, they are refused, with the employee apparently not even knowing about the 'fire.' When the submitter returned from college a couple years later, the theatre had gone out of business.
  • Innocently Insensitive: A client at a new office mistakes the kitchen for the (overweight) submitter's office, and is rather embarrassed once she realizes what she said and implied. Luckily, the submitter is more amused than angry.
  • Insane Troll Logic: Far, far too many examples to list even close to exhaustively, but here goes:
    • "...I really can't argue with that."
    • This nurse apparently thinks that being calm while donating blood means that the donor obviously has a sexual fetish for it. Both her fellow nurse and the donor are extremely confused. To compound the Insane Troll Logic, you would think you would want the person who likes to give blood to have every reason to do so!
    • This cashier can't even keep a consistent excuse for refusing to take a return for more than thirty seconds.
    • This user wonders why IT is closing his support ticket after he basically refuses to let IT actually do anything to fix his problem.
    • This boss tries to blame an ex-intern with whom she didn't get along for making an hours-long call on her home phone to Southeast Asia that resulted in a massive phone bill. It was clearly just a coincidence that the boss's cleaning lady's temp replacement had family there, and had a phone that could receive but not make calls.
    • This boss basically cuts out every single source of income his store could possibly have, and then expects to make more sales than before. The situation is effectively a kind of Disaster Dominoes:
      • He interdicts allowing free playing of anything because it tempts parents to leave kids there, and he doesn't want to be an ad hoc babysitter. This is somehow more important than the possibility of the kids (and other on-the-fence customers) deciding the games are worth buying.
      • After sales wind up falling to half because of this (and a good chunk of the work force is jettisoned), he ends the weekly game tournaments because he doesn't want to have to pay for more than one employee on the floor at a time, even though said tournaments bring in more money in 2 hours than the normal sales on any other day. It's worth noting that he doesn't connect ending the free game tryouts with the business decline.
      • At the same time, he stops getting new releases, and interdicts trading old games for new, because he's apparently afraid that the new stuff is likely to just sit there.
      • Finally (after forbidding even bathroom breaks because, since he refuses to pay for more than one employee on the floor at a time, they'd require the store to be locked entirely for the duration), he stops console repairs because he thinks ordering the parts ahead of schedule is a risk of them just sitting around! In short, he effectively dismisses the value of any source of income besides people expressly looking to buy old games. No surprise that that one basket wasn't enough to keep the store afloat.
    • This store is constantly short on staff because the manager keeps firing people for no reason whatsoever.
    • "The sun ISN’T some magic ball of life giving heat. The sun is the eye of a malevolent God. It gazes down upon us like a physical presence, weighing us down and making everything worse. It makes us cold in the winter, it makes us hot in the summer, it blinds us as we drive, and agitates the air around us making the air thicker and unpleasant.”
    • This cashier at a thrift store seems to be under the belief that thrift stores are solely for poor people, accusing the submitter of "stealing" a fancy ball gown because she wants to use it for a costume. The manager that comes to help scolds the cashier for her nonexistent logic before checking the submitter out himself. The cashier ends up continuing her inane activities, and ends up getting fired for attempting to get a young boy arrested for wanting to buy a stuffed animal because he didn't look “poor” enough.
    • This fast food cashier refuses to honor the submitter's coupon, stating that it cannot be used with any offer, including the one that the coupon is for. Worse yet, the manager backs up her reasoning, at which point the submitter gives up and leaves. Fortunately, an out-of-town location honors the coupon without question.
    • According to this pizza place, it's perfectly normal to cancel customers' orders without telling them when things get too busy, but it's okay, because they don't charge them.
    • Why would you display pretzels (albeit plastic ones) if you don't intend on selling them in-store?
    • This employee thinks that just because the submitter's son touched a bottle of beer, he thinks that it warrants carding the kid because he handled it. The epilogue states that if the employee was explicitly told that the submitter was buying alcohol for her kid, only then he could refuse the sale.
    • The client called to ask which number to put on their new bank cards, so I gave them the number from my card for the credit union. Who cares if that's not the company they bank with? They asked for a number and I gave them a number!
    • The OP here is nearly written up because after a "thorough investigation" by HR, a coworker took medication (later noted to be ibuprofen) and had an allergic reaction, while the OP was on vacation. The OP objects, for the following reasons:
      • The medication was in a lockbox inside the OP’s desk in the OP’s office. The office was locked, and the three keys that could unlock the door were in possession of the OP, the building owner, and the janitor, meaning in order to get inside the office, the coworker would have had to either break in or enter the office while it was being cleaned.
      • The desk was also locked, and the only keys that could have unlocked the desk drawer were in the possession of the OP, meaning that she would have either had to break into the desk or find a key that nobody knew about.
      • The only keys to the lockbox itself were also in the OP’s possession, meaning that the coworker would have needed to break in or have a copy of the lockbox key, which is almost impossible, given that the only two keys to the lockbox were in OP’s possession.
      • The coworker had multiple times noted to be allergic to ibuprofen, which means that she took a drug she knew she was allergic to, and lied to HR that she didn’t know about the allergy.
      • After talking to HR and getting out of the writeup, the OP checked their office and found no evidence of tampering, with every pill in the lockbox accounted for.
    • This woman reads some work advice online after being fired and then turns up to work the next day anyway under the belief that she cannot be fired if she doesn't accept the termination (the papers to which she'd already signed). Security nearly has to drag her out.
    • This bigoted cashier finds out that the submitter previously had their name changed. She then decides that only two types of people get their name changed: those in Witness Protection and transgender people, and since the submitter cannot admit to being in Witness Protection they must therefore be transgender (and then 'outs' them to anyone who will listen). The hate subsequently gets her suspended, while most of her coworkers weren't paying her too much attention anyway.
    • This company fires the submitter because they abruptly decided they no longer wanted to pay the worker what they wanted. The submitter was working there for free.
    • This tech support employee comes to the utterly bizarre conclusion that the reason the submitter mother's garage door is randomly opening and closing is because there are tarantulas in the wires...as in they're physically inside the wires and chewing through them to try to get out, and this is what is making the door open and close randomly. The kicker is that this was apparently the only solution the tech support employee could come up with, as she gives up trying to solve the problem entirely after the submitter's mother (after sitting in baffled silence for a moment) goes over the reasons why this couldn't possibly be why her door was opening and closing randomly.
    • This boss's justification for giving the submitter a promotion but not a raise:
      Boss: You see, the more money you make, the more you spend. I want to save you from this terrible vicious circle.
    • This new hire sees a sign that says anything on the table is up for grabs. So she takes food that belonged to other workers, then puts it on the table before eating it. She's utterly baffled when the submitter tells her that isn't how it works.
  • Insignia Rip-Off Ritual: Happens to this waiter, after his boss catches him lying about a customer throwing a tantrum.
  • Insistent Terminology: "IT'S SODA!"
  • I Reject Your Reality:
    • Here. A cashier at a department store insists that they don't take the card the OP is offering — which is a $100 gift card for said store. They call a manager, who is also adamant that they don't take it. After running the card, the manager triumphantly declares that it didn't cover the sale — which is true, not because they don't take the card but because the amount was for $101.62, and there is still $1.62 to pay. The OP, increasingly annoyed, pays the remainder in cash and insists they type it in, hit cash and see what happens. Of course, the register promptly acknowledges the transaction and provides a receipt, to the astonished disbelief of both the manager and cashier, who are seemingly unable to process the fact that, yes, you can pay for goods at their store with one of the store's own gift cards.
    • A worker at a lab claims that a residue bin does not have a lid (it's for biohazard waste, so can't be collected without one), claiming it's a square bin. It isn't; it's round. She then claims that none of the round lids fit it. The poster promptly proves otherwise by fitting a round lid on it, pointing out that all of the round lids fit all the round bins. She then starts repeatedly insisting "That is not its lid!" even as the poster is carrying away the closed bin for proper disposal.
    • This Truck Salesman refuses to accept he's not a good salesman as he always believe he's perfect and never does wrong in his mind and ignores the many mistakes he made. It got to the point he refuses to do his business mileage records as part of the UK's new road tax laws and wants to do it the old way - much to the annoyance of his boss, who keeps telling the salesman he cannot do his road taxes the old way, but must instead do them the new way as stated by law. This would come back to bite him years later when he got in trouble with the tax authorities for not submitting his mileage records.
    • A pest control employee speaks to a church's office manager (the submitter) prior to him coming to spray for bugs. When he arrives, though, the man swears up and down and all around that he spoke to a different, older office manager before, despite the submitter telling him at length multiple times that she is the person he spoke to before and is the church's only office manager, having been so for years. He's so convinced of this that after a certain point the submitter even wonders for a fleeting moment if the church really did have a second office manager she didn't know about.
    • This woman refuses to accept that she's been fired, having apparently interpreted some already dubious online advice that said "YOU'RE in charge, not them" to mean that she could just reject her termination letter and keep on earning a paycheque with them.
    • This worker throws her entire workplace's documentation into disarray because she was responsible for typing up handwritten reports, and she was abusing the spellcheck program's 'Add to Dictionary' function because she was convinced that her (terrible) spelling was right and the computer was wrong.
  • Ironic Echo:
    • "That was worth it for the look on your faces."
    • "It's nothing personal."
    • "Be nice."
    • "Ain't my problem."
    • In this story, an unfriendly guy takes an inexplicable dislike to the submitter and constantly makes snide comments at their expense, and the management does nothing to get him off their back while giving them the non-advice "You'll figure it out." Eventually, the situation escalates to the point where the unfriendly guy takes an innocuous question as an excuse to blow up at them and falsely accuse them of blowing up at him, and the management still refuses to intervene and gives the submitter the same non-advice. The submitter quits on the spot, and when the managers ask who's going to do their job if they leave without notice, the submitter throws their words back at them: "I'm sure you'll figure it out."
  • Is This Thing Still On?:
    • When putting someone on hold, make sure they really are. And always mind what you say.
    • Another example involving a hold button mishap. At least this time they were insulting other employees, not the customer.
    • "You're not on mute."
    • "I was tempted to wait a few seconds more before I calmly revealed to them that every single employee and customer in the store was now privy to their dirty conversation."
    • A much sillier example where the submitter and their friends realize that they can hear an employee fussing at and joking with another employee through a drive-thru speaker at a coffee shop adjacent to the restaurant they're eating at because she forgot to turn her headset off.
    • In this story, a visiting manager accidentally sets his walkie-talkie to broadcast to the whole staff while he uses the men's room.
  • It Makes Sense in Context: This submitter runs headlong into this trope.
    Submitter (on phone with client): “That makes so much sense. So, it’s not just savages and psychopaths that indulge in cannibalism?”
    […]
    Boss: *sticking her head out of her office* “I’m sure there’s context for that, but I’m not sure I want to know it, [Submitter]. I’m just glad I already had lunch.”
  • It's All About Me: As can be found on their own page.

    J–K 
  • Jeopardy! Thinking Music: Used by this father to thwart a telemarketer.
  • Jerkass: Just like sister site Not Always Right, Not Always Working has more than a few jerks – now to be seen on their own page.
  • Joke of the Butt: Causes this new cashier to burst out laughing in front of a confused customer when some Land-O-Lakes branded butter she just scanned shows up on the store's register as "LOL BUTT".
  • Jumping-to-Conclusions Diagnosis: This story involves a group of co-workers in which one has lacked a sense of smell since birth. When it comes up in a conversation taking place during the COVID-19 Pandemic, one of the people listening gets the idea that the person has the virus and is hiding their other symptoms.
  • Karma Houdini: The misogynist coworker in this story not only gets management to investigate the submitter for "hostility" (calling out his harassment), but ultimately gets Kicked Upstairs so he can harass women who aren't her.
  • Karmic Jackpot:
  • Karmic Trickster: The IT employee submitter in this story, which plays out almost like a real life Looney Tunes short. A new teacher at the school the submitter works at steals the submitter's soda and pointedly refuses to pay the submitter back for it despite saying that he would (when the submitter confronts the teacher, the teacher claims to not know what the submitter is talking about and laughs them off). The teacher walks, and the IT employee decides to teach the teacher a lesson. When later setting up the teacher's new computer, the submitter makes his password "J3rk&Th!ef". Then they set the computer's start-up sound to be very loud audio from a soda commercial. Finally, all of the teacher's documents have "I steal from my coworkers" added to the header and bottom of them and the documents have "I'm a thief" automatically added to their filenames. It doesn't take very long for the teacher to admit defeat and pay the submitter the money he owes them, and the ending suggests that the teacher never did anything like this again.
  • The Key Is Behind the Lock:
  • Kiai: One possible explanation as to why this co-worker shouts "NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON!" before headbutting a Vengeful Vending Machine.
  • Kill It with Fire: According to this electrician, It's the Only Way to Be Sure to kill a spider.
  • Kill Steal: In "Her Prized Obsession," some sales associates are competing to see who can get the most rewards card sign-ups.
    "I think I should get counted for this signup instead of you, because I spent so much time with her!"
  • The Klutz: The family in this story. Three of the four members manage to injure themselves in a water park. Thankfully, the employees are understanding and even give them free passes.
  • Knight in Sour Armor: This manager provides the best customer service, but not because he actually cares about the often-idiotic customer; he just wants them to think he cares so they'll pay the bill and leave happy and with a minimum of fuss.
  • Know-Nothing Know-It-All:
    • A distressing number of stories set in a hospital will involve nurses and even doctors that apparently never actually went to medical school but still blow off legitimate concerns from a patient with nothing more than "I know better than you because I'm a nurse/the doctor."
    • This tour guide seems to have got it in her head that she knows everything there is to know about the Titanic without having to do any research simply by being a tour guide, and as such she becomes very angry when the submitter, who has done the research, turns out to know more than she does.
    • This security guard seems to think his medical knowledge is equivalent to that of an experienced surgeon just because he watches a lot of medical dramas, and therefore he can tell that an epileptic seizure was faked because the man deliberately laid down before the seizure, and therefore it's a Wounded Gazelle Gambit intended to lead to a lawsuit (never mind the fact the man stated that the casino was not at fault). What he doesn't realize is that medical dramas prioritize pacing, viewer comprehension, and the Rule of Drama over medical accuracy and, among other things, tend to exaggerate medical emergencies as a result. This includes epileptic seizures, which in fiction happen out of nowhere causing injury because drama, whereas on this side of the fourth wall, most epileptic people can mitigate them because an "aura" alerts them to what's about to happen, hence the man lying down. Several real medical professionals have trouble convincing him that it was an actual epileptic fit because he holds so much faith in his medical drama knowledge.
    • The only possible explanation for why this produce manager, even after being told by his boss that he was being written up for telling his employees to handle produce crates in an unsafe manner, and even being told there was a post for it, he decided to yell at an employee he wrongfully fired and tell her she deserved to die for not doing things "the right way" right in front of his boss; he thinks he's right and everyone actually trying to follow and enforce the actual rules are wrong.
    • This salesperson is seemingly unable to let any kind of disagreement go, even when he's clearly in the wrong, and uses the fact that he's physically bigger than most employees (the submitter being a notable exception) to trap them in a room with him until they admit he's right.
    • This worker was repsonsible for typing up handwritten notes, and didn't realize that her spelling was awful, so she abused her computer's spellcheck's 'Add to Dictionary' function because she figured the computer was wrong. She winds up throwing her entire office into disarray.
  • Kubrick Stare: The submitter of this story has been told they get a Kubrick Stare whenever they get truly pissed off.

    L 
  • Laborious Laziness: This guy rearranged a bunch of shipping pallets in the warehouse to create a hidden nap room.
  • Lack of Empathy: The "Wow. Not A Single Drop Of Compassion." tetralogy displays this:
    • Part 1: When the submitter has a miscarriage, their manager denies them time off to recover and has them come back to the store right away, and for good measure assigns her to the babycare aisle.
    • Part 2: The submitter's mother tells her "son of the devil" boss that she has to take care of her terminally ill husband.
      Boss: “So, when is this all going to be over and done with?”
      Submitter's mother: *Staring at him in shock* “You mean… when is my husband going to die?!”
      Boss: “Yeah. It needs to hurry up so you can get back to work.”
    • Part 3: Another miscarriage example, where the boss forces the submitter to come to work without giving her time to recover.
      Boss: “I thought you’d be over it by now.”
      Submitter: “I lost my baby!”
      Boss: “No, you didn’t. You lost a fetus. It’s not like it was a living, breathing baby. I’ve met and heard stories of people who actually have lost children, in accidents and worse. They spent time caring and loving their children as they grew, tending to their needs, and helping them when they cried. You didn’t. Get out there and serve that table, or I will fire you.”
      After work, I gave my notice.
    • Part 4: The submitter's manager is downright gleeful when another worker has a miscarriage since that means she won't be needing maternity leave. Unfortunately, the worker hears him say this, and resigns on the spot.
  • Lame Pun Reaction:
  • Laser-Guided Karma: As with the rest of Not Always Right, this is the point of most stories, if not the vast majority of them. Has its own page.
  • Lawful Stupid: this rather eventful story, a pizza delivery guy is insistent that he hand the pizzas off to the submitter because their name is on the order, and doesn't seem to notice that the submitter is the only thing holding another person's bleeding artery.
  • Lazy Bum:
  • A Lesson Learned Too Well: This co-worker takes much longer to do tasks than everyone else. The submitter shadows her to see what the problem is and finds that she's "researching" just about everything about every order she processes, even when that's supposed to be done by other departments, taking ten minutes on orders that usually take thirty seconds. When the submitter asks her about this, she explains that at previous jobs, every order she processed was considered "her" order, so if something went wrong, she would be held responsible, so she felt she had to follow up on every little thing. On the other hand, she's so worried about getting into trouble that the submitter can't decide if her previous jobs were that scary or if she's just so paranoid she did all those extra tasks herself out of fear she wasn't doing enough.note 
  • Lethal Chef: The chefs at this French restaurant accidentally bake a wasp into the OP's bread, and get a thorough scolding from the OP's teacher for it.
  • Lethally Stupid:
    • These ushers, instead of quietly going up to a moviegoer and asking him to stop playing with his phone, point out the moviegoer who complained! To make matters worse, the moviegoer who complained and her friend were small, young women and the disobedient one was a tall man described as being 'like a Football Hooligan' and he's waiting by the entrance. Luckily, nothing bad happened to the girls.
    • This call centre supervisor goes on an extended power trip by setting restrictive rules. The first is to ban all drinks from the floor unless someone has a doctor's note (in which case they can only have water); this gets reversed after staff with diabetes complain. Then she decides to 'remove all distractions' by banning having personal phones and news TVs in the office, which means that everyone is only aware of a tornado heading in their direction when a customer tells them so. Even as the emergency procedures are put into place she rants at them to get back to work, only shutting up when the tornado rips the roof of the building off. After the event she's fired fairly promptly.
    • This equipment operator keeps the forks of his forklift-like device raised even when it's not raising or lowering equipment, despite the submitter's warnings that a collision in this state could topple the machine. Fortunately, when this actually happens, only equipment is damaged, but the submitter, their coworkers, and the editors are all well aware that it could hurt or kill somebody if it happens again and are in total disbelief that the employee still has his job after this.
    • This manager and some of his colleagues disabled the fire alarms so they wouldn't have to disrupt work for a false alarm. When the building receives a (false) bomb alert, it takes an additional twenty minutes for their floor to evacuate because they didn't hear the alarms, which could have been deadly in a real emergency. The managers were fired, arrested, and sent to prison, as California takes its fire safety very seriously.
    • This worker at an amusement park thinks it's more practical to just show customers food that could have allergens in them rather than get a manager or supervisor with their allergy book to specifically identify which foods could have a possible and/or not-obvious allergen in them, ignorantly and needlessly risking the health (or life!) of a young boy with a litany of allergies. Fortunately, a supervisor comes to the rescue and helps the kid and his family make a decision, and the coworker is transferred away from selling food at the park for her troubles (as is a manager friend of hers after helping her spread untrue rumors about the submitter as payback for the incident).
  • Lethal Negligence: This boarding kennel leaves the submitter's mother's dog without food for three days when the food the submitter's mother left them ran out. By the submitter and their mother's admission, their mother should have calculated how much food was needed better, but the kennel also made no attempt to contact her when they ran out. Thankfully, the dog lived.
  • Lifesaving Misfortune:
    • The owner in this story had to miss a flight to deal with the fallout from the screw-up of his studio manager… said flight being Pan Am Flight 103.
    • Downplayed in this story, where a little girl spills her virgin strawberry daiquiri because it was served in an adult cup. When the server goes to the bar to get a new one in a kid's cup, they find out the bartender accidentally made the previous one with alcohol.
  • Lightbulb Joke:
    • Referenced here.
    • This return of a defective item ends with the similar joke, "How many employees does it take to open a blender?"
    • Here is one where a customer gets a chance to do it.
  • Literal Metaphor:
  • Literal-Minded:
    • This bakery employee, when instructed to "draw hearts", wrote just that.
    • This Cashier doesn't seem to realize hamburger doesn't really need ham.
    • This waiter, when told by the customer she wanted to bring the wine bottle home, rather than cork the half full wine bottle, proceeds to dump and waste the wine into a bucket and give the customer the empty bottle. Needless to say, the waiter only got tipped a penny for his stupidity, and was fired some time after.
    • This cashier refuses to take a coupon, thinking the phrase "this coupon cannot be combined with any other offer" applies to all offers, including the exact offer that the coupon was for to begin with. Worse yet, when the submitter calls for her manager, he sides with the cashier, at which point the submitter gives up and leaves empty-handed. Luckily, a location in the next town over accepts the coupon without question.
    • This cashier thinks that a "limit of 2 per customer" stipulation for a sale price on bread means that the customer isn't allowed to buy more than 2 loaves of bread at all, regardless of if they're charged the regular price for the extra loaves.
    • This cashier believes that it's illegal to sell somebody alcohol unless they're exactly 21 years old (and refuses to acknowledge the 'or older' part of the policy).
    • A customer orders a hamburger with nothing on it and is given an empty bun without even a patty on it.
    • This restaurant trainee through a combination of only taking in the last things she was told to do and a literal interpretation of "always watch it" is convinced that the hot water for tea will boil dry if she takes her eyes off it for even a second.
    • “You should have seen the looks I got in the drug store when I went in and asked where they kept the elbow grease.”
  • Loophole Abuse:
    • This manager makes last-second changes to the schedules of employees that she doesn't like, to effectively give herself a reason to discipline them. One employee fights back after being wrongfully fired this way and exposes her whole scheme in doing so, which results in the manager's own termination.
    • This company insists that if any of their employees miss a target, they have to travel to meet their area manager for a short meeting to describe how they're going to fix it. They make the mistake of specifying that the company itself will cover all costs of travel and other expenses for these meetings. Cue the submitter: With less than a month before they leave the job for other reasons, and having missed one of said targets by 2%, they spend £1200 of the company's money to travel to the other end of the country just to tell their boss that they don't plan on changing their work at all.
    • This bank charges a fee for paying bills in cash, but there's no fee for depositing cash, or for paying bills by deducting from your account. So the customer deposits the cash he was going to use to pay the bill, then immediately pays the bill out of his account, thus circumventing the fee. The teller finds it Actually Pretty Funny and allows it, which might imply that they think that the policy is dumb too, but can't do anything to fix it.
    • This police station will cancel fingerprint appointments and delete your info if you're so much as five minutes late, but you can arrive any amount of time early and be seen. After being late to a Friday appointment, the submitter reschedules for Monday, then claims to be seventy-two hours early to their Monday appointment. The officer is aggravated but can't do anything about it.
    • This grocery store manager raises the starting pay for new employees 75 cents higher than normal wages, but when the submitter asks if employees who already work at the store will also be getting the raise, the manager is adamant that they do not get the raise. The submitter promptly quits their job...and then a few days later applies again and is hired back. The manager is not happy but still gives the submitter the new hire bonus raise anyway (along with a $250 referral bonus).

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top