Nightmare Fuel / Not Always Working

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• Any story from the Health & Body tag.
• This callous doctor.
• These two girls don't understand that celiacs are really intolerant to gluten, and were sloppy about their work. What if someone had an allergic reaction? The scariest part is the implications of the last few lines - it's likely the submitter, and probably others, did have an allergic reaction. On the bright side, the two of them got fired after the submitter's complaint to the manager was the last straw for the two of them.
• This story about a severely sleep-deprived restaurant worker is painful to read. Trying to pull two overly long shifts in two separate jobs, leaving only four hours a night for sleep can cause some serious mental and physical trauma. At least a manager in the first restaurant had noticed and was concerned; the manager of the other, however, was a complete jerk about it. Even so, nothing was done in either place for a long while; eventually, a regular had to intervene when the worker passed out while on duty!
• This story. For a place where workers are supposed to be saving (or at least prolonging) people's lives, apparently not a single one of its nurses has even the slightest bit of competence in their field - they refuse to believe that an empty catheter can clot, flat-out tell someone who knows better it hasn't clotted when it clearly has, and then take their precious time responding to a patient who is having an allergic reaction to an antibiotic.
• This doctor nearly caused a photographer to lose their sight, simply because they didn't think it was anything more serious than a headache.
• In this story, a woman's husband is suffering from a stroke. Even though she was able to get him into their car and to the hospital parking lot, it had gotten so bad that she couldn't move him. When she asks a nurse for a wheelchair, she is flat out refused. The nurse's reason? He has to actually be in the hospital to get a wheelchair. The woman keeps desperately pleading the nurse to help her but to no avail. Luckily, the woman was able to get an off duty paramedic to help her husband.
• This boss shows a horrifying disregard for the safety of his employees when he orders the narrator, a 110-pound teenage girl, to pick up pizzas in a bad part of Detroit. Even when she points out how she could be raped or murdered if she went there alone, her boss insists on it. (A male coworker ends up picking them up, with the boss none the wiser.) What makes it even worse is that the story was posted not long after the Stuebenville, Ohio rape case had been in the news.
  • The boss was probably very Drunk with Power, and wanted his orders followed to the letter, personal safety be damned!
• These nurses and doctors nearly caused a 19-year-old girl to die of appendicitis because they believed she was pregnant (she was a virgin), refusing to even consider the possibility until a nurse realized the problem because of an ultrasound. Even then, the doctor refused to believe it was appendicitis and did not want to come in.
• Classic Pointy-Haired Boss right here. When asked why on earth he didn't use the emergency key to bring a broken elevator to the ground floor to let out the person trapped inside, his reply was "Oh, yeah, I guess I could have done that..." and seems to assume that the emergency call function in an elevator is simply there to be there, not because it's supposed to be used in, you know, an emergency.
• This library guard refused to help a man having seizures on the grounds that they could be sued. Worse of all, when a person does help the man, he threatened with suing them, and when emergency services arrive, the guard tried to deny them access! It was already bad that the rest of the patrons suffered Bystander Syndrome, this guard was actually going out of his way to deny something was even happening and to deny help. Fortunately the seizure patient was fine and the guard was arrested for attempting to obstruct emergency services, and subsequently lost his job due to gaining a criminal record.
• This nurse, due to her incompetence, prudishness, and idiocy. She gave a patient a medication that the patient is allergic to. Even when the patient said she was allergic to that, the nurse injected most of it into her anyway, believing that the patient was wrong because it was an anti-allergen. Worse yet, the patient naturally reacted badly to it, and the doctor who came in said that there was nothing they could do after the fact. If the patient had been any more allergic, it's very likely that the nurse could have killed her, all over a damn curse word.
• This place for dog grooming is an example of extreme negligence. They closed 10 minutes earlier than they said they would and told the woman in the story that all of the dogs were picked up. Surprise surprise, her dog was still in a cage in the back and they had no idea she was there. They almost let a dog stay in a cage overnight in a closed building without food or water.
  • Same for this daycare, where an employee started locking up before the submitter came to pick up her months-old daughter, and just to make it worse starts arguing with her about it rather than just unlocking everything and double-checking. It takes the submitter threatening to call the police before she's allowed in - surprise again, her daughter was still in there, and she never left her there again after this incident.
• This thirteen-year-old boy was misdiagnosed with gas by a rather flippant doctor who blew off any other concerns. Luckily the father went to another doctor for a second opinion, where the child was diagnosed with acute appendicitis... and his appendix actually ruptured mid-surgery. If they'd been just a little later, or had gone with the first diagnosis, the kid would be dead.
• The sheer idea that you might one day, without even doing anything, make someone hate you so much that they would basically hold your money hostage just to ruin your vacation.
• This nurse dismisses a woman's serious allergic reaction as "just a heat rash" and makes her wait nearly an hour for treatment. If a doctor hadn't noticed and intervened, she easily could have died. The doctor even slapped her after giving her shots to make sure she didn't fall asleep, and even told her that if she'd been waiting much longer, they might not have been able to save her.
• This movie theater worker uses a packet of bleach concentrate, which is used for bathroom drains, to clean the soda machine nozzles - much to his coworker's horror! What's worse was the revelation the worker has been using it all the time! Just how many customers got sick from drinking from that machine?
• This boss writes up his employee for not giving a customer a prostitute when prostitution is illegal, saying that "what the police don't know won't hurt them". Given that a customer can just walk into his hotel, request a prostitute, and expect to be serviced, how many times has he done this? And how many other illegal activities does he condone in his hotel? Not surprisingly, the employee quits soon after.
• Let's hope this funeral home director was kidding when they said they don't check to see if a person is really dead before cremation.
• This story starts out with backstory that fits perfectly - a woman minding her own business suddenly receives a phone call from someone she's never met before, who makes threats of sexual assault after proving he somehow knows her name and address.
• In this story, a young woman (age unknown but her brother is seven) goes in for eye surgery - and as soon as the surgery is finished she is simply thrown out of the office, heavily medicated to the point that she's barely conscious, without anyone bothering to make sure that she had a ride home or that someone would be coming to pick her up. Her mother, there to pick her up after her surgery, ends up waiting until the office starts to close for the day without anyone having any clue (or seeming to care) where her daughter is; it's only because she flatly refuses to leave the office that the nurses bother to go looking and find her daughter half-asleep on a couch in the building's lobby, six floors down, still so doped that she can barely walk. We also get this line:
  Doctor: ...I'm not responsible for what happens to her after surgery. Get out so we can go home.
• When you think about it, this story counts. An employee discovers a major fire hazard, does what he can to relieve the problem, then alerts the owner that they should hire someone to fix it. The repairman they hire for that? Just glues the part the employee removed back on, without doing anything to fix the actual issue.
• Any story that involves a walk-in freezer will inevitably result in someone being locked inside.
  • This asshole decides it would be funny to lock a nine-months pregnant woman and her co-worker inside the walk-in freezer. He then proceeds to forget about them and leave them in there for twenty minutes. And of course, the icing on the cake: the boss does nothing about it. Fridge Horror sets in at the end when she goes into labor mere hours after the incident. What if she had gone into labor while she was still locked in the freezer?
    • Even worse, said asshole laughs at the now-freezing woman, claiming that "the look on [her] face was hilarious!" Worse still, said boss dumps the blame all on her, saying that she shouldn't have been near the freezer in the first place, like it was her fault she got locked in.
  • These cooks decide to lock an autistic, claustrophobic coworker in the freezer simply to be jerks. Even worse, the manager hears about this and does not care, prompting the worker to jump ship.
  • This worker not only locks the submitter inside the walk-in freezer, he proceeds to turn off the lights and barricade her inside. Worse yet, the story implies that the worker locked her inside just because he could. Fortunately, unlike the previous two stories, the worker is almost instantly fired.
• These nurses take their sweet time reacting to a flatline on a fetal heart monitor. It stabilizes on its own before they arrive, so they glibly chalk it up to a glitch. Five minutes later it happens again, the doctor arrives immediately... and he starts asking the patient's husband what he should do.^note Some commenters have pointed out that he might have meant whether they should prioritize saving the life of the mother or the child in the event that worst came to worst. Even so, if that was his intention he really should have worded it better.
  Husband: I think one of us went to medical school, and I sure as h*** hope it was you!
• This entire dentist's office doesn't think this woman is their top priority even though her jaw is severely infected to the point where she would have died from it. There is one good thing about this story: she immediately drops them after she gets better.
• Then there's the over-arching Fridge Horror that many of the offenders in the above stories have committed punishable crimes or actionable offences^note (gross negligence, wrongful/unfair dismissal, infliction of emotional distress, sexual harassment, threatening behavior, endangerment, willful violation, workplace harassment/violence/bullying, the list goes on), but have not been punished at all, usually because the victim didn't take any action against them. In many cases, the victim simply quit the job (if they were an employee) or withdrew their patronage (if they were a customer) and left it at that, leaving the offender to go about their own merry life, still in their position of power, probably still treating people that way, possibly ruining lives or even putting them in danger^note (we can only hope no actual deaths result, but the numbers are against us). "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing", indeed.
• This employee, who genuinely seems to believe that fat people are not human.
• This security guard actually stands back and watches the submitter fight off an attacker, losing her car keys and phone in the process, rather than stepping in and helping because he's decided that, as a security guard, protecting people is not his job.
• This restaurant worker, who has post-traumatic stress disorder from having been caught in a hostage situation, is forced to relive the nightmare when the assistant manager, deciding the worker is just being lazy (rather than taking a much-needed stress break during a lull in the workday), blocks him from leaving by barricading the room. The worker suffers a panic attack as a result. Thankfully, the other workers see what's being done, and quickly help him out—by removing barricades from the door, retrieving the necessary medication, and calling the (much more understanding) boss, who fires the assistant manager not only for disregarding the worker's PTSD, but also for violating the fire code in blocking the exit.
• This doctor has some rather terrifyingly Skewed Priorities. The submitter, as a six-month-old baby, suddenly starts running a bad fever, and the doctor completely ignores it to accuse the parents of being terrible parents and argue about a birthmark that hasn't disappeared yet because she's - get this - still only six months old, and which they were told would disappear on its own. The parents eventually take her to their regular doctor, learning that five other babies were running the same unexplained fever... and the submitter was the only one of the six to survive the night.
• And here we have a combination of children playing with fire and unauthorized home entry. There's also the possibility that the broker and the mother really were looking for something to steal.
• This dentist is so out of it that she begins to ask the submitter if she's allergic to a particular type of anesthetic, before trailing off and jabbing her with it anyway. Luckily, however, the submitter wasn't allergic.
  • If you think that dentist was bad, this hygienist is worse! Not only does he forcefully inject a painkiller into the patient's mouth, which went directly into her veins, he also ignores her warnings that something is wrong with her body and forcefully injects three more doses before leaving her alone without checking her condition! Had another senior hygienist not discovered what happened to the patient, the patient could have died. Mercifully, the hygienist was swiftly fired when brought to the attention of management.
• This lady was once misdiagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and, while it was since corrected, the misdiagnosis remained on her medical records. After breaking her arm and needing to go to the ER, the doctor who saw her saw the original Bipolar diagnosis and refused to listen to her statements that the records also mention it had been a misdiagnosis. The doctor was getting ready to admit her to the psychiatric ward against her will before she (rather forcefully) asserted her rights as a patient to refuse any and all medications and procedures before demanding an advocate.
  It scares me that there could be people with mental disorders being treated the way I was treated.
• Then there's this boss. While not as creepy as other examples on this page, it's still worth mentioning a flow of events occurring at this game shop in just seven weeks! First, this boss ends all customers playing games before purchase; coming up with the reason that "parents will not drop off kids to play games and leave us to babysit". Naturally, half of all business is lost within two weeks, as well as a bunch of firings down to just four employees. After that, he proceeds to can the local tournaments, end purchasing newer release games, and suspend all trading until "we have more sales". Meanwhile, the employee in this story (a console repairman) asks his boss for new parts to repair 40 consoles on line, which this is the second time he's asked this. He doesn't get them even within four weeks. It gets even worse, however; as a coworker reports he was yelled at for locking the store up just because he had to go the bathroom. One can only imagine the fears this coworker felt. The coworker also reports to the employee that the parts needed to repair the consoles will not be ordered until the boss has had more sales. Oh, and the employee in this story hasn't gotten a paycheck in almost a month. Naturally, the employee quickly resigns and the store closes a few weeks later.
• This Nurse in this story is horrible. She removes the submitter's newborn baby daughter from her arms after she just finished feeding her despite pleas by the mother to let her hold her longer since the baby is staying in NICU due to being born 14 weeks early, which the nurse dismissed the mother's pleas as just being too emotional. But it gets worse. The nurse immediately puts the baby back into incubator laying back without bothering to check or help the baby burp, something everyone knows you have to do to a baby after feeding which causes the baby to vomit. Even the baby's grandmother calls out on the nurse for her actions and tells her to stay away from her grandchild. Unfortunately, the nurse endangers the baby's life again when she gave the baby another mother's breast milk, something you don't give to a premature born child since infection might happen! The submitter made a followup post revealing this wasn't the first time the nurse has been negligent to babies and rude to the mothers which made her disliked by the others nurses. Thankfully the baby turns out to be okay and growing well, and the nurse is fired and has her medical license revoked.
• This story about a cashier that suffers a massive panic attack. Not only do none of the employees do anything about helping the poor guy but the smug Jerkass Manager plays the whole situation off like it was nothing. And to top it off? He makes a cruel, coy, dry joke about it! It's even implied that the cashier is afraid of him. The worst part? He ultimately ends up losing his job by the story's end. To anyone that has ever suffered from panic attacks of any kind, it can really and truly be both chilling and a Tear Jerker.
  Manager: Sorry about that, [My Name]. He’s pulled that trick three times over the past month. He’ll be let go if he’s not careful.
  Me: Trick? He just had a full on panic attack. Do you have idea what those are like? You need to put him somewhere less stressful.
  Manager: *grinning* A psychiatric ward?
• This apprentice tattoo artist is a borderline sociopath. He essentially views his clients' bodies as blank canvases he should be allowed to draw whatever he wants on, and when he gets told to do a butterfly instead, he scribbles all over the designated spot instead, essentially mutilating them. Karma bites him in the ass quickly and painfully, and he thankfully has virtually no future in the industry, but his apathy towards his clients' wishes and bodies is incredibly disturbing.
• This story is rather horrifying. The submitter's elderly relative introduces a young man who wants a job at the supermarket he's working at so the young man can support his pregnant girlfriend. But the submitter learns to his shock that the young man can't read because his barely-literate parents homeschooled him and only educated him by teaching him stories from the Bible orally. Worse, when he was given a chance to learn to read in the past, he refused because his father taught him reading was stupid and he could still earn money doing manual labor. However, the submitter has to point out to the young man and submitter's elderly relative that even though it's a physical job, you still need to know how read and write, which the elderly relative doesn't seem to understand and merely thinks the submitter is being "un-Christian" in not helping the young man. The story ends with the reveal that the young man attempted to join the Army, but failed because he was, again, illiterate, he is now in jail for burglary, and the no-good parents who screwed up their son's future were never punished for their actions. Lord only knows what became of the young man's girlfriend and her baby.
• Another horrifying story. It starts off when the manager orders the submitter to push carts in a severe thunderstorm. In other words, she was literally putting her employee's life in danger over a few shopping carts. Naturally, the employee expresses their concerns to the manager, but instead of taking these concerns to heart, the manager threatens to fire them, and then makes good on that threat when the submitter calls her out on her Lack of Empathy. Luckily, the owner quickly learns of the incident and the manager is promptly fired for willfully endangering the submitter, who is subsequently reinstated.
  • What makes this particular story disturbing is the fact that the manager not only fires the submitter for not doing something that could have potentially gotten them injured or even killed, but she even flat-out states beforehand that she doesn't care if the submitter gets struck. And then when the submitter stands up to her, she completely flips out and screams at the very top of her lungs as she wrongfully fires them on the spot for insubordination. All while the two are implied to be on the sales floor, in front of customers. Given all this, as well as her expansive history of complaints and write-ups for that type of behavior, plus the fact that she could very well have already been on thin ice due to stealing another worker's vacation^note the comments in that story imply that it's the same manager, it's no surprise that it all comes back to bite her in the ass hard.
  • And at the end of the story, the submitter notes that the ex-manager was arrested some time later for assaulting her ex-husband over a lost custody battle, leading one to wonder what she could have done to other employees had her boss not fired her.
  • One of the comments in that story refers to a similar story not posted on the site about a manager sending a young worker out to collect carts in tornado-force winds! The poor kid was carried up into the air and slammed into a nearby building, leaving him- as the EMT on the scene described- nothing more than "a flesh bag of pulp."
• In an extreme case of Mistaken for Servant, this manager begins screaming full blast at a customer whom he believes is one of his employees, simply for not helping another customer. What makes it really disturbing is that not only is he basing his assumption solely off of the complaint of the other customer without any other proof, but he completely ignores the fact that the submitter isn't wearing a company uniform and continues to berate her and drive her to tears before she can even explain that she doesn't work there (the "employee" basically blacks out during and after the shouting, only having brief flashes of memory from that time... talk about trauma). Thankfully, a security guard notices the incident and pulls the submitter away to allow her to regroup. The police are also called and the abusive manager is arrested for assault.
  • Similarly, this nightmare of a manager, after mistaking the submitter for a worker tries to violently drag her away before the submitter forces him off and threatens to pepper spray him before he gets arrested. Even as the police come, he yells threats of physical violence at the submitter. It turns out he has massive anger issues, which prompts the question – what sort of things did he do to people who really did work for him?
• The submitter of this story, a department manager, fires an employee from their department by screaming at him over the intercom. Even for an incompetent employee, this is one of the most humiliating ways to lose a job, and one can only imagine how the employee must have felt to have been publicly fired over the intercom like that in front of dozens, if not hundreds, of customers. Worse yet, at the end of the story, when the submitter is written up for violating protocol, they gloat about it being Worth It. Naturally, this drew massive backlash in the comments section when the story was published. (If this story on Not Always Right is referring to the same incident, the department manager was herself fired the next day.)
• The way that this produce manager brutally berates an employee he wrongfully fired is nothing short of pure horror. He bombards the employee repeatedly over the phone with insults, saying that she deserves to be fired, and even goes so far as to say that she deserves to die on the streets. The poor employee was traumatized enough by the wrongful firing, but to suddenly get a call from your ex-boss insulting you and wishing you a death on the streets? OUCH.
  • It gets worse when you learn what the call was for to begin with - the submitter (the manager's boss) had ordered the manager to apologize to the employee over the phone for the wrongful firing. When the manager instead breaks out into his insult-laced rant while still right in front of the submitter, even the submitter himself is taken aback by the manager's horrific actions. Worse yet, the manager then tries to defend his actions by calling the employee lazy again. This gets him instantly fired in response, thanks to a large history of prior issues, and the wrongfully fired employee is reinstated into his position.
• This restaurant general manager. It's bad enough that he's yelling at the submitter while she is serving an elderly lady, but what he does after the lady tips the submitter out of sympathy pushes him well over the Moral Event Horizon. Without any warning, the GM snatches the tip out of the submitter's hands, stuffs it into his pocket, and then screams "YOU'RE FIRED!", right in her face, reducing her to tears. Thankfully Laser-Guided Karma goes into immediate effect - the now-pissed elderly lady furiously scolds the GM and leaves, with several others following behind her (many without paying). The district manager also finds out what happened, and promptly reverses the firing, then pays the restaurant a visit the next day to rip the GM a new one, fire him instead, and return the stolen tip.
  • Some of the comments about this story also point out that the way the GM took the submitter's money (forcefully grabbing it out of her hands and then screaming at her afterwards) could very well have constituted straight-up robbery, which under Tennessee law (where the story took place) is considered a felony that could have landed him behind bars for several years. Unfortunately, it is never stated in the story whether charges were pressed against him.
• This cleaning lady purposely fills the submitter's room with a smelly perfume, despite being informed by the hotel staff that the submitter's wife has deadly allergies to the perfume, as the cleaning lady was convinced that the couple were trying to con the hotel for a free room. Even when she sees the wife having an allergic reaction to the perfume so extreme that the hotel staff calls an ambulance, the cleaning lady still thinks the wife is faking it with make up and tells the couple their "scam" for a free room won't work. Thankfully, the hotel staff call the police on the cleaning lady for almost killing the submitter's wife.
• This bar owner is an interviewee's worst nightmare. After seemingly offering the jobless submitter a position, he immediately retracts it and descends into a long rant berating the submitter for having poor interview skills and little work experience (and not having their driver's license), calling them unhireable and worthless. Worse yet, after he kicks the submitter out of the bar, he follows them and continues insulting them in front of customers and staff. This last stunt causes half his staff, including the cook and both his managers, to quit on the spot out of disgust. He then fires the remainder of his staff the next day out of frustration, which results in him going out of business the next week when he cannot find any replacements. The submitter, meanwhile, gets a job at a grocery store and later gets their driver's license.
• In this story, a fifty-something manager knocks on the bathroom door while the submitter, a 19-year-old girl, is inside using it. When the submitter responds that she's in there, the manager begins knocking harder and demanding her to open up. By the time the submitter is finished, the manager had started jiggling the door handle. When she finally leaves the bathroom, not only does the manager chew her out for not opening the door, he actually writes her up, deeming it an act of insubordination. The submitter books it out of there the following day.
• In this story, a restaurant owner attempts to sic someone named Barry on the submitter, an Unwitting Pawn to a scam artist who tricked several businesses into leasing overpriced credit card equipment with several hidden fees that weren't disclosed to the salespeople. The submitter flees before he can learn who this Barry fellow is or what the restaurant owner plans to have Barry do to him, but in context, it's pretty clear that, best case scenario, the submitter was going to be on the receiving end of a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• This story is the worst nightmare of anyone suffering from claustrophobia. A man walks into the bathroom of his suite to relieve himself at night, but when he tries leaving the bathroom, the door has inexplicably become stuck in its frame. As none of his attempts to get the door open work, the man finally resorts to digging his way through the drywall with pieces of the toilet tank lid he shattered in his escape attempts and the plastic housing that holds the Kleenex box.
• This seafood restaurant arguably belongs more in Not Always Healthy. They continually serve their clam chowder from one big pot. This isn't a problem, except for the fact that the chowder in the pot has gone bad. Even worse, the restaurant's manager seems to have no clue why this is a problem.
• This restaurant had raccoons fall through the ceiling and attack the customer. And the customer still ate there.
• Something very unsettling – what exactly it is is never determined – is going on in this restaurant. The submitter is the only customer there, weird noises can be heard from the kitchen the whole time, and each time the waiter comes to serve the submitter, he comes out with new injuries. Furthermore, the submitter's meal takes too long, and the coffee doesn't taste right, and when the by-now-unnerved submitter tries to leave, the waiter tries to stop them and pleads with them not to leave a bad review. When the submitter looks for more information on the restaurant on Google Maps, they can't find it.
• The submitter takes their dog to this groomers' and is told that while there, the dog's ear was "grazed." When they pick up their dog, the find that the "graze" is in fact a notch taken out of his ear, and that he's covered in other wounds. When he's taken home, he's too scared to come out of the pet crate, and takes weeks to recover physically. The submitter gets a refund, but vows never to so much as smell the place again.