Not Always Right / Tropes A to D

aka: Tropes A To F

Tropes A to D | Tropes E to L | Tropes M to T | Tropes U to Z

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#–A

• 30 Minutes, or It's Free!:
  • This customer orders a large number of pizzas in hopes that they'll be late. When they're not late (despite her claim that the pizza took an hour), she throws a tantrum and destroys the submitter's phone. A week later, she'd be arrested for stabbing another delivery driver.
  • In this one the customer is told that not only doesn't the pizzeria do that any more, but their order was delivered within 30 minutes, anyway.
  • This customer is told the pizzeria he's called hasn't ever offered this. He does not take it well.
  • This story, from when the promotion was still running, has a delivery guy who makes it with seconds to spare, even after his car wouldn't start.
  • This delivery driver for the company that made the promotion had to deal with customers who locked them out of the hotel room they were delivering to for just long enough that the 30 minutes expired. The driver didn't honor the promotion because the customers deliberately locked them out, so the customers had to pay the full $199.97 bill.
• A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: This customer was left a box full of cash when his grandfather died, and he is desperate to spend it all on a new gaming laptop so he can play Call of Duty... and he wants to spend it, damn it, no matter how much the store employees try to tell him that the $1,000 bill he's trying to pay with is worth a lot more than the value printed on it. After he pays and leaves, the submitter is allowed to exchange the bill with an equivalent set of smaller ones, and winds up getting $4,000 for it from a collector.
• Abomination Accusation Attack:
  • Here's a woman going totally overboard with this trope as she visits the movies and decides that she owns the place and has the right to deny random strangers the seats they have bought, all in the name of Think of the Children! — accusing two random young women of being potential child molesters and thus disqualified from being treated with basic human respect.
  • In another instance, this father, for no noticeable reason, accuses a middle-schooler of stealing books from a library (said middle schooler was a volunteer and clearly checking books in). After futilely trying to convince people of his wild insinuation, he then calls the cops and claims the middle-schooler set a bomb with no proof whatsoever, as if he felt like framing her out of the blue just to "vindicate" himself. Good thing his daughter had a conscience and set the whole thing straight (and ended up getting the father arrested for wasting police time and money just to be a dick to a stranger).
  • In Carting Her Off to Justice, a man is accused of being a kidnapper by a woman after he stops a cart with her kid inside from rolling away. She goes as far as to call the police on him, and he's nearly arrested. Luckily, just about every other customer nearby confirmed his side of the story, and the woman was arrested for abandoning and endangering a minor.
  • In Breast to Just Let It Run Its Course, a woman accuses the male submitter of rape when he sees the woman wearing a bra in a woman's clothing store. The flaw is that she stepped out of the dressing room and asked him how she looked without realizing that the submitter was male. She stands by this story when the police come and insists that the submitter raped her even though he did not enter the dressing room or approach her in any way. This, combined with the fact that the submitter was quiet and cooperative, and the fact that there were several witnesses who saw what actually happened, meant that the woman was kicked out of the store, and arrested when she refused.
  • This woman believes that the teenage submitter is dating an older man on the basis that the submitter called him “Daddy.” It turns out that the man the submitter refers to as “Daddy” is, in fact, her father; however, the woman in question refuses to believe it and has to be persuaded to leave by a manager.
  • This old lady doesn’t believe that the submitter is out with her son on maternity leave, since the submitter doesn’t have a “real” job, and instead believes that the submitter kidnapped her son from someone else. She (the submitter) has to hide in the back room with a manager actively stopping the lady until the police arrive to arrest the lady.
  • Several people believe that using any form of hand signals to communicate is “throwing gang signs.” That the people using the hand signals are mute or actually deaf does not matter.
  • This woman accuses an employee of doing the Nazi salute (when the gesture is clearly waving his hand in greeting), and when the employee ends up accidentally demonstrating the salute in question, the woman immediately takes a picture of him and threatens to send the picture to the local news to get the store branded as “Nazi Mart” if her groceries are not free. Instead, the manager angrily kicks her out.
  • This man calls a restaurant to complain about gang activity outside the restaurant. It turns out he's referring to the drive-thru staff.
• Abhorrent Admirer: This guy is called one by one of the workers after revealing he's basically been stalking one of their co-workers.
• Abusive Parents:
  • "That's not true. My mommy and daddy tie me to trees when they get mad."
  • Not caring when your daughter's hands are being burned would count, too.
  • This mother ignored her son's shortness of breath and chest pains for 5 days because she thought he was "just looking for attention".
    • This mother too ignored a store paging her to go to her daughter out in the parking lot for half an hour, because she assumed a massive nosebleed was likewise just an attempt to get attention. Worse, this is apparently a frequent occurrence.
  • This mother, after accidentally locking her one-month-old child and her keys inside her car, actually tries to prevent a police officer from rescuing said child, because the only way to get in involves smashing a window.
  • This mother causes her daughter unnecessary stress and anxiety by lying to her. The family recently moved from Chicago to New Jersey and they told their daughter they were on a vacation as opposed to a permanent move.
  • The third part of this three-in-one story features a mother attempting to trap her son in her custody by buying contracts totalling €300 in his name and then using this as evidence that he's irresponsible with his money. Thankfully, he's having none of it, and it's heavily implied that she fails.
  • This woman fully states that her son "is a toddler now" and that he doesn't eat fruits and vegetables anymore. Apparently, she's willing to let her son slowly kill himself with junk food.
  • This plane passenger, when her four-or-five-year-old daughter crys during a period of turbulence, threatens to push her off the plane if she doesn't be quiet. When other passengers and a flight attendant try and comfort the child, she becomes more unruly and has to be escorted off the plane when they land. The submitter doesn't hear what became of the child, but hopes that the incident led to her being placed in better hands.
• Accentuate the Negative: Reading the site, it could be easy to forget the 99% of customers who don't cause any kind of trouble exist at all. The staff are aware of this and actually put a disclaimer on their zombie comic, acknowledging that a majority of customers are polite and kind.
  • The comments are often guilty of doing this to individual stories, especially towards the submitters. If the submitter does anything the comments decide is even slightly not the 'correct' action, you can expect the comments to ignore pretty much everything else in the story in favor of painting the submitter as being completely at fault and a terrible person. Examples of things that have gotten this response include a submitter asking an employee about a product and trusting the answer (which turned out to be incorrect), an employee being amused by a customer repeatedly using the word 'flabbergasted', and a cashier at a bagel shop not knowing what 'lox' is when they've never heard the term before (it's not even used on the shop's menu).
    • Also, any time a story includes the submitter having a retort, doing something nice, or even just making a joke, expect many commenters to accuse them of being full of themselves and only submitting the stories to stroke their egos.
• Accidental Innuendo: Many times.invoked
  • I'm not a bottom man!
  • I don't think I have ever seen such a nice rack!
  • Oh! I didn't recognize you with clothes on!
  • I'll just hold it open as wide as I can and you shove it in there.
  • Just thinking about S and M.
  • I touch my granddaughter.
  • I can’t even get it up anymore!
  • I can't get it to stay up!
  • The titties you mash to start your engine!
  • ...and what size is your boomstick, sir?
• Accidental Misnaming: “Can I have a ticket to Loogahgbaroogah?”^note They were going Loughborough (pronounced "Luffbruh")
• Acronym Confusion:
  • This customer is looking for the HOBET — the Health Occupational Basics Entrance Test. Unfortunately, the customer isn't specific enough, and as a result the bookstore workers think the customer is looking for The Hobbit, which the customer doesn't seem to have heard of.
  • A patient at a medical office insists that what she wants is an IED (improvised explosive device), when she really means an IUD (intrauterine device). The submitter jokes that "technically" both of these devices could be used for preventing pregnancy.
• Achievements in Ignorance: This guy at a pet store was trying to buy a wild bird that he caught outside, thinking it was a display.
• Actually, I Am Him: A common situation involves a rude customer (or worker on the Not Always Working side) dressing down a "lay" worker and demanding to speak to a manager or the owner, only for the worker they're shouting at to be said owner or manager. The offending customer or worker is almost always humilated and reprimanded.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Occasionally, a prank on a telemarketer will get the telemarketer laughing. Such as when this customer goes all Michigan J. Frog on the telemarketer.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: Probably what happened here. The story caused much scratching of heads as to how anyone could mishear the question "Is that all?" as "Are you South African?". However, as one of the commenters pointed out, it's a bit more plausible if you assume the question was in fact "Is that everything?"^* The story takes place in Australia; try imagining how both phrases would be pronounced in an Australian accent and the editing messed it up.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Used in the titles of many stories on the site, such as "Ruh Roh, Retroactive Rewards Rage", "Posted: Picky Procrastinator Prefers Plethora of Paraphernalia", and "Putting Pickles Before People Will Put You In A Pickle".
• Adorably Precocious Child:
  • This miniature mathematician. Even more so since he showed up right after a man who didn't understand the difference between percents and dollars.
  • Meanwhile, this youngster has remarkably mature taste in theatre.
• Age Insecurity:
  • This patient is calling to set up an appointment and she really doesn't want to say out loud what year she was born because she's calling from her workplace breakroom and doesn't want her co-workers to learn how old she is. When the submitter notes that this isn't an option, she throws a fit.
  "FINE! 1960! I’M F*** SIXTY YEARS OLD! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?! NOW EVERYONE KNOWS! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU MADE ME DO THAT!”
  • This old woman doesn't want to accept a senior discout despite clearly being old enough to qualify.
• Aggressive Categorism:
  • One of the annoying customers doesn't like the music playing from Guitar Hero. She puts the blame for this on teenagers and their modern tasteless music... in spite of the music and the people playing the game being older than her!
  • This grocery store customer assumes that teenagers can't do math without calculators. The best part is that the teenager she asked to do some calculations got the answer right, both with and without a calculator.
• Air Guitar: This customer is disappointed their CD doesn't actually come with one like the ad said.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy:
  • This guy calling a government call centre while drunk tries to impersonate his (female) appointee without bothering to do even a crude impression of her. The submitter is not impressed and eventually hangs up on him.
  • This woman is a perfect demonstration of why drunk shopping is a bad idea. She looks for baking ingredients in a section where clothing and home supplies are, she continually harasses an Asda employee (the submitter) for not helping her even though the story takes place in a Tesco^note the specific names are unmentioned in the story, but it's clear to any British person what they are from the logo descriptions, she pulls a "kids these days" on the 41-year-old submitter, she assaults the submitter by shoving her (the submitter's) trolley, and as if it weren't clear enough that she was drunk, she eventually descends into a meltdown over the submitter supposedly preventing her from baking.
  • This woman, attending a wedding dinner, while drunkenly "playing the 'Oh, wow, look at that!' game" with her grandchild, mistakes a kamado grill for a beehive. She then attempts to enter the kitchen to satisfy the curious and excited child, seeing no safety issue with disturbing a beehive or entering an area full of hot and/or sharp objects, and, upon being stopped by the submitter from entering the kitchen, accuses her of assault. The submitter ends up having to spell out that customers are not allowed in staff-only areas, and the woman's son-in-law has to drag her back to the table.
  • This businessman is implied to be extremely drunk when he demands top-shelf whiskey and shouts over the submitter's attempt to warn him of the price.
  • Initially appears to be the case here, but later turns out to be Roofie-Induced Idiocy: a woman who had her drink spiked with Rohypnol on a night out stumbles into a hotel lobby and is so out of it that she obliviously pees on the floor. Unwilling to get a clearly intoxicated woman branded a sex offender for something she's in no state to realize she's doing, and unaware that she's been roofied, the submitter tries to have her return when she's sober with money for the carpet cleaning as an alternative to pressing charges, then declines even the money when what actually happened comes to light. (Warning: mention of sexual assault)
• All Animals Are Dogs: Meet Dog the cat, who behaves very much like a dog.
• All Animals Are Domesticated:
  • This tourist, upon hearing that they will be able to see bears (among other animals) in the area, asks if they can feed them. Having been told that no, they're wild bears and very dangerous, the tourist asks if they can send their kids to play with the bears. The poster replies drily that that would count as feeding the bears.
  • This tourist, on a boating tour to see wild killer whales, expects to see them putting on a show, as they would at an aquarium. When the tour guide tries to explain that wild animals don't do tricks, the befuddled tourist asks when they feed them. The guide patiently explains that, being wild, they feed themselves, which baffles the tourist still further.
    I thought you said they didn't do tricks?
  • "Oh, he wanted to know what time the dolphins were scheduled to be swimming by.”
  • These French tourists are disappointed when the submitter – a park ranger leading the tour – can't just call forth snakes. Naturally they leave just before the tour group discovers three snakes.
• All Animation Is Disney: Stated outright In-Universe by this customer, who can't understand why a gift shop in Disneyland Paris won't sell him a Shrek toy (and apparently claims to be a Disney bigwig). Naturally, the trope is directly brought up in the comments section.
• All Asians Know Martial Arts: Exploited by a Chinese kid and a Chinese vendor here. Not only that, it's Supernatural Martial Arts.
• All Just a Dream: This man dreams that it's Christmas, and he gets a new car from his grandmother. When he wakes up he believes that the dream actually happened, it's December 26th, and that his new car has been stolen; he only gets a reality check when he goes into a store to buy chocolate milk and finds that all of the bottles appear to be two weeks out of date, at which point the cashier tells him that it's only December 10th.
• All Men Are Perverts: This story has a woman trying to use I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!, and failing hard due to the guy being gay.
• All Women Are Lustful: Who actually cares about the sexual content of a zombie film? At least one person, who declared "We're seeing this!" when informed the movie contained male nudity.
• Almighty Mom: This angry drunk knocks another guy out at a bar, and the bouncers are called, but then his mother steps up and drags him out by the ear.
• Always Chaotic Evil:
  • The man in this story seems to think that the whole point of The Vietnam War was to eradicate the Vietnamese people, and that Americans are conditioned and/or legally required to kill any survivors, even if they're on foreign soil.
  • Then there's people like this, who think "follower of Islam" and "Taliban extremist" are always one and the same.
  • These kids believe this of teenage girls, which their father uses to stop them eating Skittles.
• Ambiguous Gender: In several stories, the gender of the customer/employee/whatever isn't stated until halfway through. Sometimes, it isn't stated at all.
• Ambiguous Syntax: Self-Disservice is a case of a Literal-Minded customer seeing a sign stating "Employees must wash hands", and waiting in the restroom for an employee to wash her hands for her.
• Ambulance Chaser:
  • Inverted here, where a man calls his lawyer before calling an ambulance, while the lawyer in question (the submitter) tries to get him to actually respond to the situation.
  • Played Straight here:
    “If this toy bursts into flames, how am I going to know who to sue?”
• Animals Respect Nature: "The Purple Flower Eater" has the manager at an apartment complex get called by a resident who thinks their neighbors destroyed their flower plantings because they believe the resident is gay. The manager asks if the resident did anything special when they planted, and the resident says they put fish pieces in the soil as fertilizer.
  Manager: ...[Resident], I think that raccoons dug up your flowers to get at the fish.
  Resident: What? No, that can't be. Raccoons are very respectful of nature. They wouldn't do that.
• And a Diet Coke:
  • "You see, my grandkids love it when I make deep-fried Oreos, and I wanted to get the sugar-free kind because they’re healthier to deep-fry than the regular kind."
  • This customer orders a veggie pizza because she's on a diet… but then asks them to hold all the actual vegetarian ingredients and add various meats. The employee just rings it up as a meats pizza with tomatoes, without telling her, because that's what it actually is.
  • Inverted here with a customer who wants the cashier to put more caffeine in a diet drink that has very little to begin with.
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: This story details a woman who, even though she didn't reserve or buy the game online, demands a Pokémon game that the story previously had in stock. At the end of the story, OP reveals that they were the one who bought the game.
• Angrish:
  • Made worse in this story since the customer is not only very upset but also moderately drunk and extremely Welsh.
  • This customer is reduced to "incomprehensible screaming, mixed with overdramatic sobs and heaving breaths" when she doesn't get what she wants.
• Animal Lover: This guy thinks he's one of these, deciding that the best way to deal with a huge tarantula he found in his car is to set it loose in a movie theatre where he reasons it will eat well with all of the food people drop on the floor. He then demands a refund when he finds out that a manager had to kill it when it became aggressive.
• Animal Wrongs Group: One lady at a zoo becomes appalled when some new lions arrive and finds out they're going to be fed meat, and tells the zookeeper that there are plenty of meat substitutes that they could be fed despite the zookeeper's insistence that lions cannot survive on vegetables.
• Animation Age Ghetto: A customer giving grief to another one because he's a young adult buying a Pokémon game. But her buying Grand Theft Auto V for her nine-year-old kid is perfectly fine (at least until the kid drops an F-bomb).invoked
  • Situation Goes South (Park) Very Quickly has a mother taking her son to see South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, is told by the employee that it's NOT made for kids, as it's filled with swearing, offensive humor, and general themes not appropriate for kids… and completely ignores him because it's a cartoon, therefore it's for kids. And, of course, she then places the blame on the employee when it turns out she was wrong and her five-year-old son starts calling her an "uncle fucker" while screaming that he wants to keep watching. For added Irony, this exact scenario is what the film mercilessly lampoons.
  • Inverted by this customer, who is under the impression that The Little Mermaid (1989), of all things, is pornography.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: This case of a teenage girl trying to be an Attention Whore by picking out a different bridesmaid dress for her older sister's wedding to try and upstage her, and throwing a tantrum when she's not allowed to do so. She ends up not being invited to the wedding.
• Apologetic Attacker: This customer apologizes in advance to a worker because she had a bad day and needs to vent it via imprecations. She was still one of the most polite customers that day.
• April Fools' Day:
  • On April 1, 2015, the site posted an image and several stories having to do with zombies. The sister sites did much the same.
  • On April 1, 2016, the site and its sister sites (with the exception of Not Always Hopeless) had fake posts set in the Star Wars universe.
  • On April 1, 2017, some stories on the site and its sister sites were based on Disney movies, like Toy Story, TRON, and Beauty and the Beast.
• A Rare Sentence: "Ma’am, I guarantee you that you will not find a Sasquatch in your mousetrap, in your kitchen.”
• Aristocrats Are Evil: This person is so rude and bossy to the staff, they've taken to calling her "Her Royal Highness."
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • "Well, I'm four. What's your excuse?"
  • "What about your rude, bullshit attitude makes you think we'd even CONSIDER working with you?"
• Armor-Piercing Response:
  • After a salesperson warns the customer's grandchild to stop running in the store before someone gets hurt:
    Customer: Should you be the one telling her that?
    Salesperson: No, you should be, but you're not, so I have to.
  • When a customer balks at paying to replace a broken plate:
    Customer Service: You're absolutely right. You did not break the plate, your son did. He should pay for it.
    Customer: Well, I never! We're leaving!
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • This customer doesn't object to the violence and hooker-murdering in Grand Theft Auto... but heaven forbid her child be exposed to bad language.
  • A Native Canadian wondering why two different types of pizza cost the same when one has fewer toppings: "Your people come here, give diseases, kill us all, steal our land, put our children in residential schools, and now this!"
• Artistic License – Biology: Many stories feature people who just don't quite get how nature works.
  • Chickens don't bleed! But can read — why not, if even turtles do?
  • "No thanks, I'm trying to become a vegetarian and eggs come from cows." — right, those carnivorous, soy cows.
  • "That's a dolphin, dear. It eats people." And maybe swims upriver to mate like other whales. All the way to Salt Lake, Utah, US (and from there, back to Hollywood). Without tails. Then come right out of the water and steal children.
  • Beware of cockatiel or ostrich hatching basilisks. And fire-breathing insectile bearded dragons.
  • Even if you hide extra appendages under your clothes you may still fail to uphold the Masquerade.
  • Flying penguins.
  • Male dogs getting pregnant?
  • This customer thinks that a male cat can nurse a litter of orphaned kittens. Thankfully, the vet hospital recommends a cat foster program.
  • This customer apparently thinks that hamsters are aquatic.
  • This customer insists the dog being brought into the vet for a physical is female, "because that's what I paid for" despite the fact that the dog has a penis and testes, calling those "an ambilical [sic] hernia."
  • The one where a woman bringing her pet to be spayed insists that the clinic should not use anesthesia and instead simply hold down the poor animal while the reproductive organs are surgically removed... because she was awake for her C-section, and that's the same thing, isn't it?
  • When do the deer turn into moose?
  • One from a poster attempting to accuse a customer of this: when someone asks about a raptor show at a zoo, they're not talking about velociraptors!
  • This customer is amused by the thought of coffee coming from beans, and instead thinks that it comes from "rich dirt".
  • This man who doesn't know the difference between diarrhea and constipation.
  • These women somehow mistake a cashier's tongue piercing for herpes.
  • Not only does this woman mistake a horseshoe crab for a stingray, but she's convinced it'll sting her and that the handler is immune. It's in a touch tank at an aquarium.
  • "Chicken is poultry, not meat like beef and pork."
  • Oysters are plants. After all, they grow in the sea, like seaweed.
  • Milk is still dairy no matter what animal it comes from.
  • Coconuts are white?
  • Apparently, according to this kid's parent, snakes are genderless (unlike worms) and have no bones in their bodies.
  • According to this racist moron, eating watermelon (or even artificial watermelon flavoring) somehow causes white people's skin to turn Black.
  • Yes, grass can die, and no, you can't revive it.
  • This book-banning busybody is convinced that among other things, mammals don't exist (cows are animals, not mammals), insects aren't animals, and there are only four classifications – plant, animal, mineral, and human.
  • These parents both mistake the submitter's ferret for other animals. The mother thinks it's a raccoon, while the father thinks it's a weasel (somewhat understandably, them being related species), but when the submitter tries to tell them it's a ferret, he thinks it's a sick parrot.
    Couple's child: “Daddy, is your hearing aid on?”
  • These rather unintelligent Straw Vegetarians with more money than sense have some interesting opinions about snakes eating meat (and for the record, they think the venison their dogs are eating is vegetarian).
    Submitter: “Snakes are not herbivores. They eat meat. They have to. Meat, bugs, eggs; you know, protein. You can’t just throw a carrot in there and expect them to eat it.”
    Customer #1: “I never said they were dinosaurs! I know that they’ve only been around like 300 years or something. Like, when President Lincoln was around they discovered them. But it doesn’t matter. They shouldn’t eat meat. You need to fix that.”
  • “I want this model kitten, but in a different color.”
  • This aquarium visitor was convinced that all whales were male and all dolphins were female and as such is very confused when their tour guide introduces them to a female beluga whale. (Then when the guest's friend sarcastically tells the guest that dolphins are actually just gay sharks, the guest actually believes it.)
    • Similarly, this woman thinks that tigers are "girl lions."
  • Apparently soy milk is cow's milk with the lactose taken out.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: This woman has got it into her head that all acids are corrosive, and is shocked to learn that DNA is an acid. In addition to DNA, a number of commenters point out that the submitter could have used fruit juice as an example.
• Artistic License – Economics: Any entry titled "This Is Why We're In A Recession". There are one hundred entries of the 'series', as of March 2021 (and counting, long after the actual recession ended), as well as one called "This Is Why We're In A Recession, Literally" - which, true to the title, states the exact reason for the recession.
  • And now, there is a story titled This Is Why We're In A Recession, Part We Don't Even Know Anymore.
    • And now: This Is Why We’re In A Recession, Part "It’s Over 9000!"
  • This new Company Director not only refuses to pay the person who does maintenances and updates for his company's website to redesign the website, but he also wants that person to pay back all the money the company paid them for maintaining the website since in his idiotic view, he's still paying that person with the money he's asking from them.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • Many customers assume that we all live in America (or whichever country they're from), or even appear to be unaware that other countries exist. "But... isn't Europe part of the US?"
  • This woman believes that since Ohio isn't in Austin (Texas), it must be overseas.
  • This guy seems to be under the impression that Illinois is a Canadian province.
  • Quite a few stories involve Americans across the border in Canada who are a bit surprised to learn that it isn't exactly like home.
  • This guy, on the other hand, manages to make the distinction between Canada and the US. But not between Canada and the Netherlands.
  • "CANADA IS PART OF THE UNITED STATES; YOU’RE ALL JUST IN DENIAL!" Bizarrely, the person making this claim is not from the U.S., nor even Canada, but New Zealand.
  • This ignorant traveler makes the assumption that since a travel brochure for visiting Quebec was in English, that means it and the rest of Canada are part of America and the people there should be speaking "American" at all times, solely for his convenience.
  • This tourist complains that all the road signs are in Spanish instead of English. The customer service person replies, "We are in Spain, sir. Spanish is our official language."
  • What travel is better — a train to Hawaii or a boat to Atlantis?
  • "You mean Japan's a real place?!" And even Australia isn't in the Middle East.
  • In turn, Europeans sometimes fail to understand that North America is a really big place populated mostly by European immigrants who may be even more into imitation than the rest of humanity.
  • "Oh yeah, I remember now. Vietnam is that little island next to Korea!"
  • Who cares if Utah is landlocked; taunting an officer of the law about whaling is WRONG, according to this eavesdropping customer.
  • This person thinks all of Asia is a single country.
  • This person thinks the Great Lakes are divided into the Great Lakes of Canada, and the Great Lakes of America, and that national borders can't run through lakes.
  • "France ain't in Europe! It's just across the Channel!"
  • This Ohio woman is convinced she actually lives in Iowa.
  • This person doesn't know the difference between states and countries and gets hung up on the word "outside" as in "outside the United States."
  • Apparently, there are times when the capital of Tasmania is closer to the Australian mainland than it usually is. Why? Because, according to this tourist, the island rotates.
  • This wife of a United Airlines pilot is trying to call her husband (who is staying in Amsterdam at the moment), but can't comprehend time difference and that it's the middle of the night in the Netherlands.
  • This gas station customer: "Are you from outside of Canada?" "No, I'm from the US."
  • A tourist attempts to use a Comically Small Bribe (starting from five dollars and going upwards in five dollar amounts) to get a glass-bottomed boat tour operating out of Bermuda to travel to the North Atlantic so he can see the wreck of the Titanic, ignorant both of the distance to the site and the fact that at its depth it cannot be seen from the surface.
  • This guy thought there are no cars in Hawaii and that the Pacific Ocean was a river.
  • This moron tried ordering spaghetti at a Mexican restaurant, and it only gets worse from there.
    Customer: “Shut up! Spaghetti is as American as pizza!”
    Submitter: “Well… you’re not wrong.”
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: The customer in this story doesn't realise that most guns store one bullet in the chamber, and when the submitter asks him to check the chamber, he condescendingly waggles the magazine in her face and, thinking the submitter knows nothing about guns simply because they're a "man thing" after she explains why she wants him to check the chamber, asks for a male clerk in the mistaken belief that a fellow man will back him up. Of course, said male clerk, the submitter's manager, takes her side even before successfully firing the allegedly safe gun at a wall. To compound the customer's idiocy, the gun has a warning to check the chamber stamped on the side.
  • Even pellet guns can be dangerous. The kid shot a hole in the television.
• Artistic License – History:
  • This guy on Vietnam. Remember that war in the 1970s where the US killed every single Vietnamese person? He does.
  • Of course it's not actual live footage of the siege of 1216. Because they only had black and white video back then.
  • According to this tourist, national parks and monuments existed before the US Civil War's battles.
  • These women believe that snakes were only discovered 300 years ago, during the time of Abraham Lincoln.
  • This customer apparently doesn't know the significance of the year 1776 in American history.
  • An American who doesn't know who George Washington is!
  • According to this father, the United States has only fought in one war, and it's never lost any battles or wars at all. Though the submitter's co-worker suspects another trope is at play – and it's implied the father isn't even the first guy with this kind of issue that the co-worker has dealt with.
  • This woman, who was homeschooled, refuses to believe that humans existed before America did, and is going on to homeschool her own children because she doesn't believe what's being taught in public schools.
• Artistic License – Law: Some customers start threatening lawsuits at the drop of a hat and, usually, under the most feeble of pretexts. Sometimes, just wearing a suit will make people think you're a lawyer.
  • According to this woman, fountain pens are illegal for signing documents. Never mind that she ended up signing in pencil, but seriously, since when?
  • This woman repeatedly and loudly insists right into the face of the police officers arresting her that she is perfectly entitled to use her son's credit card, even though he's legally changed his last name it's her mother's prerogative, it is not fraud, and she would be personally telling the judge that the law is wrong. (Unfortunately, the submitter isn't required to provide witness, so they never found out how the story ended.)
  • This Englishwoman visiting Wales claims that Welsh law doesn't apply to her (and to add insult to injury for her, the law she was complaining about would later be duplicated in England).
• Artistic License – Linguistics:
  • "I had Spanish in high school, and all I remember is 'Auf wiedersehen'!"
  • This customer can't tell the difference between Spanish and French. Also throws in some racist douchebaggery for good measure.
  • This guy seems to think "Mexican" is a language. Also, even a casual listener can tell the difference between Navajo and Spanish.
  • E pluribus unum does not translate as "In God we trust".^note Unfortunately, the viewpoint character gets another fact wrong; "E pluribus unum" is not the national motto of the U.S., and has not been since 1956; the current motto is — wait for it — "In God we trust".
  • This girl is trying to ask for a comb while on a class trip to Spain.^note The word for comb is "peine", yet she uses "pene", which refers to… a specific part of the male anatomy.
  • This woman seems to think that Google Translate can make accurate translations in such a way that it defeats the purpose of professional translators.
  • Many Americans can't pronounce Hawaiian names even though it's a mostly phonetic language.
  • Regardless of what language you speak, numbers are pretty much the same as they're a universal concept. Not to this woman apparently.
• Artistic License – Medicine:
  • This woman actually wants surgery to remove her cholesterol as opposed to changing her diet.
  • “Ma’am, the glasses make your vision better, but only if you are wearing them.”
  • “I’m actually really worried for her children’s education. Especially since she thinks Jesus had a Thanksgiving regardless that it was more than a thousand years after he died…”
• Artistic License – Music:
  • This customer, who can't tell a saxophone from a violin, and doesn't seem to know the meaning of the word "instrument".
  • This guy doesn't understand how music stores work. He's convinced that music stores only make money from selling parts such as guitar strings and plectrums. He tried to steal an expensive electric guitar because of his stupidity. He ended up getting arrested by a regular (an off-duty cop) and caused $3,000 worth of damage to a $15,000 instrument. To make matters worse, he's apparently a repeat offender.
  • This guy doesn't know the difference between an electric guitar and a bass guitar and also thinks that "rhythm guitar" is a type of guitar as opposed to a style of playing.
• Artistic License – Pharmacology:
  • This guy asking for a non-drowsy OTC sleeping agent. Sure, buddy.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • Can you turn the photo around so I can see that guy's face?
  • Maybe it will weigh less tomorrow.
  • This customer specifically wanted a soda with ice on the bottom. Naturally, the request was impossible to fulfill.
  • Potatoes will bruise apples, even when the apples are above them. Lettuce on top is fair game, though.
  • This customer thinks items weigh more when scrunched up than when they're looser. To compound her mistake, she uses the analogy of a ball of yarn weighing more when it's soaked in water than otherwise; while this is true, it's not because the water causes it to compact better, but because the weight of the water is added to the weight of the yarn.
  • A ladder to space.
  • "Just pour a bunch of hot water in it!" Into a pool that has a volume of half a million gallons of water? Yeah, lady, it's not that simple.
  • This person doesn't seem to understand how a roulette wheel works.
  • This customer had to ask if a bag filled with deflated balloons contained helium.
  • These friends buy a baguette from a bakery and the baguette proceeds to fall out through the bottom of the paper bag (the bags aren't the highest quality to begin with). They attempt to put the baguette into the bag through the hole in the bottom. Just because the bottom happened to rip open, that doesn't automatically seal up the other end, as the submitter puts it.
  • This woman wants a cup of coffee with infinite sugar in it.
  • This guy fails to understand that a drill pump will ignite the gasoline in his car, regardless of whether the drill is electric or not.
  • This woman claims there was a button battery in her coffee. She warmed up the coffee in the microwave, so if there really was a battery there, she'd likely not have a microwave, let alone her life.
  • Many people do not seem to understand how escalators work. Many injuries and incidents later, the submitter is baffled people are that stupid.
  • This couple was trying to set up a birthday cake in their hotel room. It was going well until they decided to use a sparkler as a lighter. They set the duvet and bed on fire, tripped the fire alarm and the man suffered fourth-degree burns.
  • Turn the ocean off!
  • This guy claims that derby cars run at 5000 degrees Fahrenheit (which, as noted in-story, is halfway to the temperature of the surface of the sun and would destroy a car if it really ran that hot).
  • This person plugged a power bar into itself, apparently assuming this would somehow generate infinite amounts of electricity out of nowhere. When the sales assistant finally manages to get through to her that it doesn't work that way, she not only returned the bar, but the TV she'd been planning to run on it "to save electricity".
  • This woman at a jewelry store seems to completely mentally shut down when she discovers that, no, it's not possible to create a much larger diamond by simply merging two smaller diamonds together. Maybe she's been watching too much Steven Universe.
  • These parents let their sons go tubing down a major US river (heavily implied to be the Mississippi River) under the assumption that it would eventually bring them back around to where they started after a while (instead of going and going until it gets to the Gulf of Mexico). When they realize that isn't the case, the mom's eyes go wide and they promptly flee to go find them. This tourist on a river tour elsewhere evidently thought the same exact thing, much to the chagrin of the tour guide and their photographer.
  • This woman, buying slices of Swiss cheese at a deli, demands that the worker account for the holes in the cheese, because she's "not paying for something I'm not getting!" Apparently, she thinks that the scale will somehow include the weight of the cheese that would have been where the holes are.
  • This entitled plane passenger thinks that being in first class should exclude him from being affected by turbulence, and demands that the pilots fly in a way that turblence is only felt by other parts of the aircraft.
• Asbestos-Free Cereal: "Organic" baking soda falls into this category, at best.
• The Atoner:
  • A customer comes to a store to confess to having stolen some merchandise and offers to pay for it.
  • This couple does their same, to show their kid to fix errors in life.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: This customer accidentally deletes a shortcut on their computer, so they're directed into the recycle bin to restore it. The mention of 'recycling bin' prompts the customer to empty the trash in their bathroom, at which point they get distracted by how dirty their bathroom is so they decide to mop, all while tech support is still on the line.
• Attention Whore: Or what's the point of getting that hairstyle if nobody tells you how amazing it is...
• Authentication by Newspaper: Used to foil a scammer here.
• Auto Erotica: A Malaproper gives this kind of impression, to the horror of the manager: "I just really need to get my car sodomized."
• Ax-Crazy:
  • This guy comes into a salon wielding a hammer and demands to see a specific person. When the receptionist tells him nobody with that name works there, the man starts swinging the hammer and screaming about his ex-wife taking his kids. The police end up hauling him away as he continues ranting and raving about how his ex-wife took his kids and how her boss would fire her. It later turns out that the ex-wife never even worked at that salon.
  • It's mentioned at the end of this story that the customer involved would be arrested for stabbing a delivery driver for not bringing her a Coke.

B

• Bad Boss: The owner of this fast food restaurant has no regard at all for the employees who were put through a terrifying ordeal that resulted in the destruction of half the building, and his only comment is "business is business" and how they should be reopen for that business by the weekend. (This is after he insisted the location work overnight with a skeleton crew, despite being located in an area rough enough that customers brazenly attack the staff during the daytime.) The two employees promptly quit.
• Bad Influencer: This restaurant thought of a novel way to get rid of or tame Small Name, Big Ego "influencers" who just want free food by setting up a series of signs explaining the rules they must follow. Of the six the poster noted, three are explicitly shown: "If you have to say you are an influencer, you are not an influencer", "An influencer has over 1,000,000 followers", and "Threats of negative reviews before you've tried the food will result in a ban".
• Bad Liar: Often employed by someone who tries to lie about something or a situation, but the person they are trying to lie to knows that the other is not being truthful if not outright lying. Common stories include customers claiming a product is defective, often when it was clear the customer either abused the item and/or tried to use it for a purpose it was not intended; customers/clients who purchased a basic level of service and then either 1. claimed they didn't get their level of service (when in fact they did), or 2. claimed they didn't get something that was included in a more premium package (but believed they were entitled to it); and so forth. Examples:
  • This doctor was way too eager to try to throw off the stop setter, seeing how all the sentences contradict each other. Not to mention that the stop setter hadn't actually gotten around to mentioning the dogs yet.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Many stories that take place at a veterinary office or pet store.
  • This woman is willing to kill newborn puppies with lethal amounts of flea medicine so they don't infect her purebred Yorkshire terrier. She also calls them 'ugly' and claims that 'mixed breeds are the devil's work'.
  • This horrible woman. When a pet store owner informs her that they don't sell feeder mice for snakes, she gets her boyfriend/husband to purchase a pet mouse from the store to use as a feeder anyway, then, after the snake refuses it, takes photos of herself abusing the mouse just to spite the store owner, including ones that show her dangling it over boiling water, holding it above her dog's mouth, using it as a ball in a game of catch, and throwing it in the toilet. Thankfully, the mouse survives and the submitter keeps it as a pet, while the woman is arrested, and ultimately sentenced to community service and a month behind bars.
  • This nurse, who hates bats and considers them filthy and diseased, admits that when she was young, she and her friends made a game out of knocking bats out of the air with badminton racquets and stomping on them.
  • In this story, a woman roughly drags her puppy around on a choke chain and kicks it when it won't get out of her car. Additionally, her dialogue implies that she was only interested in breeding it for money rather than actually caring for it. She then thinks the submitter 'hexed' her dog when the submitter got the puppy to behave just by being nice and understanding. The woman is arrested for animal abuse and the submitter's dad's girlfriend kept the puppy (unsurprisingly, the dog's issues were mostly related to being dragged around on a choke chain, not its attitude) and treated the poor thing much better
  • This woman ends up getting her son's bird's wings clipped. The issue is that she refuses to allow the bird ample time to heal (there was some bleeding), but she tries to blame the store for "traumatizing" the bird. The woman is definitely to blame for her stupidity.
  • This woman is at a garden store and is purchasing a box. The worker asks what the box is being used for and the woman responds: decomposing. What? It turns out that her dog is dead and she's planning on using it as compost to which she asks if it's legal to compost pets. She said that the dog was useless in real life but can be useful in death. It gets worse though. It becomes apparent that she has the dead dog in a bag in her other hand.
  • Zig-zagged in this story, where the man has evidently never bred (nor even owned) dogs before; he walks into the pet store looking for "puppy formula" (which does exist but is relatively uncommon) for his seven-week-old puppies, convinced that they need to be exclusively milk-fed, citing an unknown article on Google that says that dogs can't eat solid food until they're two years old (the submitter confirms they can eat solid food as early as four weeks old). The man wants the puppy formula because the mother has been milked dry from the unnecessarily long weaning period and he also asks for cream because her nipples are bleeding. As the submitter puts it, "some people shouldn't be allowed to have pets." On one hand, unlike the previous examples there's no malice here (in fact, he's trying to do what he thinks he's supposed to); on the other hand, he is harming them and seems to be oblivious to it, which doesn't exactly speak positively of his character. It doesn't help that the story cuts off without revealing how the man reacted to being told he was wrong, when said reaction would be a major indicator of his character: a horrified reaction, for instance, would suggest he really did want to do the right thing and was just led astray by bad advice, while doubling down and insisting he was right would suggest something entirely different.
  • A customer in this story accuses their paper delivery person of kicking their dog. It turns out that not only was the accusation entirely made up for racist reasons, the customer is the bad person who once had seventeen dogs living in squalid conditions removed from their house, and has a court order banning them from owning a dog in the first place as a result of that.
• Bad Review Threat: A bread-and-butter trope, often attempted by customers who believe they are entitled to a certain level of service. Often includes impossible demands and accompanied by threats to either report the "errant" employee to his/her bosses (with hopes the employee will lose his/her job) and/or write a negative review to a review website if their demands aren't met.
  • One restaurant put up a placard saying threats of bad reviews before food is served will result in an immediate ban (one of six such signs meant to drive off would-be influencers trying to get a free lunch).
  • This customer cuts loose on the poster and their manager for daring to put soy milk in with the other vegan foods, insisting that soy milk comes from cows. Finally they stomp off, invoking this trope:
    Customer: I’m going to complain online that [Store] hates vegans! I’ll put [Store] on blast on Facebook and Instagram!
    Manager: Make sure you explain exactly why about the soymilk! I can’t wait to read the comments!
• Badass Adorable: Anytime a young child sets an adult (who should know better) straight or comes to someone's rescue. Such as this one.
  • The martial arts student in this story flattens a man who was sexually harassing some teenage dance students, then follows up by kicking him in the crotch until he's too crippled by pain to move. Then asks if she can buy an ice cream.
    "Oh, little karate kid is here. Be careful and don’t break a nail."
• Badass Bystander: In this story, a belligerent customer goes from taking a swing at the cashier to lying unconscious, and she has no idea what happened. When he regains consciousness, neither does he, claiming the cashier attacked him. They have to check the CCTV in slow motion to see "a tiny, middle-aged Asian woman" jump up, slam his head into the counter, and then get back into line as if nothing had happened.
• Badass Teacher: This editor's wife. Primary school trainer and judo master all in one? Why not?
• Bait-and-Switch: While many stories take the consumer fraud definition (advertising a service or merchandise to entice customers, then falsely claiming said items had sold out and then offering an alternative at an increased price), there are also as many stories where a writer leads the readers and/or other characters to believe one thing is happening, only for something else – often unexpected – to actually happen. Examples:
  • A narrator-based example here. A lifeguard disciplines some kids who are acting up, and the girl yells that she's going to tell her father. True to her word, the father comes up, described as "rather large and intimidating". You might expect him to yell at the lifeguard something like "how dare you talk to my little girl like that"... but nope, he just apologizes for his daughter's behavior, and furthermore tells the head lifeguard about the whole thing, which results in an official commendation for the lifeguard.
  • In this story, a server, who was wearing a bisexual pride bandanna, comes in from the patio, which is occupied by a family of five as well as one other guy sitting alone, visibly upset and taking off the bandana. When the mother of the family comes in visibly angry, the hostess expects that she's going to throw a fit about the server's sexuality. However, it turns out she was actually there to complain about the other customer harassing the server and then cursing out one of her kids for objecting. The bigot was kicked out and the family was given free desserts.
  • Two notices on a library bulletin board advertise the same woman's services as a psychic and a massuese. Two old ladies complain ... but not about the ad the librarian assumes. They don't care if she's a sex worker, they just think she's a Phony Psychic.
  • This story looks like it's going to be about a passive-aggressive Heteronormative Crusader complaining about "His and His" and "Hers and Hers" towel sets. It turns out that not only has the guy seemingly never heard of same-sex couples before, but once it's explained to him, he seems to be in favour of the concept.
  • This restaurant story looks at first like a textbook case of oblivious/indulgent parents not doing anything while their kids make a mess. Then, when the family is done eating, without the staff saying a word, the family quickly clean everything up and even return all the furniture they had used back to where it was before they moved it (they had pushed several tables together and grabbed chairs along with them).
• Based on a Great Big Lie: At least, this is what you hope about some of the entries; but it's impossible to know exactly how many are fakes.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: This idiot is the victim of a particularly bizarre one — a person in plain clothes barged into their home, took their DVD player on the basis that the company they work for no longer sells DVD players^note please note that retail companies don't confiscate discontinued items, and even if they did want discontinued items back for valid reasons — for instance, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7's exploding batteries — they wouldn't barge into people's homes unannounced, and directed the victim to a company that never sold DVD players in the first place. The submitter's coworker advises the idiot to call the police.
• Beast in the Building:
  • A substantial amount of stories involve customers sneaking in their pets – despite rules to the contrary.
  • This drunk tries to circumvent drunk driving charges while buying extra beer by riding a horse into a convenience store.
  • In a bizarre example, this guy leaves his dog in a university library, where it defecates everywhere and leads staff on a wild chase. He seems to have no idea why it's a problem.
  • A more innocuous case in this story, where a lamb escapes from a bag that a hotel guest had asked OP to watch. While people are a bit bemused by the sudden appearance of a lamb in a city hotel, no one seems able to be too upset because it's so dang cute (as well as obviously harmless), and the customer is apologetic about the escape attempt and not explaining the situation before asking OP to watch the "bag". It turns out the lamb was born premature and was being transported to a specialist to receive better care.
  • A hotel guest ordering room service and leaving his door open results in a bear helping itself to the food.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • A man in full prayer garb refuses to pay for the pornographic television on his hotel bill. He claims that he flipped to that channel "by accident", despite the bill stating that he watched at least two hours of said porn. He continues to rant that a religious man like him would never willingly expose himself to such filth, but eventually gives up and angrily throws a wad of money at the receptionist. The next day, the religious man calls back with another complaint, but the receptionist simply says that all pornographic channels are now locked so he will no longer "be exposed to such filth", just like he asked.
  • This woman demands a full refund from a website because they "lied to her" and "are an unethical company" …because they sent her an email stating that they were able to get the delivery done two days early. The woman not only demands a refund, but states that she does want the delivery early, and that she doesn't want to give it back in any way. When the submitter refuses (since the submitter notes that the woman has given no reason to give a refund and that the call is being recorded, preventing any dispute from the bank), the caller hangs up and then calls back 29 times to get the submitter fired. The company gives her the refund, and then redirects the order back to them, blocks her account, address, credit card number, phone number, and IP address from being able to order from the system, and bans her from the site.
  • "I demand to be refunded everything I paid for my phone line during your outage!" "I've applied a refund of 6¢ to your account."
  • Combined with Mugging the Monster here. The rude customer here first throws his ID at the clerk (it lands on the desk), and when offered a manager or supervisor, instead insists on speaking to (read: shouting at and insulting) the housekeeping staff, who were short-handed due to a flu outbreak. He quickly changes his mind when housekeeping arrives and has heard how [Clerk] was treated.
  • This entitled woman goes to a grocery store with a long list of generic groceries^note including a listing simply reading "snacks" and demands that the staff do her shopping for her because she's in a hurry. Two and a half hours later, the staff have gotten her shopping… but since she failed to specify brands, they've gathered the most expensive brand of everything, bringing her total up to $1,400.
  • This hotel, owned by a person who is very strict about hygiene, has a policy in place for guests who can't wear masks during the COVID-19 Pandemic for health reasons. It boils down to reducing the guest's contact with other people via having curbside check-in, the restaurant's food being for in-room dining only, no housekeeping for the entire stay, and being fine with the customer wearing a face-shield instead. One of the policy's side effects is driving away people who are only pretending to have health reasons so they can get away with not wearing a mask for ideological reasons, as they usually take issue with some combination of not having any housekeeping, not being able to dine in the restaurant and being expected to wear a face-shield.
  • A judge at a 4H fair's vegetable contest is harassed by a contestant's mother, insisting that her son's tomatoes are not second-place tomatoes, and the judge will change the ribbon because she's married to the fair board secretary and always gets her way. So the judge exchanges the second-place ribbon for a "participation" ribbon, meaning that instead of winning second place, the son's tomatoes don't place at all (though he doesn't visibly care).
  • This customer who may or may not be claiming a medical condition to get a burger with no salt (he has rejected a burger in which only the patties were made without salt beforehand) in a restaurant that takes such things seriously, gets an extremely bland burger without any components that contain salt, which makes it two salt-free patties wrapped in lettuce. He's not pleased at all and asks where the bun and other toppings are.
  • When a plane runs into a problem right before taking off, all passengers are transferred to other planes, with priority given to those who need to make a connection. The narrator is among the last handful to be taken to a new flight alongside a couple who had the first row in coach. The man is furious over the change and demands to have the same seats on the new flight. He and his wife get them. The rest of the group, narrator included, gets upgraded to first class.
  • A customer complaining about the wait in a short-staffed fast-food place says the workers should go get "real jobs". He is then told the place is short-staffed because people did exactly that.
  • Several stories (such as this one) involve racist call centre customers refusing to speak to the Operator from India (or the Phillippines) and demanding to be put through to an American call centre. The operator does just that ... but they're meant to deal with Spanish language calls.
• Beat: Sometimes precedes a customer realizing his or her own stupidity. For example, after failing primary school level math problems.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Ask in the nearest bookstore. In the history section. Also, the role of Captain America in World War II is sadly understated.
  • Batman hides out in Tennessee these days. Thankfully, this came from a child.^note The BellSouth HQ building in Nashville has two pointed spires which have made the locals give it the moniker of "the Batman building"; this may be what he's referring to.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Tons of people who would give even Pat Robertson a run for his money in the sheer insanity department, if not the asshole department. Half of them go into Fridge Horror because they are showing signs of dementia and/or Alzheimer's.
  • Then there are the more benign, but still insane, ones like this person, who is the polar opposite of a young-earth creationist.
  • A fundamentalist alum of a certain college tries her hardest to "justify" the stupidity. "You don't need freedom of speech if you let Jesus think for you."
    • In a similar vein, when complaining about the Lunar New Year in the belief that the Western New Year is a Christian holiday as stated in the Bible, "When you have Jesus, you don't need to think."
  • Those people have nothing on this lady, who, because of her beliefs, winds up falling for a Paper-Thin Disguise, half of which wasn't even part of the disguise.
  • How about this lady? She doesn't seem to understand the point of there being other religions besides Christianity.
  • For this customer, a "photo converter" apparently means converting "devil worshippers" into Christians.
  • And for this customer, computer wizards are as vile as "real" wizards are, even if they're only connected by name.
  • This person bought a toy sword, armor, and shield set for their son, and demanded a refund for it. What happened? The son started play-acting like any kid with a toy sword, armor, and shield would do. The customer is convinced that means the toy is possessed, rather than believing that their son was just being normal.
  • This mother believes her son had a seizure, despite the son himself admitting he was doing something else, because "he's a good Christian boy and would never touch himself in such a horrible way". She adamantly demands that he be taken to the ER and the EMTs present eventually relent. Hope the medical bills and trauma were worth it, lady.
  • A customer believes her church when they say Doctor Who is evil. Somehow, this entitles her to demand the person watching an episode of the show, on their smartphone, with headphones on, and otherwise minding their own business, to turn it off. Apparently, even with that level of non-disturbance, she still felt threatened by it.
  • This lady somehow can't even tell the difference between a star shape and a pentagram.
  • Inverted here, where a customer asks the cashier (who is wearing a small cross necklace) about her religious beliefs, and then goes off about how Christians have "centuries of blood" on their hands and demanding a refund simply because that cashier touched the drink he ordered.
  • Played straight VS Averted squares off here, where a lady tries to use religion to discriminate against a man born of an Islamic family (who himself is not even Muslim, but Catholic), who explodes on her with a massive "The Reason You Suck" Speech. Though the end of the story implies she was just a dime-store bigot using religion as a justification for it, since she later threatens violence against a Japanese exchange student presumably working his way through college (which gets her arrested).
  • This woman demands that a store take down signs wishing people a happy Diwali because apparently acknowledging religious holidays other than the ones she observes is "racist".
  • Other religions are starting to get in on the act. A woman in clearly Islamic garb walks into a bakery and orders a ham and cheese sandwich. The cashier, knowing Muslims can't eat pork, asks her if she is, in fact, a Muslim, as ham is made of pork. She flies into a rage and accuses the submitter of being racist by questioning her religion and demands that he get her the ham sandwich. Once she gets the sandwich and bites into it, she brings it back to the cashier demanding that he be fired for giving her the sandwich with pork that she ordered. When the manager arrives on the scene and learns what's going on, she begins shouting at him in Arabic. He says something back to her in Arabic that causes her to become very angry and storm out. What did he say?
    "You clearly have ears and a brain, but it will take you years to learn how to use them."
  • This woman thinks that a guy got injured because he said a swear word, and not because of the paint can that fell on his head which caused him to swear in the first place.
  • Another self-proclaimed Muslim here. The caller complains about a sandwich having a "bacon" taste, saying that Muslims can't eat pork, and accusing the workers of not cleaning the grill before swapping out meats... when ordering a sausage and egg sandwich. Unless specified otherwise, like "turkey sausage," sausage is also made of pork.
  • This customer seems to believe math and money are the work of the Devil, although the submitter suspects he could have been using that as an excuse to get free stuff.
  • This woman believes anyone who works in retail is part of the "servant class", whose entire purpose is to serve people like her for life and are not allowed to rise from their station. The worker who's serving her, a university student, is not only shocked but offended that she tells him to stop studying and stay working retail, and asks for someone else to cover the lady's purchase while he calms down.
  • This Mormon customer seems to think all employees who work at the Marriott Hotel chain are all Mormons and take orders from the Mormon Church. He goes mad at the submitter, a Marriott employee, for breaking Mormon religious rules by drinking beer even though the submitter is not a Mormon which the customer refuses to believe. And when the customer demands a manager punish the submitter, he freaks out when he learns the manager is an Arab Muslim, accusing everyone in the hotel as heathens before presumably leaving the hotel to find another one that matches his criteria.
  • This woman believes that God will protect her from COVID-19, an airborne disease potentially affecting every single human being on the planet regardless of religious piety, and cataracts, a genetic condition that runs in her family. The Mormon doctor, however, defies it.
    Doctor: “Well, God wrote cataracts into your DNA just like he wrote nearsightedness into your DNA. You’re developing cataracts.”
  • This person tells a doctor asking if they've had a COVID-19 vaccine that God is their vaccine, and then complains about a cough apparently resulting from COVID-19.
  • This lady sends a complaint to a convenience store demanding an employee be fired for not going to church with her, because that, and him being unwilling to disclose details of his private life to a perfect stranger, apparently means he's an atheist.
  • This grandmother tries to prevent her daughter from picking up prescriptions for her son because "Jesus is the cure for all ills!"
    Manager: “Then please, ma’am, tell me, when is he going to publish his research?”
  • This mother takes her kids to the zoo and asks an employee to point her exclusively toward the animals that mate for life because she wants to raise her children with Christian values and doesn't want them to "fall in love with an animal that’s also a complete sl*t." She winds up discounting penguins from this category because she "heard they're gay now," and on being told that lions aren't included because they're not monogamous like in The Lion King, she's aghast.
    Mother: Noah should have kept some of these animals out of the ark!
  • This customer's objection to using sporks.
    “The spork is ‘the devil’s utensil’ because it is the amalgamation of the masculine fork and the feminine spoon and is trying to blur gender lines in society.”
  • This woman seems to think every video game ever is blasphemous since "only God can work his will through another, and when a person does it, they’re pretending to be God!”
  • This woman asks the pet store to pray for their fish, thinking that will somehow miraculously heal from being on death's door.
  • This client refuses to pay a bill purely because the invoice number happens to be 666.
  • Played With in this story. The submitter's heart fills with dread when he sees three older gentlemen wearing large wooden crosses entering a planetarium show about the formation of the universe and the beginnings of life on Earth. Sure enough, two of the men hastily decamp the building after the show, but the submitter is pleasantly surprised when the third expresses enjoyment with the show, and enthusiastically asks for directions to the dinosaur exhibit.
  • One or more parishioners of this church keeps "tipping" waiters at a nearby restaurant popular with the congregation with fake notes that turn out to contain only bible verses or pleas to attend church. Eventually they accrue nearly $500 in bogus tips (and one dine-and-dash variant when someone "paid" their bill with one of those tracts), and the restaurant gets so fed up that they ban the entire congregation. When word reaches the pastor, he is not happy, and (while leaving the parishioner anonymous) gives them a "Reason You Suck" Speech to the entire congregation followed by a Suspiciously Specific Sermon on the sinfulness of disguising greed as charity. Later, the submitter notes that the congregation's resident Holier Than Thou "mean girls" were subsequently halved in number, indicating the culprit was one or more of them.
  • This bigoted customer thinks the (raised Catholic) submitter is part of some terrorist "Muslim brotherhood" called Etihad and storms out. Really, the submitter was wearing a Manchester City uniform.^note Etihad Airways sponsors Man City's jerseys)
  • This grandfather tries to buy a video game for his grandson, but turns down most of them for being too "ungodly." Ratchet & Clank? He's holding a ray-gun – too violent! Gran Turismo? Luxury cars are a sign of greed – a sin! The game he winds up picking in the end? God of War – it has "god" in the title after all!
  • When the submitter mentions their restaurant has a "food bible" that contains information about ingredients, this customer storms out, saying she "won't be eating around such blasphemers."
• Believing Their Own Lies: Some obvious scammers manage to be so convinced they're right that they're genuinely outraged when called on it.
  • This customer, trying to get a discount by claiming to be the father of an employee, names the woman who's actually serving him. When she calls him on this, he first accuses her of lying and then, even more bizarrely, says "I can't believe my own daughter won't give me a discount!"
  • This man attempts to return a Twilight (2005) book to the bookstore, since there aren't any pictures and his four year old can't read it. When the OP notes that it's a Twilight book, he claims that it's a Peppa Pig book. The submitter realizes that the man had taped a piece of paper saying "Peppa Pig" over the title. Even so, the man refuses to budge to the point where he tries to attack the submitter, requiring the police to be called.
• Benevolent Boss: Many of the managers included in these stories fall under this trope by backing up their beleaguered employees; those who don't usually end up on Not Always Working instead.
• Berserk Button: For a good number of the customers, not getting their way is enough to get them to fly off the handle, sometimes to the point of attacking someone.
  • A woman who thought she got shortchanged proceeds to light a cigarette and set the merchandise on fire only to realize she had the correct change and runs away.
  • This man attempts to donate some parrots to a second-hand store because he doesn't want to deal with cleaning the mess they make anymore. The man gets angry when they refuse to take them and then proceeds to open the cage and release the birds. Needless to say, the birds proceed to literally rain hell by shitting all over the store. After the parrots are finally put back in the cage, the manager has to call an animal shelter and the employees are stuck for over three hours past closing, cleaning up the mess.
  • This teenage boy gets caught trying to shoplift a movie. The LP officer catches him and his parents proceed to attack the officer when they hear their son shriek. They all proceed to get into a huge wrestling fight and security ends up arresting all three of them!
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • As phrased by her toddler: "Uh oh. Mama MAD."
  • This guy all but outright calls himself a Gentle Giant, but all of that goes away the moment he learns that a rude misogynist insulted one of his senior coworkers. He promptly sends the guy running out of the store with his tail between his legs.
  • OP's sister in this story is described as being one of the most loving people to ever live, outright saying that she doesn't curse or raise her voice. However, she also hates bullies and when she sees a man verbally abuse a cashier with Down Syndrome, she verbally dresses him down and shames him in front of everyone, again, all without cursing or raising her voice.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: This coworker is small, timid, and babyfaced. But when a customer twice his size violently threatens him, the customer winds up leaving the store with a shattered hip and two cracked ribs.
• Big Brother Is Watching: This woman apparently believes traffic cameras work in this manner.
• Big Damn Heroes: Many stories involve another person stepping in to stand up to particularly nasty customers, whether it be a boss, a coworker, or even a fellow customer.
• Big Eater:
  • The everlasting supper. And apparently he ate almost everything (though it did take him four hours).
  • "How many people are you feeding!?" "I’m hungry!"
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: A customer complains that a store's condoms are "too small" for her husband, and a gay male cashier, after demonstrating he can fit them over his arm, asks if he can be introduced to the husband.
• Big "WHY?!": In this story, the submitter transfers a particularly abrasive Mood-Swinger caller. They later receive an email from a rep in another part of the state with only one word:
  WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?
• Bilingual Backfire:
  • Happens twice over in one story: not only does the subject of the remark understand, so does a nearby bartender, making this a double backfire.
  • Happens here as well.
  • And here, with a side of misogyny.
  • A railway fare-dodger tries to weasel out of paying for his ticket by pretending not to speak English and responding to the ticket inspector in the Black Speech of Mordor. Unfortunately for him the submitter knows the quote and is able to call him out. (The inspector, meanwhile, doesn't appear to have heard of Mordor at all.)
• Binary Suns: Surprisingly enough, our solar system doesn't have this feature, to the dismay of a tourist who traveled to Norway to see the "midnight sun" but didn't quite understand what that meant.
• Birds of a Feather: A rather disgusting example here. A woman urinates on the floor and smears her feces onto several books when she doesn't get her way. Her boyfriend does the same when the police arrest her.
• Black Comedy: This.
  Old Customer: I need to return this.
  Submitter: Okay. Was there something wrong with it?
  Old Customer: No, but it says that it lasts for 14 years. I’m not going to live that long!
• Bland-Name Product: With very, very, very few exceptions, any trademarked item that gets namedropped in a story will have that name excised in favor of a generic "[Brand Name]" or "[Item]" or similar label. Sometimes people in the comments are able to figure out company names and locations from the very few context clues provided in the story.
  • An example of exception is here, where both Bath & Body Works and Bed Bath & Beyond are mentioned by name due to a customer conflating the two names — the story would not make sense if the names were rendered generic.
  • Another exception can be found here, with KFC and Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen being directly named for similar reasons.
  • Another exception is here wherein Wendy's and McDonald's are directly named due to the story's premise of a person entering a Wendy's, seeing the cartoon Wendy on the restaurant's logo, and inexplicably coming to the conclusion that she is intended to be a transgender Ronald McDonald.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Numerous accounts of customers trying very poorly to bullshit their way out of paying for something, as well as employees going along with crazy or stupid customers' misconceptions or conspiracy theories in order to get out of the conversation.
  • Most complaints filed during or after stories are also wildly embellished. For example, cashier refusing to take a return on a $3 kazoo because it was not defective as the customer claimed somehow means the cashier "threw a kazoo at her", and a dollar-off coupon being invalidated due to the customer returning the goods that got her that coupon means the cashier "threatened the life of her and her child" and "chased her out of the store".
  • This bizarre customer keeps insisting that his fence is taller than when he last said it, going from five feet to ten feet to sixteen feet in one exchange.
• *Bleep*-dammit!: NSFW language in stories is censored, but not necessarily all of a compound word. Exactly what gets censored and how (e.g. "ass-h***" versus "a**hole") varies, due to the number of different submitters' styles.
  • This story censors a Swedish profanity.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: There's a whole category for it - "Lost In Translation".
• Bluff the Impostor: This anti-masker continually attempts to ask the employees of the store taunting and stupid questions about the state’s mask mandate, clearly attempting and failing to get a rise out of them so he can claim his rights are being infringed upon. He then changes tactics and brutally insults the submitter before taking out his phone and asking if the OP yelled at him for “exercising his rights” by not wearing a mask. The OP simply asks the anti-masker if he seriously just insulted someone in hopes that he could film them … and then notes the security camera about ten feet away and bluffs that it records audio. The anti-masker, in defeat, leaves the building.
• Body in a Breadbox: This library is very chagrinned to find someone has stuffed a dead bird in one of their books.
• Book Safe: What this customer apparently was looking for.
• Bothering by the Book: This chef shuts down a homophobic bigot by listing off a good half dozen Bible verses that she failed to follow.
  • "I'm so sorry, but the line died unexpectedly. Would you like to listen to it again?" (the customer had hung up in the middle of the recording that disproved their claim)
• Bowdlerize:
  • Possibly the only site on the Web that stars out "hell" and isn't explicitly Christian. Martha Stewart uses saltier language. You get used to it, though.
    • It got worse after the switch to Disqus, as afterward swears in comments were as heavily censored as in the stories.
    • When this story was originally published in 2008, the rude woman in it was referred to as "Movie Set B*tch," which was eventually changed to "Movie Set Worker."
  • This customer asks for a version of the Bible that she can give to her kid that doesn't have Jesus die in the end.
    Customer:“Ugh! Fine. It’s not ideal, but I’m going to have to just buy this and skip over the parts I don’t like!”
    Manager: “I’m pretty sure that’s how most Christians use the Bible anyway!”
• Brand Name Takeover: "By 'Coke' I meant 'soda!'" This is actually a regular part of the dialect in parts of the American South, especially the Atlanta area.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • A policeman's reasons for arresting this guy: "Well, to start with, you’ve given us false details. Following that, you caused an accident and refused to settle this correctly whilst clearly being to blame. Following that, we have done a check on your vehicle and it’s uninsured. Also, you don’t have a license and you’re wanted for two hit-and-runs."
  • "It's 'D' as in 'dog', 'A' as in August, 'I' as in igloo, 'J' as in junkie..."
  • "Just getting the necessities, y'know?" Like groceries... and handcuffs.
  • This exchange, which occurs as a boy's birthday party is given a tour of the projection room and the boys state what they can see from it:
  Boy 1: Look! There's my mom!
  Boy 2: This [theater] has previews!
  Boy 3: This [theater showing a sex scene] has BOOBIES!!
  (We managed to distract them with a scary story, and luckily the parents were very understanding. I’m just glad they didn’t see anything below the waist!)
• Bridezilla: Weddings can be particularly stressful times, especially for the bride who wants to make their special day just as perfect as possible and full of positive memories. However, this quest often pushes many normally sane brides-to-be over the edge, and particularly egregious examples are not unheard of.
  • This bride wanted her wedding to happen as the sun set into the sea… unaware that she was on the East Coast, so that was physically impossible.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Yes, lady at the vet's, your dogs would do that. They're dogs. No, she is not having "virgin-birth Jesus puppies", as the poster puts it.
• Buffy Speak:
  • DE TING, DE TING!!!
  • The tall things, and the not-so-tall things.
  • Buffy Speak is apparently the first language of this customer.
  • "Y'all got some smell-good?"
  • "I was, like, all opposite-y." Ironically enough, despite references to the trope namer, the phrasing is blamed on Stephenie Meyer.
  • "Yeah. Phone don’t work. It’s all like 'WHAAAAAAT', and needs to be like 'YAAYUUUUHHH'."
  • "The computer box is all broke-a-fied and the blinky-light box is not blinky anymore!"
• Bully Hunter: Many stories involve a third party (sometimes a fellow workmate, sometimes themselves a customer) who, upon encountering an unreasonable character trying to bully a server into getting what they want (or even just to be a Jerkass), feel the need to intervene.
• Bullying a Dragon: Don't mock a bunch of guys with swords, especially at a Renaissance festival.
• But I Can't Be Pregnant!: Multiple customers attempt to return used pregnancy tests (which no store allows, of course) when they get positive results under the belief that they could not possibly be pregnant. Why would they be using the tests in the first place if they "can't" be pregnant? Examples include: here, here, and here.
  • This girl insists she cannot be pregnant because she's a lesbian. She is not attracted to women. She has a boyfriend. She just "knows" lesbians "can't" get pregnant, and therefore declared herself one.
  • This mother insists that her daughter's pregnancy diagnosis is obviously false because her angel of a daughter is obviously a virgin, despite the implication that said daughter was in an intimate situation with her boyfriend and the mother knew it.
• Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie: In this story (and the comment that inspired it), a plane tries to scatter a person's ashes over a Major League Baseball stadium, but the mechanism malfunctions and it drops the container holding the ashes onto the stadium's roof. This precipitates a terrorism scare because everyone just saw a plane dropping a container holding a strange powder onto the stadium, resulting in the hazmat team being called out. Oh, and there's no crying "fake" with this story – it actually happened.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: According to these customers, it is, to the point where the employee's C-cups^note Generally considered on the big side. are "tiny" to them.
• By "No", I Mean "Yes": All the time.
  • Frequently literal variations, such as a bacon cheeseburger with no bacon, but not a cheeseburger which becomes the same bacon cheeseburger upon adding, you guessed it, bacon. Frequently a Pyrrhic Victory for the customer as well, as the typical customer's "cashier is always trying to cheat me" attitude makes them blind to the above logic and they insist on paying for the more expensive thing without including the ingredients that make it more expensive.
  • Also, the hamburger with cheese that is absolutely not a cheeseburger, and its opposite, the cheeseburger without cheese that is absolutely not a hamburger.
  • A subversion: An iced coffee without the coffee is not milk and ice, but milk, ice, and tea.
  • "We'll have the cheese eggs with no cheese, and regular eggs with cheese." And then they get upset when they are charged for one lot of cheese eggs and one lot of regular ones, even though — however you look at it — that's exactly what they ordered.

C

• The Cake Is a Lie: Some people just don't get it.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Several examples, including:
  • Something called "eesh squeesh". They're actually onions.
  • "Screen mail", which is apparently a bag of potato chips.
  • "La-tea", which is apparently an iced coffee. Complete with Lampshade Hanging.
  • "Cup of onions and cheese" apparently means "jug of milk" to this customer. Or maybe "hamburger".
  • This customer is looking for a book. Or a dictionary. Turns out they actually want a safe. (Perhaps a Book Safe?)
  • "Where do you keep your nipples?!" He wants fuel bulbs. (He's also drunk, and has singled out the only female mechanic in the shop.)
  • This person calls peanuts "Red Rushkies" for no discernible reason.
  • Probable subversion here, as the poster and their manager think this is what's going on when a customer apparently asking for "yellow" turns out to want ice. However, as pointed out by the comments section, the Spanish word for ice, "hielo", sounds a lot like the English "yellow, so it's likely the customer was using the Spanish word (potentially because he couldn't remember the English translation) and the OP and manager just didn't recognize it. ^note The story takes place in Texas, which has a large Spanish-speaking population.
  • This customer is insistent that root beer is called "Dr. Coke", and throws a fit when the workers don't know what they're asking for.
  • This customer calls scissors "skidders" and gets angry when the employee is confused, even firing back with "Well, I call ’em skidders. God, you’re dumb."
  • This man calls pizzas "pepperonis", and gets upset at the poster for "not listening" and getting his topping requests wrong. Luckily his wife is able to jump in and place the order for him.
  • This guy insults the submitter for not knowing what "wazzzzher blades" are. It turns out he means razor blades. When the submitter calls it by its common name, the guy states that his family says "wazzzzher," and not to "f*** correct" him.
  • This customer insists on calling eclairs "sweet sausages", and doesn't even seem to be aware that they're called eclairs.
• Calling Me a Logarithm:
  • One story involves a customer thinking that the word "oxymoron" is an insult.
  • This customer thinks the same of "veni, vidi, vici".
• Calling the Old Man Out: A daughter stands up to her homophobic mother in defense of a gay cashier.
• Cane Fu: "I'll teach you to disrespect your elders!"
• Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality:
  • A tourist calls a store and demands to meet Walter White so he can buy meth. When the employee tells the tourist Walter is not real but a fictional character, the tourist refuses to believe him. The manager ends up giving the tourist a fake address to meet Walter — a police station.
  • In this story, a woman in a Team Edward t-shirt accosts a librarian for wearing a "Save the Wolves" shirt for an animal charity event, since it "must" mean she's on Team Jacob. That's stupid, but not overly so. Then she's remonstrated with by another librarian wearing "animal eye" contact lenses, and concludes that the library doesn't just employ werewolf fans, but actual werewolves.
  • This teenager thinks Wuxia TV shows are real, and if an actual martial arts school is telling him otherwise, that either means they're keeping the truth from outsiders or the secret manual has been lost again.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': After a string of annoying telemarketing calls, this woman and her roommate answer the next call pretending her (absent) husband had died and the caller was interrupting the wake. Turns out that one was a business call the husband had actually been expecting.
• Can't You Read the Sign?: The first customer does. The second...doesn't.
• Captain Obvious: Many customers will express with surprise the baldly obvious, like letting employees know that the restaurant they are currently outside is on fire.
  • No, really?
• Car Fu: After being told multiple times that the restaurant and drive-thru were closed, this customer rams his truck into the building's transformer, knocking out it's power.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • All too often, the customers will not accept the word of an employee, or anyone they think is an employee, at face value. They either think that the employee is trying to rip them off, or trying to weasel out of having to do any work. Either way, the employee must somehow be lying if the customer does not get exactly what they want.
  • This customer refuses to believe there is no such thing as a "Flux capacitor" for his car. He's apparently unaware it's a fictional device from Back to the Future, as his mechanic friend told him that he needs one, and he's clearly oblivious to the fact that he's been pranked by his friend. It is only when the submitter shows him proof that the customer realizes he's been tricked.
  • This crazy woman refuses to accept that the submitter is a 21-year-old college student and not an underage high school student illegally working, despite proof on her ID, which gets the crazy woman banned from the store. Yet despite this, when the submitter is confronted by the crazy woman four years later, she still thinks the submitter is a high school student using a fake ID to drink at the bar with her friends, despite the fact that she and her friends had graduated from high school seven years ago! And just like last time, the woman is also banned from the bar after she refuses to let it go and not bother the submitter. One of the submitter's friends tells her mother about the incident, and all she had to say was "that woman has always been insane," implying these particular incidents were just two of many this lady got herself into.
  • This pizza delivery girl insists several times that she is not a guest at the party, just there to deliver pizza, but everyone assumes she's joking.
• Casual Danger Dialogue:
  • "Oh, okay. By the way, my keypad seems to be on fire. Is that a bad thing?"
  • "You know that computer that was a fire risk? She meant that it was on fire."
  • "Your stupid fire alarm is going off again! Just tell me how to turn it off." "Have you checked the dormitory for fire?" "Stay on the line. I'll check... The dormitory is on fire."
  • Yes, I'd say the flashing lights may have something to do with the tornado warning.
  • "Oh, I feel [the earthquake] now! Isn't this exciting?"
• Casual Kink: This man apparently has a foot fetish and walks into a department store just to touch the high heels on display. Apparently his favorite are the black patent leather ones.
• "Cavemen vs. Astronauts" Debate: How to increase tips.
• Cheshire Cat Grin: Referenced here.
• Children Are Innocent: Several attempted scams end with a small child asking why their parents are lying to the employees.
  • “How come you said she planted a bomb? She didn’t!”
  • Secret agent!
  • “I’m sorry my nana said that. She doesn’t know you’re not allowed to say the f-word.”
  • "But Mommy, you told me to open it!"
  • This grandmother complains about a service dog, saing he can't be a "working" animal he looks too happy.
    Customer: “Hmph! Well, I don’t look that happy at work!”
    Customer’s Granddaughter: *With childlike innocence* “Grandma, you don’t look happy anywhere!”
• Chronic Pet Killer: Way too many people can't figure out how to properly take care of fish.
  • These customers don't understand fish care. The second customer, more horrifyingly, has supposedly had hundreds of fish, in the belief that they genuinely only have a lifespan of a week or two (when in reality she's starving them to death).
  • Similarly, this customer kills multiple fish in the belief that fish just "eat the water."
  • This repeat customer routinely doesn't cycle his water and keeps too many fish in too small a space, and blames the store for selling him sick fish. Unfortunately, management enables his behaviour because they want his money more than they want better care for their fish.
  • Similarly, this customer puts ten goldfish in a one-gallon bowl and gets more fish even after being told the risks.
  • And this idiot routinely takes her fish out of the water to pet it.
• Clark Kenting: Unintentional example on the part of the disguised person here. Subverted here, as the guy figures it out. He does not react well.
  • Perhaps an even weirder example.
  • Sometimes, all it takes is a swap of necklaces.
• Cloudcuckoolander: A common trait among the customers in these stories. Usually, these are the customers who are less horrible or are unintentionally offensive. Usually.
  • "Well, at least it’s not a Nazi-controlled fish world where it’s 'hail tuna, only what the tuna says!'"
  • It's a bird, hello bird!
  • Also, dumblesnore.
  • ...sweatshirts.
  • This heartless exploitation of garden gnomes. Now turn them back to flesh, change dress, and petrify again. Also a pretty amazing example of Skewed Priorities. This woman appears to fully believe that garden gnomes are living, sentient beings who have been "frozen" by the ceramics company in order to be sold as ornaments. She has no moral objections to this practice; her only concern is that their outfits clash with her own. Furthermore, why is it so important that their clothes match hers? Is she actually planning to carry them around with her at a goddamn wedding?
  • THESE. ARE. PEACCHEESSSS!
  • The large mountain Jew goes anywhere he wants to!
  • AND SO HUMBLE! YOU SAVED MY FIRE MONKEY! *leaves store*
  • Polyester tigers.
  • Woo-hoo.
  • This guy fails either military history or Multiverse-ography. It's hard to tell.
  • TRUST NO ONE
  • Oh, a cow exploded.
  • This person calling an IT company to get his toilet remotely fixed.
  • The customers in this baffling story who evidently have never been to a store in their entire lives. Among other things, they spend a considerable amount of time waiting by the automatic sliding doors, which are wide open due to them standing right in the doorway, trying to figure out how to open the already-open door and leave.
  • This peanut-loving customer in search of "the truth".
  • For whatever reason that this guy became curious enough that he proceeded to start sucking on leather shoes because he wanted to see what would happen if they got wet.
  • This odd woman who walks into a bank with two dimes she found in the bank's parking lot and asks to exchange them for twenty pennies, just because "pennies are my favorite coins" and she "hates dimes".
  • This woman is convinced that lighter fluid is in the toy department despite an employee telling her it's in the garden section. On what planet is it safe to give kids lighter fluid?
  • Some customers think there's a magic supply of merchandise in the backroom Never before has it applied to a restroom.
  • This bizarre woman refusing all methods of payment until a man (presumably her husband) pays for her and then she is carried out of the store on piggyback, much to the shock of everybody in the store.
  • This man insists that supermarkets never close. Some do.
  • This guy wants a hotel to store 20 pounds of seafood in the freezer. Never mind why he's driving from Wisconsin to Washington State with that much raw seafood in his truck.
  • Bertha, the shotgun.
  • This woman tells a music store to stop playing David Bowie music because it upsets her cats. Her cats which aren't even there with her. She later calls the store to complain because her cats were upset when she got home, leaving the store's manager dumbfounded.
  • This fellow called a customer service line from the mental hospital, apparently just to have someone to talk to that wasn't a therapist. Although delusional and scatterbrained, the phone worker remarks that he's a lot more polite and entertaining than their usual callers.
  • This customer angrily leaves her hairstylist when she's angry that her hair looks off (which would have been remedied when her hair was dried), even though she's had this style many times before. She leaves with it still wet, though not before drawing a penis in condensation on the stylist's window. When she comes back, the stylist asks her why she didn't notice the process earlier, she launches into a rather detailed story about being locked up by her Crazy Cat Lady grandmother who destroyed her phone.
  • This woman is (assuming it was't a particularly weird prank) convinced that veterinarians and the cat shelter are cloning her and/or her friends' cats.
  • This woman tends to bring oversize hardware store carts meant for lumber into small stores – miles away from the hardware store – where it barely (if ever) fits in the aisles. Nobody can figure out why.
  • This customer thinks that their cat unplugged their power bar and plugged it into itself, and also turned up the thermostat.
  • This woman seems to use books for everything… except reading.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Often launched by particularly insane customers.
  • Occasionally gets them owned. Call center employees do not have to put up with that abuse, and are allowed to Just Hang Up On Him.
  • This girl apologizes before pulling off one of these.
• Clown Car: Ten people in one tiny car.
• Clumsy Copyright Censorship: This client hires the submitter to design a backdrop that celebrates the World Cup. Only, they're scared of lawsuits from FIFA, so they ask them to remove the soccer player… and the ball… and the field.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • Alaskan Cruise Grab Bag, the last one. Also approximately 1000 others.
  • I didn't come to this library to read!
  • This mother keeps on saying that she doesn't want to watch a movie rated 17 and over. She doesn't seem to understand at all that she's not the entire problem — if she doesn't go, her underage sons can't watch the movie.
  • This elderly person won't give up her car and start taking the bus because she can't see well enough to read the bus destination signs.
  • This mother is livid that a music instructor is showing heavy metal and rock music to her son, and demands that the instructor show the son some "classics", like Jimi Hendrix. When the instructor points out a questionable lyric from one of those songs, the mother just says, "Yes! The classics!"
  • This customer complains that his toaster has a hole in it. The reason the hole is there in the first place is to prevent the electrical cable from causing electrical shocks and fires. The customer is having none of it and says that his smoke detector suffices for fire prevention. If his toaster catches fire, he's got no one to blame but himself.
  • This woman wants to buy a swivel chair for her desk but doesn't care that the plastic casters on the bottom would ruin her hardwood floor.
  • This kid wants to buy a stuffed pink bird from the zoo gift shop. The father complains that the bird is pink and asks the cashier if the bird comes in blue. It doesn't because it's a flamingo!
  • This man saw the "gift" option on the Amazon delivery page and assumed that if he checked it, then Amazon would send him a free gift along with his order.
  • This family is moving out of their rental home and is in the process of selling it to a new buyer. A woman seems interested but complains that there are boxes all over the place. Why did she think they were there?
  • This tourist in Dubai needing to ask if a hotel with the word "beach" in its name is close to the beach.
  • A store's male frogs start hugging, causing a customer to go off on a tangent against gay marriage - the submitter then pretends to comically miss the point in order to shut down the conversation: "Oh, I didn't know frogs could get married."
  • This customer, struggling to think of anything to distinguish which of four women with glasses and long brown hair assisted him previously, says he thinks she had tattoos. When it turns out he's looking for the only worker who doesn't have tattoos, he says he just assumed they all did. Even if he'd been right, it would have been completely useless as a distiguishing feature.
  • “WELL, HOW DO YOU EXPECT TO MAKE ANY MONEY IF YOU DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH?! TERRIBLE SERVICE! I AM COMPLAINING!” Note that this story takes place in Costa Rica.
  • This story:
    Resident: “You can’t take the [Labor Day] off! What if there was a medical emergency on a holiday!”
    Me: “Then I hope you would call 911.”
    Resident: “Don’t they have the day off, too?”
  • And this one:
    “My daughter doesn’t have a problem with comprehension! She just doesn’t understand the material.”
  • A woman speaks of e-mail and homosexuals as if they were equally modern inventions. The poster points out that ancient Greeks might disagree with her. The woman assumes the statement is about e-mail.
  • This mother complains about her son being taken out of the game after being hit by the ball… in a game of dodgeball.
  • This story:
    Caller: “Do they teach you how to swim in those classes?”
    Submitter: “Um, yes… they’re swimming lessons.”
  • This customer complains that when they ordered a pizza, the pizza place "stuck all of [the toppings] into some kind of bread."
• Comically Small Bribe:
  • This customer trying to bribe a cashier for the date a stock of new Wiis would be coming in.
  • This scammer tried to bypass SMS verification for a website by offering an online chat agent a $5 Amazon gift card to run the verification over their personal cellphone. An online chat agent for a company that specializes in fraud prevention.
    We’re in the business of preventing the exact sort of fraud you’re asking me to help with. Why do you think a $5 gift card is going to change my mind?
  • This dishonest woman tries to bribe a notary with a 500€ bill... when the usual fee for contract reading is double that.
  • This customer attempts to bribe the cashier $5 to honor a sale that ended the previous day. Since $5 is also the difference between the sales price and the regular price, the cashier "accepts" the bribe, and rings it up as the regular price.
  • This guy tries to bribe the bar owner $20 for free drinks all night, and is genuinely baffled as to why that doesn't work.
• Companion Cube: "He doesn't look over 21, ma'am."
• Compensating for Something: And failing.
  • In this story, a woman returning something is perfectly understanding about only getting the sale price of £9.99 back, not full price, before getting unsolicited advice from the guy behind her than if she makes a fuss and demands to see the manager, she'll get the full £12.99. Her reaction: "How small does your d**k have to be to get a thrill out of £3?"
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: What did you do that for?
• Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: invoked Comes back to bite this professor, but at least he's big enough to follow it up.
• Complaining About Things You Haven't Paid For:
  • A few stories see customers complain about things they didn't even pay money for. Ones that stand out include a caller complaining about receiving a free soup that came with her food order and a man calling a hotel to complain that the towels he stole from his room upon checking out were "too scratchy."
  • Or this person complaining about the internet being out, when it's actually his neighbor's - he's been stealing it.
  • A thief calling the store that they shorted her a shoe.
  • This customer is informed of a buy-two-get-one-free sale on an item she has two of, and immediately assumes what the cashier means is she's being charged for three of that item. Turns out she was a previous problem-customer who would fly off the handle at employees for stupid things like this and had been banned from the store until the new manager took over.
  • This lady complains to hotel management about her own dog barking, and then is shocked when instead of discounting her room, they bill her for an unreported pet.
• Completely Unnecessary Translator: This genius insists on translating between a German cashier and an English-speaking customer. However, not only does the cashier speak English, said cashier is even replying in English. Nevertheless, the "helper" decides to "translate" everything the cashier says "back" into English.
• Computer Equals Monitor: Very common.
  • According to this guy.
  • And this one.
  • As well as this one, this one, this one, and this one.
  • Inverted here, where a person panics because they can't find the tower... for an all-in-one iMac.
  • Another straight example here.
  • Another inversion with an all-in-one: this person assumes his "computer" is the thing plugged into the back of his "monitor", and brings in his power brick for a malware cleanup.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: This kid was way too calm considering his mother went psychotic earlier.
  Writer: Little boy, how are you just so calm in all this?
  Customer’s Son: This isn’t the first time this has happened. Last time, she kicked someone where it hurts a lot, ’cause he fell over crying and stuff.
• Confronting Your Imposter: Right here. Here, too.
  • Telemarketers seem to have a bad habit of calling a family-run business and claiming to be related to the owner.
    • As does this poor sap.
  • Great case of this here: a man walks into a medical office, tries to excuse his lack of an appointment by claiming to be related to the doctor - and ends up insulting both said doctor and his wife.
  • A double-whammy here, where an egotistical customer claims to be an animal doctor's girlfriend and accuses the receptionist of being "jealous" of her for that - the doctor is actually gay, and the receptionist is his sister.
  • A couple scammers try and fail to buy about $1000 worth of electronic goods with a stolen credit card, and are caught in part because they tried to use said card when its rightful holder was the cashier.
    • Thieves seem to have a knack for trying to sell stolen goods to the very people they were stolen from.
    • Similar to the above case, a supermarket customer gets a hold of an employee discount card and tries to use it on a purchase: After the newly trained cashier has trouble running the card, the submitter comes in to assist, only to find it's their own card, which they'd recently reported missing.
• Con Man:
  • These theme park guests attempt a Wounded Gazelle Gambit where they try to make it look like a park employee dropped a wheelchair-bound person on purpose. Too bad for them, they didn't take into account that there would be security cameras everywhere.
  • These two customers try to con on a smaller scale with one of them paying with a $10 bill and demanding change for a $20, and the second man pretends to back up the story. They're thwarted when there turns out to be no $20 bills in the register.
  • This customer tries a one-man version of the above scam but fails to note what cashiers can and can't do.
  • This woman tries to pull a scam on a motel employee involving a rug machine. The woman is claiming the rug machine didn't work and her daughter injured herself trying to use it and asks for a refund or a discount on the next rental. The machine is rented out several more times and the submitter asks one of the clients if the machine worked. It did and the submitter is able to call out the woman on her lies.
  • A regular customer wants to hold a memorial service for the victims of Hurricane Katrina in the library conference room. This is normally against policy, but the manager makes an exception. The local funerary service shows up and asks where they can put the casket. It turns out the regular scammed the library into holding a funeral for her dead daughter (not related in any way to the hurricane). The woman was trying to get a free funeral by deceiving people into believing it was in remembrance of a natural disaster.
• Conspiracy Theorist:
  • The helicopters. They're in my veins, you know.
  • A woman who tin-foiled her dog.
  • This guy destroys air pumps for you.
  • Mormons. They shock.
  • A customer at a hotel refuses to believe the red light on a smoke detector isn't a camera recording her.
  • A man who thinks the only way to keep his PIN safe is to cover the keypad with his mouth and press the keys with his tongue.
  • Quite a few customers refuse to reveal any personal information, like addresses or phone numbers, to an employee, because they think that the employee will either use that information to harass them or give it to some nefarious group.
  • This seemingly drunk man has some intriguing things to say about televisions and radios.
  • This woman is convinced that barcode scanners are part of a government plot to give people cancer and control their minds.
  • This nut is noted to "believe every crazy conspiracy theory under the sun," and it only gets crazier from there.
  • This guy's conspiracy theory spans the entire cosmos.
  • Here we have a twofer; an anti-vaxxer and a flat-earther!
    Customer: “One day, the firmament will fall, and all you sheep will see that the Earth is not a sphere and that you’ve been lied to from day one!”
    Manager: *After recovering from Stunned Silence* “Well… stupidity isn’t a crime, so feel free to go.”
• Content Warnings: This poor mouse This story actually has a disclaimer in bold at the top of the text warning readers about the potentially distressing content of the story. Said disclaimer is absolutely necessary because this woman: dangles the mouse by its tail over a pot of boiling water and even plays catch with it. The mouse survived, but at what cost?
  • This story contains a content warning labeled "Warning: Physical Assault." The story involves a man thinking the (female) manager's badge is fake and attempting to rip it off her uniform, but he ends up roughly grabbing and twisting her breast. This rough treatment causes the pin on the badge to stab the manager in the chest and security eventually escorts the man away leaving the manager bloodied and bruised. The man tried to claim the assault was justified because "he thought she was a fake manager." Really?
  • This story contains a warning for "Severe injury to a child" as a mother's inattentiveness results in her child losing a finger.
• Contrived Coincidence: This fast food joint gets three loud, angry female customers within one hour, all wearing pink.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Somehow, we don't think you were next to a river of lava...
• Cool and Unusual Punishment:
  • This mother, upon learning from her naïve younger daughter that her son's smoking pot:
    And could you box up an order of mac'n'cheese please? Oh, and some really good-smelling stuff? I figure they'll have the munchies and I want to torture them.
  • A kid made a $100 pledge to a charity on behalf of his parents, without their knowledge. His mom's reaction to finding out? Make him pay it himself, out of his allowance.
  • A man is hogging the game store's console to play their demo copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and comes back every time the employees kick him off... so, after closing, one employee logs onto the man's save file, dumps all his stuff, and leaves him in an unplayable situation. (The comments all point out that the employee could have just deleted his file every time they kicked him off the console.)
  • This mom calls the phone company to cut her teen daughter's mobile service in the middle of a call for not doing her chores.
    Submitter (phone company representative): I learned many new Swiss curse words.
  • "Am I a bad person for packing up several boxes of expired hard-boiled eggs and shipping them to the scammers using the prepaid labels they sent?"
• Cool Old Guy:
  • This man plays video games, hangs out at the game store, and gives great dating advice.
  • The guys in this story were playing Guitar Hero as soon as it came out.
  • This customer has great taste in music.
  • Meanwhile, for this one, the '90s never ended.
  • This guy thinks brightly-dyed hair is great, and people who insult it need their eyes checked.
• Cool Old Lady:
  • This lady needed batteries for her "ghetto blaster" (boombox).
  • And this one pulled a "That's What She Said" joke.
  • This one will make your match no matter what team you're on.
  • These ladies respond to a member of their care home staff making a racist joke about voodoo regarding a black resident who had died by shifting their craft group towards "making these Blair Witch stick figures and leaving them where that troll will find them".
• Correction Bait: invoked How this furniture store finally gets a picky customer (who always seems to have a complaint about the custom pieces they deliver) to accept an order the first time—create an obvious, easily fixable problem, wait for them to point it out, then fix it. They've made their complaint, you've saved money; everyone's happy.
• Correlation/Causation Gag: This cashier is (jokingly) asked to stop the rain outside. The cashier, like they always do when asked this question, turns to face outside and snaps their fingers...and by sheer coincidence, the rain immediately stops and the sun comes out. The terrified customer runs away without her groceries.
• Could Say It, But...: This apartment complex cannot permit more than two pets per unit over the phone, but please come into the office to discuss the situation in person! Turns out management is fine with authorizing a three-cat unit for an existing tenant with a good history, but since the owners monitor the phone lines, they cannot bend the rules like that over the phone.
• Covered in Gunge: This customer, who forgot to put the lid on his new blender when making a beet protein smoothie. It's all over the ceiling. And the cats. And, possibly, the baby.
• Covers Always Lie: So, is it a book or a movie? Confused.
• Covert Pervert: "I probably get more than you do."
  • This woman, once you sort through the Fridge Logic.
  • What does a Scotsman wear under his "quilt"? This lady sure wanted to know.
• Crazy Cat Lady: My Gatsby!.
  • This one is more of a dog lady, but she maxes out the crazy part.
  • This crazy lady takes the trope to a whole new level as she offers a ridiculous amount of money for the poster's two cats and even follows her home in an attempt to get them from her! She did not get the cats.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: "Sir, you can't just do that!" "I don't want anyone to come between us!"
• Crazy-Prepared: If you don't have a spoon, what will you do if you find some ice cream?
• Credit Card Plot:
  • A credit card is not free money, surprisingly enough.
  • This one utterly fails to understand how credit cards work: "What's the point of having a credit card if I still have to pay for what I'm buying!?"
  • This lady apparently has 15 credit cards just so she doesn't have to actually pay them off when they hit the limit. She may believe that is how credit cards are meant to work.
  • This irresponsible eighteen-year-old credit card user runs headlong into this trope, having been told from a friend that "interest-free" means she doesn't have to pay it back, and lying on her application form that she was employed for a company that had fired her months ago for no-showing. Not surprisingly, she maxes it out within a month, much to her father's ire.
• Creepy Child: "Well then, I guess you will have to ask her, or I will have to ask, or the doll's soul will have to ask."
• Crossdresser:
  • This man here, though he tried to cover it up at first. Happily, the workers were willing to help him out once he admitted the truth, and he became a regular customer after that.
  • This customer as well, except that he never actually bought anything.
• Crowd Song:
  • "Mama, oooooooh, didn't mean to make you cry; if I'm not back again this time tomorrow, carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters...."
  • In some stories, you can find a variant of this in the comments. (Story for context)
• Cruella to Animals: In this story, the submitter tries to canvas donations to an animal shelter, and on the first mention of dogs to one lady…
  Lady: “Dogs! Filthy, disgusting, horrible animals! How dare you ask me to support f*** dogs?! They should all be thrown into a fire, cooked, and eaten! Or better, eaten alive!” *proceeds to spit at [the submitter's] feet then slams the door in [their] face*
• The CSI Effect:
  • An apparent source of problems for photo labs, whose clients will ask for all sorts of crazy stuff (such as turning back the image so they can see the photographer) just because they (claim) saw it in TV once. A couple (including this one) mention this exact show. invoked
  • This customer is miffed that the free-falling part of skydiving only takes around 30–40 seconds and not five minutes like in the movies. invoked
• Cure Your Gays: Bizarrely inverted.
• Curse Cut Short: Because that's the size of my c-
• Cute Bruiser: Watch as this petite woman successfully subdues a man much larger than her.
• Cuteness Proximity: Everyone who comes across this lamb pretty much melts into a puddle of goo at the sight.

D

• Danger Is My Middle Name: This man.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Apparently, this guy.
• Daydream Believer: Lots of them. The outstanding ones include the aspiring Evil Overlord and the Hell's denizen complaining about overimmigration to his place by disloyal employees.
• Deadpan Snarker: Among others, this call-center employee. Doubles as a Stealth Pun.
  • "We deal exclusively in fresh, live woodchucks".
  • "Just a sec... Shit!" "I'm sorry, sir; we don't serve that here." "If I wanted that, I'd go to [competitor!]"
  • This customer, in handling another customer who was out of line.
  • "So, let me understand this: your complaint is that the sandwich you wanted extra toasted, more than recommended, was in fact too toasted?" "Are you being smart with me here?!" "Someone in this conversation has to be."
  • "You speakin' that monkey language?" "Well, I can understand you just fine, sir."
  • After a Dirty Old Man uses several discounts and tries to pick up the desk clerk: "Sir, if you need all those discounts for this hotel, then you can not afford me."
• Death Glare:
  • A particularly effective one. Add a Slasher Smile for effect, and you've just freaked out the abusive customer.
  • This "withering glare" stops a customer from breaking into a tourist attraction after hours.
• Delayed Reaction: This cashier, helped by Stupid Crooks.
  • Hello miss... wait, you're a girl?!
• Department of Redundancy Department: Here, with a side order of Hypocritical Humor.
  • This customer thinks they caught the submitter being redundant.
  • “Does this cake have cake in it?”
  • A store where you can buy things.
• Depth Deception: No special tools are required when customers don't understand distance.
• Despair Event Horizon: After reading enough of these, you'll feel like you've crossed it, and that humans are greedy, irredeemable asshats. There are those who aren't, but you'll probably be so jaded you won't particularly care.
• Determinator:
  • This lady is going to use the out-of-order toilet, and no amount of walking distance, signs, barriers, or janitors are going to stop her.
  • Played for Horror here. A Middle-Eastern woman who was being forced into an Arranged Marriage escapes her family, who absolutely refuse to give up on bringing her back. When an employee locks her inside their store, over twenty men break in through the window. When she takes shelter behind a code-locked fire door, they break that down. When she barricades herself onto the roof, they try to force the hatch open. When the police and then eventually the SWAT team show up, they try to fight them, and people are still trying to breach the roof while the brawl is raging.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: Here. And here.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • An underage customer tries to buy cigarettes...in a yogurt shop. There are many, many more examples on the site.
  • A mother is stopped from entering an adult store with her baby in the stroller since underage children aren't allowed in such a store. When the mother threatens to call the police for refusing to let her enter, the submitter dares her to do it since the authorities will question her why would she try to bring her child to such a place. Just like the police officer behind her.
  • This customer, who didn't bring his ID with him to buy cigarettes, threatens the cashier, claiming he knows the owner of the chain so he either sells him the cigarettes or he will call the owner and get him fired and kicked out. The cashier, unfazed, points out that if he does fire him, there will be no one to run the store since he's the only employee and the customer himself has no idea how to run a store. Furthermore, the other customers will not be pleased they couldn't buy their things and will complain to the owner, all because of his actions. Realizing his threat didn't work and the other customers are angry with him, he quickly runs away.
  • "I'LL JUST WATCH IT ONLINE, SO THERE! WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT?" "I think you forgot we provide your internet, too. It won't be reconnected either, until you pay your bill."
  • This customer calls the police on a store that won't refund something he bought at a competitor, expecting the manager to immediately cave in. The manager goes on with taking care of other customers ... and this guy suddenly gets worried. "You… you a**-hole! I have unpaid tickets! I can’t talk to the police!" (Unfortunately, he flees before the cops show up.)
  • This customer at a vet clinic tries to force her way to the front of the line by claiming that she is the vet's girlfriend. She tries claiming this to the vet's sister, who knows that her brother is gay and already has a boyfriend. When that doesn't work, the customer makes things worse for herself by repeatedly insulting the vet's sister and threatening to get her fired, loudly enough to catch the attention of a sheriff's deputy, who warns her that harassment charges could be filed against her. By the end of it, when the vet hears how the customer treated his sister, she is no longer welcome at the clinic.
  • A mom, furious that her son's Christmas present (an Xbox) isn't going to arrive until the day after Christmas, decides to try to guilt-trip the delivery folks by calling them up and forcing them to personally apologize to her son for delivering it later than she wants. Her scheme blows up in her face when she hands the phone to her son, who (predictably) ends up elated to find out he's going to get an Xbox for Christmas when the employee tells him and doesn't care if it arrives a day late. The embarrassed mother defeatedly (and hastily) hangs up as soon as she has her phone back.
  • This lady wants to rent a car to go visit family. Problem is, not only does she not have a license, she never learned how to drive. When queried as to how she planned on driving to see family if she didn't know how to drive, she admits that she "hadn't thought that far ahead". And she still tries to buy a car… with someone else's expired license (she bought it off Craigslist), apparently not thinking that what the company wants is assurance that you probably won't crash their car, not a look at some random plastic rectangle. She ends up being arrested for identity theft.
  • This woman goes to a restaurant known for a "Chef's Special" where the chef will spend two minutes quizzing you about your food preferences and then prepare something tailor-made for you (limit one per hour), makes a huge fuss about not just getting this but skipping the queue because it's her birthday, and then turns out to be completely incapable of actually answering the questions, having apparently not considered this at all.
  • This woman broke up with her boyfriend seven years ago to "teach him a lesson," apparently never considering that he would take her at her word and eventually move on to someone else.
  • This would-be-helpful customer drives his hire car 80 miles to the headquarters of the hire company, because he thinks that would be more convenient for them than returning it to the dealership he got it from. Amongst the many things he hasn't considered is how he's going to get home.
  • This mother thinks it's a good idea to have a photographer take a picture of her son throwing a baseball – a hard, actual baseball – at the camera. Despite the submitter explaining to her multiple times that this is a recipe for property damage if not injury, she doesn't get the picture, and tells her son to throw it at the camera anyway, breaking it and giving the submitter a black eye. She had to be dragged out by security.
  • This rock band decides to hold a nighttime performance… in a hotel room.
  • This customer asks the submitter to paint a portrait of her dog… who's been dead six years.
  • This woman signs her signature on the PIN pad with a permanent marker instead of the stylus, and then gets paranoid over identity theft and rips the pad off the register and tries to run off with it.
  • This genius, on finding that his CD wouldn't play, gave it to his dog to play with, assuming that when he returned it, the store wouldn't care what state it was in (though of course, that's assuming he was telling the truth about the damage occurring before he tried to play it).
  • These church ladies constantly lecture the owner of the diner they go to after church about working on a Sunday. When she pretends to be taking their words on board, they're shocked to realise that if she stops working on Sunday, the diner won't be open.
  • These four guys are so desperate for a joint (prior to marijuana legalization in their state) that they crowd into the fitting stall of a young girls' clothing store to smoke it, apparently not considering that the fitting stall is neither completely obscured nor air-sealed.
  • This customer is told to send her broken microwave to Tennessee. Her way of doing this is to give some random guy $10 and tell them to send it to Tennessee. Naturally she assumes that it's the company's fault it doesn't get there.
  • This apartment resident is a double example. First, he has to move furniture into a room, but the door gets in the way, so instead of unscrewing the hinges, he rips the door from the frame – hinges and all. Then is surprised when he can't get the door back on. Then, when he tries to report the damaged door to the building supervisor, the supervisor misunderstands and thinks there's been a break-in. So the guy panics about getting into trouble with the building and waits for the police crouched down and brandishing a baseball bat. Thankfully, the cops aren't triggerhappy, but he has to pay for a new door and frame.
  • A pet/house-sitting employee arrives at a house expecting to look after the owners' dog while they're on vacation but instead finds their child, whose parents have told them that the house-sitter will be feeding them and ferrying them to and from school, and who borrowed a neighbor's dog to trick the sitting company's manager. It baffles the company as to how they thought this would work without the sitters calling Child Protection Services.
  • This customer comes to the store reporting computer problems… but neglects to bring the actual computer.
  • This woman tries to ask the submitter to remove the security tag from the pants she's just bought… while she's wearing said pants.
• Digging Yourself Deeper:
  • This customer assumes the submitter is pregnant, and on being told she isn't, assumes she's chubby, only to have to backpedal again.
  • This guy, who promptly hangs a lampshade on it.
  • "Congratulations, ma'am. I didn't think this situation could look any worse for you, but you succeeded." A woman attempts to smuggle a three-year-old child through a museum ticket line inside a backpack. As soon as the attendant discovers the child, she hastily claims that it's not hers. Cue police. (The Stinger? Three-year-olds had free admission.)
  • This verbally belligerent customer tries to pay for her groceries with her son's card and refuses to believe that it's illegal, even when the cops show up, and continues to make things worse for herself.
    The cops repeatedly reminded her that she had the right to remain silent and she repeatedly ignored them. She had no subtlety, saw nothing wrong with it, and just kept admitting her crimes at full volume. Because they weren’t crimes. Because she knew the law and knew her rights better than the cops themselves did. And she would personally tell the judge what the REAL laws were.
    
    I was just amazed, listening to this woman dig herself a hole like a cartoon character going after gold.
  • This customer threatens the submitter… on cameras that record audio, just after the submitter did a background check on him. He hastily decamps the store, but the manager calls the police on him anyway.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil:
  • This unfortunate computer user receives a bootleg copy of a program and calls tech support because she doesn't have the necessary registration code to activate it. After that, she complains that she can't get it working and the fact she has to pay for it.
  • Another user calls tech support to complain that he can't access a website he uses to download games, movies, and shows. He insists that he deserves a discount since they're preventing him from accessing the site and refuses to believe his actions are illegal. His insistence that he be allowed access to the site and that his activities are not illegal eventually get his account cancelled.
  • This fine specimen thinks that Windows operating system is totally free, period. He got a copy from his government-employee friend, who illegally copied it from work (good luck convincing the customer that this was illegal, though). When he tried to install it himself, because the store he brought it to wouldn't work on an illegal copy, he ended up wrecking his entire computer.
• Dinner Order Flub: "The serving of Wi-Fi, how big is the free portion?"
• Dirty Coward: This guy is a violent misogynistic jerk, but backs down when confronted by someone who can fight back.
• Dirty Old Man:
  • Well, at least he's honest about it.
  • Here is a dirty old person of unspecified gender.
  • Here, nobody knows (nor wants to know) what this man has been doing over his computer.
  • For their April Fool's Day 2016 jokes, we learn that Master Yoda apparently has an interest in erotic holovideos like Fifty Shades of the Dark Side.
  • "Then you can give me a heart attack and I can die a happy man."
• Dirty Old Woman: Being old gives you the right to sexually harass employees, apparently.
  • Also these ladies.
  • I used to make chocolate penises.
  • This lady misdials the phone helpline she was trying to get to and gets a phone sex service instead. She wants to call them back once she's done with the helpline.
• Disabled Means Helpless: This person believes that people in wheelchairs are completely helpless.
• Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery: This woman continually comes in after hours in order to have inexperienced cashiers allow her to pay for all her groceries with her EBT card (which is illegal, as several items do not qualify for EBT) and picks her order up days afterward, causing the perishables to go bad, which she complains about. Originally, they have a policy for them to put everything back after twenty-four hours, causing the woman to complain to corporate that they are discriminating against her because she is disabled (it is never stated specifically how she is disabled), forcing the store to keep her stuff and call her every day, at which point she still only shows up about half the time. When the store stops being a twenty-four-hour location, she calls corporate once again to claim discrimination, which this time fails. Eventually, the store is able to get the woman banned, at which point she, again unsuccessfully, claims discrimination because she’s disabled.
• The Disease That Shall Not Be Named: For a long time, stories relating to the COVID-19 Pandemic (on any of the Not Always sites) would never call it by name, generally making references to "the global health crisis" and dubbing it "[The Disease]", "[rapidly spreading illness]", etc. This is likely for practical reasons, as many advertisers will avoid sites that refer to coronavirus or COVID-19 directly, as they don't want the association. Although this no longer seems to be entirely true as of December 2021, as this story explicitly refers to the coronavirus pandemic.
• Disney Owns This Trope:
  • This person appears to believe that Disney owns the whole state of Florida, to the point where all bag checkers supposedly have to be "Disney-certified".
  • It seems she's not alone in this belief.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Customers wish for this in quite a few stories. Did the employee screw up an inconsequential detail? Their ass must be fired! Did the store follow policy to the letter by denying a return? They must be sued and driven out of business!
  • This woman pulled the fire alarm and forced the gym to close until the fire department cleared the building because someone else wanted to work out and she didn't have the whole (public) gym to herself. She gets banned and arrested for misuse of emergency services.
  • A man is baffled when he discovers that his cell phone service account has been discontinued on account of him being dead (which he obviously isn't), and eventually he and the submitter trace this bizarre discrepancy to his daughter, who had been disallowed from going to a party and retaliated by telling the company that her father was dead, causing them to delete his account and disable his mobile phone. The man's first action after his service is restored is to take his daughter off his account.
  • A movie-goer threatens to burn a movie theater employee with a lit cigarette just because the employee cannot give the movie-goer a more detailed description of the plot of a movie they have not seen yet right there on the spot.
  • This plane passenger is being ignored by the plane's stewardesses over his abuse of the call button, so he gets out a toolkit (that he somehow got past security) and starts disassembling his seat.
  • This man parks in a bookstore's fire lane while he and his wife go across the street for dinner, and on their return they're met by a simple request from the manager not to do that again. For whatever reason, the man decides this offends him so much that he's going to repeatedly smear fecal matter all around the store's bathroom.
  • A previous customer pepper-sprayed a grocery store fishmonger "because his fish was too heavy". At the time of the story, the spray has been lingering for so long that the grocery store is displaying hot sauce to make people think that's why it smells like a capsaicin bomb went off.
  • In this story, a Jerkass in the drive-thru of a Mexican fast-food restaurant completely flips his lid, spits on his burrito, and then throws it back at the teenaged cashier, telling the poor kid that he is a failure and that he should die in a fire (causing the poor cashier to quit his job on the spot)… just because the restaurant was out of sour cream for his burrito.
    Commenter Kate Williams: Man, how much of a insecure loser syndrome you have to have [sic] in order to get mad and assault an employee over sour-cream?
  • This woman seems perfectly happy with the service she receives… until the submitter tells them "no problem" instead of "you're welcome," and things only devolve from there to the point where the next thing the submitter knows, they're waking up in hospital.
  • This guy harasses the submitter and promises to "make sure of it that you’re scared when you walk the streets," just for asking to see his ID when he tried to buy alcohol.
  • This maniac calls the submitter and tells them that they and their family should die, for pointing out she's at wrong restaurant (because all fast food restaurants are owned by the same people obviously).
  • This woman punches a waitress for asking if she wanted another glass of wine, as she figured the waitress was insinuating that she was an alcoholic.
  • After this guy is told not to smoke in the restaurant and his attempt to bribe the submitter to look the other way falls flat, he tosses his cigarette lighter into a restaurant's fryer, causing a fire that necessitates the restaurant's evacuation.
  • This story features a customer destroying a pizza deliverer's cell phone on being told that the pizza arrived too early for the 30 Minutes, or It's Free! policy to come into effect. But the real instance of this trope comes at the end, when it's mentioned that a week after this incident, the customer was arrested for stabbing a delivery driver for not bringing her a coke.
  • This woman is a repeat offender. In the space of one theme park visit, she says the cotton candy vendor needs to be fired because the cotton candy wasn't fluffy enough, the popcorn vendor should be fired because the popcorn was "too poppy," and the merry-go-round operator should be fired because the ride was spinning "too clockwise."
  • “I’m going to pull the fire alarm if you don’t serve me.”
    • This customer actually did pull the fire alarm when she couldn't find anyone to slice her bread for her (and she apparently didn't want to buy any pre-sliced bread).
• Dissimile: "She's about the same size, I guess...except thinner and with bigger boobs." Exactly like this, except all different.
• The Ditz: So, so many. For example, "All right, now I have I-n-d-i-a-m-i-m-b-i-n-d-o-k-i-a-m-n - is that how you spell Minneapolis?"
  • Another good example. "Well, yeah, I’m really klutzy, so I tend to drop [my laptop] out of my car when I go to school. Is it bad to drop it a lot?”
  • "No, no, no. I want that chicken 'friend' rice stuff... and that's got shrimp, right?"
  • The series "Adventures In The Third Dimension" are about people who are either too tired or too stupid to realize that yes, there is a third dimension. Not everything is a flat left or right.
  • This woman is 'running late' and arrives at a store an hour and a half before they open, and rather than interpret the locked door as 'the store is shut' she interprets it as 'the door is stuck' and breaks a window to get in. She remains completely oblivious even though she gets confused about the lack of staff.
  • This Australian man has apparently never encountered (nor heard of) a can opener in his entire life.
  • "It was a Playbox!" Do you want an Xbox or a PlayStation?
  • This guy apparently didn't know that leaving a wool jumper near a heat source (in this case a candle) would cause it to catch on fire.
  • This woman wants to return a jar of peanut butter because it contains peanuts! Are you fucking serious?!
  • In fact, almost everything under "Extra Stupid" is filled with people who can't seem to grasp basic concepts like "rain is wet" or "ice is cold". There are, as of this edit, nearly four hundred pages under the "Extra Stupid" tag, with five entries per page. That's almost two thousand stories with that tag.
  • This woman sends an accountant on a wild goose chase because she forgot what state "KY" is for. ^note KY stands for Kentucky, the woman thought it stood for Connecticut.
  • This woman goes to get her car repaired at the dealership and for some reason doesn't know the make and model of the car she drives, her phone number, or her own god damn name!
  • This man utterly fails to comprehend the fact that the gas pump reads "regular unleaded" is correct. The man is unaware that gas had recently been made universally unleaded.
  • This woman doesn't seem to know what an eraser is.
  • This woman attempts to pay for a kitchen appliance with cash over her phone and apparently pushes the money into her phone case. When the submitter reminds the woman that they must pay the cash in person, the woman accuses the store of stealing her money (that is still there with her) and later comes into the store to complain about them supposedly stealing her money... which she is then amazed to discover is still in her phone case.
  • This man does the classic shtick of taking the wrong drink at a coffee shop. He ordered a caramel macchiato and somehow mistook a glass of water for his drink. He also complained about its "horrible taste."
  • This woman can't for the life of her understand how to mail packages.
  • This woman bought two tins of almonds, forgetting she has a nut allergy. Really?
  • This woman who is of Korean extraction wants a black-and-white photo of her grandparents touched up because she thinks her grandfather's side has faded. She can't seem to comprehend how she's mixed race (her grandfather is Caucasian with blonde hair) and thinks she's white after being told as such.
  • This German man doesn't seem to understand how Amazon works. He thought checking "gift" would mean he'd get a gift with the order.
  • This woman flings (non-aggressively) her credit card at the cashier and misses. Her card somehow manages to land inside a smoothie machine.
  • Is bread a food?
  • "What's a website? What's an Internet?"
  • This woman was trying to call a window cleaning company and somehow managed to dial her own number for about an hour.
  • This man is very computer inept that it takes 15 minutes for him to locate the spacebar!
  • When going out to buy a cake, maybe know the person's name and how to spell.
  • Mr. Johnson is not in fact Mr. Williamson.
  • This customer calls a store, claiming to be in a store's electronics department, and asks them to send someone to help her locate a CD. Five minutes later, after they fail to find her, she reveals that she's actually at home.
  • What's music?
  • This man dropped his credit card in the sink and then tried to dry it by putting it in the microwave.
  • This man thinking that the AC adapter power cable is a computer.
  • This woman heard the story about fixing a wet phone by putting it in rice, except she somehow missed the 'wet' part and thus dunks her phone into a grocery store's rice bar to try and fix its broken screen.
  • This entire family took a computer telling them to insert (virtual) coins to be able to keep playing games included with it literally and began inserting coins into the computer tower itself to be able to keep playing, thinking the coins would magically go straight to the game devs, with the dad eventually cutting some "coin slots" into the tower's shell to make inserting them into the computer easier. Not only did this not work, but the computer's warranty was voided because of the "coin slots" cut into the shell and the excess amount of coins being put inside eventually ended up trashing the computer's insides.
  • This customer believed that when milk got too old it turned into cheese rather than spoil, and until being dispelled of that notion right then, he had been keeping a jug of milk in his unrefrigerated cupboard for two years in the hopes that it would one day become cheese.
  • This genius comes to pick up something for his company, but he doesn't remember the company's name.
  • This guy has to have it explained to him that a grilled cheese sandwich is a sandwich with grilled cheese, and that hashbrowns taste like potatoes because they're made of potatoes.
  • This library patron:
    “I don’t understand what you’re asking me all this for. I just want astrolognomy [sic]!”
• Ditzy Genius: This person is a scientist with several PhDs. Yet, he is unable to figure out exactly how to press the 4 key on his phone to get rid of his extended absence message.
• Does Not Like Spam: “I mean it! NO feta on the one side! GOD HELP YOU IF THERE IS FETA!”
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Gigantic pens.
• Domed Hometown: This guest at an Orlando theme park owned, according to her, by a "f***g mouse" is convinced that said park possesses a retractable dome for use in bad weather (of which Florida has a great deal), and is irate that she got wet despite this. For reference, the largest domed structure ever built is the Singapore National Stadium, which covers approximately 24 acres; the Magic Kingdom covers 107. Even if sufficiently-strong construction materials existed to build a dome of that size, let alone a retractable one, nobody, not even Disney, has that kind of money.^* And that's assuming it was only the Magic Kingdom she was talking about — for all we know, it could have been the whole of Disney World, which covers 39 square miles. Good luck trying to build a dome over that. She then starts screaming about how she's going to call the terrorists and have them fly planes into the park, which gets her jailed for making terrorist threats.
• Domestic Abuse:
  • Comes up every so often. Here's a rather scary example.
  • Yikes, this story. A fast food worker goes to answer a nighttime knock at the door to remind the knocker that they're drive-thru only at night, only to find a badly beaten woman fleeing an Arranged Marriage; a situation that quickly goes From Bad to Worse when the angry male relatives of her family arrive and proceed to lay siege to the restaurant in an attempt to reclaim her, forcing the woman and the two on-shift employees to take refuge on the roof until the police arrive.
• Don't Explain the Joke: "It's funny, because it sounds sexual."
• Don't Make Me Take My Belt Off!: "Do you have any electronic child-spanking-devices?”
• Doom It Yourself: While waiting for tech support to come, this genius building maintenance guy decides to fix the office printer himself. When tech support arrives, the office is completely covered in toner, and not only is the printer damaged beyond reasonable repair, but so too are three computers.
• Door Dumb: Often the icing on the cake to a particularly unreasonable customer. For example.
  • And every so often, it's the entire point of the story.
• Doorstopper: This seems to be the type of book that this customer is looking for, though given the way they describe it, "lifestopper" may be a better term.
• Double Entendre: Oddly enough, the literal meaning of the words is the correct one. It's still creepy, though.
  • It had to be a joke. Nobody could have done that by accident.
  • The title of this entry suggests that the poster thought that the milkshake spilling was no accident.
  • Can't get it up anymore.
  • Fast women.
  • "You wouldn't know anything about 10 inches, dear."
  • Is anyone gonna pump me?
  • An on-going malapropism of "g-spot" for "hotspot", despite continuous correction.
  • New jugs. Get that mind out of the gutter.
  • Proximity of mass media isn't conducive to removing one's mind out of that gutter.
• Double Standard:
  • Mixed with Does Not Like Women, a guy who nearly had a stroke when he was told all the managers were female; also see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
  • This woman is appalled that a male cleaner is cleaning the women's restroom. However, a female cleaner working in the men's restroom? Just fine by her!
  • This man just assumes that all women regardless of occupation (the women he's badgering at that specific point in time are pharmacists) know how to mend clothes.
  • A problem for the babysitter in this story, who learned that people were less likely to hire him knowing he was male. As it happened, though, he had a Gender-Blender Name and a voice that sounded feminine on the phone, so he avoided any use of gendered pronouns in his advert (though without actually lying) and offered the first session for free in order to get a foot in the door. This gave people who hired him on the assumption that he was female the chance to see that he actually was a good babysitter.
• Double Take: Done by this hotel worker when a guest's stay comes out to $2.4 million. For his part, the guest doesn't bat an eyelid. (It turns out that he was the CEO of a major global bank, and he'd won some jewelry in a charity auction held at the hotel which had been charged to his room.)
• Do Wrong, Right: "Now, now, they're not dumb people. They're suckers."
• Do You Want to Haggle?:
  • The joke about Cloud Cuckoolander haggling in the wrong direction is not entirely baseless, as you can see here. Or here. Don't let them fool you, fool yourself first.
  • The online seller in this story absolutely does not want to haggle, calmly but firmly making it clear that the computer he's selling is not going for less than the asking price, and that there are two other potential buyers who are offering said asking price. The would-be buyer, however, responds by accusing the seller of "flipping out" and "having a meltdown," claiming the seller is only refusing to knock the price down because he fears "personal defeat," while trying to paint himself as the reasonable one. He does eventually give up, but not until after telling the seller to "get help".^* Several commenters question why the seller didn't simply block the idiot once he started with this nonsense — although the seller's general attitude throughout the exchange suggests that he simply found it amusing.
  • A tourist surprises a shop owner by not trying to haggle down an already reasonably-priced book. According to the owner, the locals will inevitably try to do so, even if the item is free (which, assuming that wasn't a joke, would mean they expect the shop to pay them to take merchandise away).
  • This customer, having previously been told the asking price for a new trailer is $6,000, walks in and says he is not going to haggle: he is offering $7,500 and they can take it or leave it. Unsurprisingly, they take it.
  • This customer apparently haggles for the sheer joy of it, since after getting the price knocked down from four for a dollar to five for a dollar, and saying how much he loves getting a bargain, he then happily hands over $20 and says to keep the change because it's for charity.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: "Oh! Isn't he cute?! He wants to play baseball!" A mother says this after her kid throws a can of yams at a cashier and significantly injures them.
• Drives Like Crazy:
  • A newcomer to New Jersey is alarmed that they're going ten miles per hour over the posted speed limit and still the slowest car on the road.
  • This driver somehow mistakes an employee parking lot (with a boom gate) for a "VIP lot," and crashes into the submitter's friend's parked car, believing that the submitter's friend is at fault. But it gets even crazier from there. Turns out he's blind in one eye, has very bad vision in the other, refuses to wear glasses or contacts, and is driving on a suspended license for accidents caused because of his bad eyesight. When the submitter's friend – the optician he tried to have sign off on his license – sics the police on him, he tries to make his getaway, and slams right into the barrier again. Unsurprisingly, he's arrested for multiple offenses.
• Duct Tape for Everything: This bartender uses Hello Kitty duct tape to stop bar fights. (It Makes Sense in Context- the bar had a 'no sports logo hats' policy because people kept starting fights over rival sports teams. Customers would be allowed to keep their hats, if they let the bartender slap a strip of duct tape over the logo and declare them supporters of the Pretty Kitties. It actually worked.)
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: This shopper thinks that Justin Bieber is a woman. In line with that mistake, the shopper additionally thinks his first name is Justine.
• Dude, Where's Our Car?: "That's my car from last year. That's right, that IS where I parked it!"
• Dumbass Has a Point: Why would anyone pay $1,500 for a massage chair when they can use it here for free?!
  • Note how said dumbass is being told to get his ass off the chair for pretty much that exact reason!
• Dumb Blonde: Yes, some of them do exist and they are giving the natural blondes a bad name.
  • "Oh, I’m not looking for a colorist! Just someone who knows how to cut blonde hair."
  • Subverted here. A male customer clearly thinks this of a female customer, thinking she's a Twilight fan. However, she's clearly well-read, quoting George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and capping off with a quote from Douglas Adams.

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