Tear Jerker / Not Always Right

For moments from Not Always Working, see here.

From Not Always Right

• You really gotta feel bad for this guy. He has to buy several copies of the same Spongebob Squarepants DVD for his 10-year-old son, costing him $550.
  Dad: Oh, don’t worry about it. I hate my life anyway.
• This customer is so lonely he wants to receive ads from a company just so he can get something through the mail.
• Whatever can be said about the Afghanistan conflict, people coming home from it only to deal with bigots who think having Asian soldiers is good because it's "Better [losing] you than losing some American boys" is depressing.
• This poor little girl, whose mother considers her less important than a credit card. She even tells the workers who watched her daughter to say it's her daughter that's lost next time so she knows not to rush.
  • Similarly, there's this poor little boy whose mother left him at the museum and had driven more than three hours before the museum called to tell her - and her major concern was her coat.
• A minor one here. She wants to know how to treat a rash on her butt, but doesn't want health services to know, so she calls tech support for computers, of all places. When she is told tech support can't help her, she hangs up while sobbing.
• It's hard not to feel sorry for this guy/girl who is accused of ruining a boy's 13th birthday because of a problem with the ovens that is in no way the worker's fault. To add insult to injury, it was the submitter's own birthday too.
• This one doesn't sound sad until you put it in hindsight. You can bet this little girl's gonna grow up a Spoiled Brat. After finding a roll of lost money, she is told by her mother to keep it. When the cashier tells her she cannot keep it unless 30 days pass without someone claiming it, the family lie to another employee in order to get it. Later on, the person who actually lost the money comes and finds out their money has been taken by someone else.
• Similarly, this kid's gonna grow up to be a criminal, being told by his father to steal candy bars. If the cashier hadn't been fluent in Japanese (the father spoke Japanese, assuming the cashier wouldn't understand), he would've gotten away with it.
• This one's especially horrifying to people who are Animal Lovers. Two kids grab butterflies from an exhibit with their fists, possibly hurting them, and when they are told to stop, their mother says that they should be allowed to do whatever they want to them, and tries to apply Never Say "Die" to real life. She has to be forcibly removed from the exhibit in the end.
• This one features rude customers, awesome customers... and a 70-year-old cashier who has to work to afford chemotherapy.
• It's hard not to feel bad for the regular in this story, especially if you're an animal lover and/or have a beloved pet yourself. A customer's hamster has a tumor and must be put down. She wants to give the hamster one final treat first, but another customer comes and grabs the hamster's box from her hands without permission. The customer thinks that a hamster-loving friend would like to see a hamster that is about to die.
• This post seems like an ordinary bigot post, with a violent customer who insults the cashier with homophobic comments and physical threats, until the end, where a second one comes around!
• This is just depressing. You'd expect underage drinking from 17- or 18-year-olds, but ten-year-olds?!
  • Unless the first boy was just parroting his elder relatives' or friends' opinions - which seems likely since he doesn't know the difference between beer and rum. Here's hoping.
• This. Unlike most things on this list, it's also a Heartwarming Moment: After a family's dog had to be euthanized, an Air Force lieutenant who lost his brother to cancer cheers the 10-year-old son by telling him that if he did his best to make the dog's life worth living, the dog would be proud.
• This one, which is also a Heartwarming Moment — for some people, the last thing a close person ever gave them is very important.
• This homeowner who had to deal with asshole golfers who think they can go wherever they want is bad enough, but it gets worse when he lists all the trouble they've put him through—not only have they broken into and wrecked his property, they killed his dog. When people value a damn golf game over life, you know you're dealing with some really scummy folks.
• This story which is also heartwarming — an eight-year old kid goes above and beyond what is expected for a kid his age to make sure his neighbor, who recently suffered a tragedy, has a Christmas, and moves everyone else to help any way they can.
• This poor girl. Her birthday was supposed to be celebrated together with her divorced parents, but her mother shows her hateful homophobia (upon learning that her new friend's older sister is a lesbian) and storms out, ruining the kid's birthday wishes. On the bright side (well sort of), the father subsequently gets full custody and now the little girl is allowed to play with her friend and learn Spanish as well.
• This poor girl just wants a dragon toy, but her mother won't let her. Then she tries to get a toy dog, but her mother won't get her that either because it's not pink. Then her mother tells her that she can't get a toy unless it's pink and 'girly', and then her mother tells the stunned cashier that girls who don't play with pink toys will be gay and that her daughter needs to 'learn her place'. Jesus Christ.
• An otherwise normal tech support call about an elderly man trying to access his voicemail takes a depressing turn when he admits that the reason why was because his wife passed away recently and he wanted to hear her voice again via an old voicemail message.
• This story of a woman randomly trying to get people in an electronics store fired over her pizza being wrong ends with her being dragged out by the police for assault... and separated from her young son, who is visibly terrified and upset.
• To summarise this story, which got a Content Warning for severe injury to a child, a 5-year-old boy loses a finger to a T-shirt printing machine because his mother is too absorbed in a phone call to supervise him. And even after learning what just happened, she's more focused on berating the staff members, continuing the phone call, and getting her order than trying to comfort her injured son, who is crying, terrified, and almost certainly traumatised. One hopes the poor boy was permanently taken out of her custody as a result of her being charged with neglect.
• This story starts with a 15-year-old kid, a coworker of the poster, being shot dead on the way to school, a week before Christmas no less, and just gets worse from there. Rumors start flying around that he was in a gang and was killed by a rival gang (purely because of the color of his skin), and his grieving colleagues have to deal not only with members of the public asking about his supposed criminal connections, but even a news crew that shows up wanting to ask all sorts of horrible questions (the store's managers and owners end up chasing them off the premises). Fortunately, there are also a fair number of decent people who knew the kid and that he would never be involved in anything like that, and the ending notes that a collection has been taken up for his family.

From Not Always Romantic

• This narrator's friend received condolences rather than congratulations on his wedding.
• Hard not to feel sorry for this poor guy for his failed proposal attempt.
  • Although it does get better if you think that they were just joking around.
• This is a strong case of The Ending Changes Everything. By the time the writer had uploaded the anecdote, her husband had died.

From Not Always Related

• This writer. Her father forgot her own birthday, but instead gives a birthday present to her stepsister, whose own birthday is a week away. And then, when the submitter doesn't wish him a happy birthday a few months later, he calls her an "awful selfish daughter".
• An elderly mother of two works herself into an early grave because she's too stubborn to hire someone to help her with mowing the lawn (the lawn is on a steep incline and has to be kept short per HA rules). While the OP has some excuse to have not been able to help, her brother only says that he shouldn't be expected to do any work just because he's a man when asked why he never helped despite being fit enough to do so. Let this sink in: His mother died early because he was too lazy to help her with the yard work and he doesn't seem to care.
• This girl is practically disowned by her mother just for being bisexual. The final exchange in the story makes it clear that the mother holds zero remorse for kicking her own daughter to the curb.
  OP: I think I will move in with [Girlfriend.]
  Mom: GOOD RIDDANCE!

From Not Always Learning

• One story on this section of the site takes place during finals week. A girl comes up to the storyteller complaining that the copy machine hasn't printed her things. A tech goes with her to look, and the girl runs by in tears because she'd accidentally put her report through the shredder.
• Not really a Tear Jerker, but kinda depressing: This one student in an advanced French class is always late, and when she does come, she sleeps through most of the class. However, her homework is always done, and she does very well on exams. Then one day, the student has had enough of this, and says, in French, "I hate all my classmates." The teacher is surprised that she would blatantly insult everyone in class, but the student is confident that nobody actually understood her. The teacher confirmed that nobody in the class understood that fairly-basic-French sentence, and were only there because everyone else had cheated for the entire term by using translators. The student was then moved into a class where people were actually interested in learning French.
  • Imagine how the teacher felt at that moment, realizing that nobody in her class was interested in what she was teaching.
• Nobody should have to go to a school with this learning environment.
  • Here's another which is arguably worse. The submitter left the school because she couldn't take it.
• A teacher puts a student in detention for being a few seconds late to school... because the student's brother died the previous night, and she was up all night grieving.
  • On the bright side, the rest of the faculty helped her get out of it and the science teacher never troubled her again.
    • But you have to wonder... why in the world was she in school that day in the first place? Why didn't the parents keep her home? That's a whole separate ball of Tear Jerker by itself. To be fair here though, some people cope with grief by trying to maintain as much normalcy in their lives as they can... but then, if she was up all night it doesn't sound like that was her preference (and even if she did want to maintain normalcy, sending someone who hasn't had any sleep to school is a bad idea since sleep is important).
• It's bad when other students telling you what you're saying is correct is wrong. But when a teacher does the same thing, it's even worse.
• "You're like my mom, only you actually care about me." That poor kid...
• This poor teenager had their school photos plastered all over the winning entry in an ugly tie contest - which was presented by their friends. While their friends reassured them that they thought up the scheme before the submitter was announced as the judge, it didn't exactly do wonders for their self-esteem.
• One college student calls out a teacher, whom she used to respect, for completely ignoring her during a lecture and trying to humiliate her in front of the class because she missed class the day before. As she's finally able to explain to the teacher and class, her daughter had been run over by a truck, so the student had spent the day in her daughter's hospital room instead of coming to class. She had also tried, repeatedly, to contact the teacher and explain her absence. She gives the teacher an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech before leaving, never to return again. For bonus tear jerker points, the submitter has no idea if the daughter recovered.
• The final line of the story sums it up perfectly: "But seriously, where are you in life where you have to bully a middle school student to feel empowered?"
• You have to feel sorry for the student in this story. His mother exploits his disability for her own gain, and the reason he's working so hard on his studies is so that he can go to a college far away from her.
• While the principal in this story brought everything on himself, it's still somewhat distressing for his entire life to be destroyed from his desire to treat his engaged daughter generously. His attempt to withhold pay on his employees for two months ended in him losing everything, from his job to his family. At what point is the Laser-Guided Karma more than necessary?
• After learning about Cupid and his arrows that make people fall in love, a second grader sadly comments: “I wish Cupid would shoot my mom so that she’d love my dad again.”
• The Christian principal of a private school in this story calls the entire school into the auditorium to tell them that a teacher will no longer be working there... because he's been having an affair with the married mother of a student who is present. The student begins crying as he says this and eventually runs out of the auditorium in tears while the principal obliviously rambles on how much of a sin it is. It turns out that she was so embarrassed by the scandal that she left the school. The kicker? Absolutely no one in the school, including the student, knew about the affair before the principal told them, claiming he didn't want any rumors going around about it.
• When an elementary school class is asked what they would do with a time machine, one kid says they would go back to give George Floyd a real $20 bill. ^Explanation George Floyd was an African-American man who had the police called on him for allegedly using a counterfeit $20. He was killed during the arrest, and his death sparked worldwide protests against police brutality.

From Not Always Friendly

• You have to feel bad for this poor boy, who gets inspired to draw a lot more by an artist's pep talk; but his mother ruins it completely by telling him that he has no talent and that since no one else in the family can draw, he can't either.
• This poor guy. Being invited to dinner with your high school friends, only for them to forget about you and then completely blank you has got to sting.
• This mother causes a scene on a plane when the OP lets a kid borrow her old Nintendo DS to play Pokémon... because she didn't give the kid the newer console that she also had. Worse, she has the gall to lie to the flight attendant, saying the OP stole it from the kid. Another passenger steps up and reveals that this is not the case, and the OP was trying to be friendly and let the kid play her game. The flight attendant makes her put away both consoles, which means neither she nor the kid can play. Towards the end of the flight, the OP apologizes to the kid over what happened, to which he replies, "It wasn't your fault. [Mother] ruins everything." In other words, it wasn't the first time that poor kid has had to go through something like this.
• The submitter's mother in this story deserves mention. Not only has she recently lost her father, the town tax collector, but it's only been six months since she lost her mother - both of her parents died within half a year of each other. And while she's trying to sort out her father's estate and his tax office, she gets a woman on the phone who yells at her for several minutes because he's not there to accept her tax payment. Sure, the woman had no idea, but she never gives the grieving daughter much chance to explain either.
• The ordeal of Lady the cat. The submitter fosters her to a woman who claims to be an experienced pet owner who will get Lady spayed. A month later, the submitter is furious to discover that the woman is now giving Lady away herself – and she's now pregnant, showing marks of attack from male cats, and utterly miserable. The submitter's friend offers to pick Lady up and bring her back. Thankfully Lady recovers and she and her kittens are safe, and all back in the submitter's care, where she plans for them to stay. But the ordeal has left a tangible mark on the poor cat.
  "Lady still panics whenever we go on holiday and hides immediately when she sees a male cat. She’s much shyer and more skittish than she was when she left here the first time, and it will probably take years for me to gain her real trust again."

From Not Always Hopeless

• This sad story here. A young Chinese girl used to be a brat at a Chinese restaurant despite attempts by her mother telling her daughter to behave and be a proper lady. Then one day, the little girl and her parents stop coming to the restaurant. Three months later, the little girl returns to the restaurant with her father and much to the staff's surprise, she is behaving well and is polite to them. But then comes the Wham Line on why the sudden change of behavior: the mother was killed in a car accident three months ago, around the time they stopped coming to the restaurant. The little girl, not understanding that her mother is gone, thought her mother left her because she was naughty, and became a proper lady which she hoped would make her mother come back.
• This story of a teenager befriending an elderly neighbor is downright depressing. She's been abandoned by her own family, has no friends or caretakers, and can no longer keep up with her own housework.
• This poor kid had his house burn down along with everything he owned, including his Christmas presents.

From Not Always Healthy

• The submitter of this story tries in vain to convince the owners of a dog suffering from heatstroke from the summer 2018 heatwave to get it to the vet. Unfortunately, they're too stupid to realize it's suffering heatstroke and think it's just tired from the coastal walk it just took, no matter how many times it drinks water too quickly and pukes it back up, and in their response to any help - namely, refusing it or misinterpreting the gesture - drive the submitter, who is increasingly worried about the dog and desperately hoping they listen to reason, into an autistic meltdown. By the time the morons realize the poor little dog isn't simply tired, it's too late.
• The poster of this story would reveal in the comments that the patient unfortunately died, making sure to clarify that it was due to his injuries being too severe and not the Obstructive Bureaucrat.
• We think we have a winner. A longtime member of NAR has had three stories posted, all centering around the birth of her baby at only 29 weeks. The fourth story above is about how, after a month of the premature girl living happy and healthy following 70 days at the hospital, the submitter wakes up to find her baby suddenly struggling to breathe. The parents and paramedics do everything they can to save the slowly dying child, despite the low odds and one doctor telling them that the merciful thing would be to let her go when she suffers brain damage after her heart stops, but it all ends up in vain--the child passes away peacefully in her mother's arms. The comments are almost nothing but expressions of sympathy, and the story itself is titled "Our Deepest Condolences", implying that even the site editors were heartbroken over the news. It also makes all of those stories so much Harsher in Hindsight.

From Not Always Legal

• This person accompanies a friend to traffic court and has a conversation with the judge afterward. The judge says that his biggest regret was not sending a repeat offender, a sixteen-year-old girl, to jail for her latest moving violation. On her way home, she tried to beat a train to the crossing.
  If I had given her the jail time, she'd be alive today.
• The poor kid in this story gets to watch his mom go batshit crazy over an airsoft gun, shoot the submitter with it, run off into the woods without him, and then shoot a police dog's eye out. She's thereafter sentenced to 15 years in prison. All of this when he's just eleven. One can only hope that his remaining family isn't as criminally insane and will help him move past the trauma the whole incident likely caused.