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Not Always Right / Tropes U to Z

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    U-V 
  • Unintelligible Accent: This man's accent is so thick that the submitter finds it almost impossible to decipher what he's saying, and he refuses to tone it down, thinking the submitter doesn't speak "Englits".
  • Unit Confusion: “Get me a liter of ham.”
  • Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: This one here. The girlfriend doesn't take well to the customer.
  • Ungrateful Bastard: These four individuals are all completely ambivalent to having won a raffle. The first said they don't care, the second said they're too busy, the third doesn't want it if it's not high quality, and the fourth really doesn't want to go and get it. You'd think people would be more excited about receiving something for free.
  • Unishment: Warning a child "stay out of the restaurant's kitchen or they'll make you wash dishes" backfires.
  • Unit Confusion:
    • Now explained!
    • This man's misunderstanding of the metric units on his ruler (it was metric on both sides) is heavily implied to cause a disastrous situation in the future. How so? The man in question is an architect put in charge of the design of a massive luxury estate!
    • This customer has to have it explained to him that there are not 100 minutes in an hour.
      Customer: “I wish we’d stuck with the metric system. All these American measurements are crazy.”
  • Unmanly Secret: This customer is embarrassed that the cashier knows he watches Steven Universe, a children's show with multiple female lead characters. Fortunately, the cashier reassures the customer that he's not being judgmental because he's also a fan of the show.
  • Unnamed Parent: Both callers in this story apparently believed their recently-deceased mothers were actually named "Mom".
  • Unreliable Narrator: Since these are anonymous stories, readers ultimately have to take the posters' word that they aren't embellishing the anecdote, leaving out essential details, or making it up entirely.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The guy that craps himself in this story that nobody but the cashier seems to notice. He is not the main "character" either.
  • Unsatisfiable Customer: This accounts for a majority of the stories there.
    • An inversion here: a customer asks for a can of forest-green paint, the submitter (this being their first time using the machine to mix paint) somehow ends up with gray, and the customer decides that's "close enough" and takes it anyway.
    • A customer is let onto a subway train despite not having enough money for the fare. Instead of being grateful for the act of kindness, she instead complains that this is the reason why the transit system is lacking funds.
    • This poor guy just can't win.
    • This guy is so upset by being offered a free CD from his doctor (who is also a musician) that he cancels his appointment because he feels that the free offer is just the receptionist's way of coming on to him.
    • This jerk loudly takes issue with literally everything about the movie theatre he visits. The submitter suspects that he was in a bad mood to begin with and decided to take it out on the whole theatre.
      Submitter: “Sir, you just yelled at me because you have to put your own butter and salt on. Now you’re mad I’m pouring your soda for you?”
      Customer: “GO F*** YOURSELF!”
    • This customer is disappointed when the pet store doesn't have anything for her since she wants something so "low-maintenance" that she doesn't want to feed it.
      Submitter: “Here is a pet rock. You can have a pet rock.”
      Customer: “What does it do?”
      Submitter: “Absolutely f*** all, which is the same as what you intend to do. Have a nice day.”
    • This customer is angry that her eel has sesame seeds and demands a new one, then gets angry that it doesn't have sesame seeds.
    • Within the space of one theme park visit, this woman 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."
  • Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object: This matchup between a boy who can't stop asking "why" and a worker who actually has an answer for him every time is compared to this trope by an awed manager.
  • Unwanted Assistance:
    • This customer reacts fairly calmly to a flight delay due to inclement weather. Another customer tries to get angry on the first customer's behalf. The first customer eventually tells the other to shut up, as she wasn't helping the situation at all.
    • Similarly, this story features a customer who gets angry at another customer for "harassing" an off-duty employee when the employee tells him that the other customer had made an honest mistake.
    • When a fire breaks out, this customer pesters the submitter to make sure he deals with the fire "properly."
      Man: “What about the people still asleep in the houses? Should you not warn them!?”
      Submitter: *in their head* “I would be but I’m stood here talking to you!” *to Man* “I was just about to do that, sir…”
  • Unstoppable Rage: Many customers fly into these at the least provocation.
  • Urine Trouble: Serves as the capstone to a hilariously incompetent attempt at dog smuggling.
  • Vagina Dentata: Or... something...?
  • Vegetarian Carnivore:
  • Verbal Backspace: Sometimes... when the customers are the first to realize they're not (always) right. A good example.
  • The Victim Must Be Confused: A drive-thru customer at this restaurant sees one of the workers taking orders in a long drive-thru line with a company provided iPad, to help move traffic. Despite all assurances from the employee that none of the employees are forced to do it, and they are in fact quite happy with the arrangement, the customer takes clandestine photos, and posts a "worker oppression" narrative on Facebook that causes the business a major PR debacle.
  • Victoria's Secret Compartment: One customer tried to smuggle free samples out this way. They didn't make much of an attempt to hide them.
    • Apparently, this lady's VSC is so secret, she forgets when she hides her cell phone there.
  • Visible Silence: The most common ending of entries. May represent Sarcasm Failure.

    W 
  • Wacky Cravings:
    • The (unseen) pregnant wife of this man wants her mint-choc bar.
    • Another wants Vanilla Häagen-Dazs™.
    • And yet another wants anchovies, jarred asparagus and bacon-flavored chips.
  • Waif-Fu: Apparently practised by many Action Girls, short men, and even one nine-year-old boy.
  • Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: “They got my printer working! And I only used the f-word once!” Um, hooray for you?note 
  • Waxing Lyrical:
  • Weapon for Intimidation:
    • Two here: the fake gun used to commit a robbery and the fake knife used to stop it.
    • This lady carries a real taser with the batteries removed, due to a fight at a Black Friday sale.
  • Wham Line:
  • What Are Records?: This customer seems to think this is what's going on... When in reality, she's just in the wrong store.
  • What Beautiful Eyes!: This isn't always a good thing.
  • What Could Possibly Go Wrong?:
  • What Did I Do Last Night?: An equivalent here, where four old ladies accidentally eat pot brownies on July 4th, get the munchies so hard they buy a whole load of snacks, and are almost convinced they were imagining it until they return to the store a few days later for regular purchases.
  • What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: invoked
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: invoked
    • With a side order of Sustained Misunderstanding: "How could you put that in a children's film?"
    • Princess Mononoke — it's just a princess cartoon, right? To the woman's credit, she does actually take the clerk's advice, and pretty quickly at that.
    • Also occurs with Pan's Labyrinth and Con Air.
    • Grand Theft Auto V for a nine-year-old boy? Perfectly fine! (At least, until said boy drops an F-bomb on another customer for questioning it.)
      • The entire "Grand Theft Innocence" series is this trope applied to video games, Grand Theft Auto being the most prominent offender.
    • These grandparents decide that a film featuring Batman has to be for kids, because it's Batman; the Board of Film Classification simply doesn't know what they're talking about with that 12-certificate rating.
    • This New Jersey mother decides to take her kids to South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, believing "It’s a cartoon, so it’s for kids," and obviously ignorant of the fact that the movie is rated R because of its content, swearing, offensive humor, and general themes not appropriate for kids, as warned by the clerk manning the ticket sales. The mother obviously ignores the clerk's warnings, so 20 minutes later, she predictably comes back, furious to confront the clerk, thinking “It’s a d*** cartoon. It should be for kids only. That’s made to corrupt the youth!” It goes downhill from there as she punches the clerk and attacks other customers, and ultimately ends up getting arrested and serving a month in prison.
    • This lady, clearly unfamiliar with the phrase "never judge a book by its cover", bought what is most likely Whispers by Passenger for her grandson because its album art is styled after children's books from the 1960s, and was disgusted when the album turned out to be completely inappropriate for children. Everyone in earshot is bewildered that she would buy that artist's music for a little kid.
    • This woman was apparently under the impression that all card games were strictly children's games, and as such was mortified when the Cards Against Humanity game she bought for her kids contained adult humor, sex jokes, and cursing in it ("It's a card game! Card games are for kids!", she insists).
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: There are some people who seem to be a bit confused.
  • What Year Is This?:
  • When Elders Attack: In which a group of old ladies from a retirement home enact revenge on a Racist Grandma speaking ill of the dead by crafting voodoo dolls and leaving them lying around where the racist can find them.
  • Where the Hell Is Springfield?: In the United States.
  • Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Msquared. That's their only name.
  • Wholesome Crossdresser: This story, where the OP is complimented by a little girl.
  • Who's on First?:
  • Why We Can't Have Nice Things:
    • This photo store had to stop offering photo-cropping services because too many people tried to sue them for damages despite signing a waiver. The customer they're explaining this to then demonstrates exactly why they stopped.
    • This car rental employee stopped telling a joke about charging extra for cleaning bugs off a rental car's windshield after a customer, as usual, took the joke seriously and nearly went berserk over it.
    • When this customer asks why a store doesn't offer credit for recycled cartridges anymore, the clerk replies that people were getting cheap junk cartridges from other brands off the internet and recycling them for more credit than they were actually worth. Sure enough, the customer had been doing that scam himself.
    • An employee for a hotel chain decides to use the chain's discounted employee rate for stays at its Hawaii locations to take her family on vacation. However, when they get there, it turns out that she failed to have HR authorize the reservation and she must pay the full reservation. The resultant ear-shattering tantrum the woman throws costs her the trip, her job, and, for everyone else employed at the hotel chain, the employee discount at the chain's Hawaii locations.
    • In this story, the crew of a plane rapidly get tired of a mother not doing anything about her child running roughshod around the plane until…
      Captain (on PA): “I’m keeping the seatbelt sign on for the remainder of the flight. Passengers are only allowed out of their seats to use the restrooms. For those who wish to complain about my actions, please mention in said complaints that some customers were unwilling to control their children until it became technically illegal not to do so. I wish most of you a pleasant remainder of the flight.”
    • Similarly, at this car racing event, the catch fence is damaged. It's not damaged enough to cancel the event over… until a bunch of kids whose parents are too busy with their cell phones and beer start messing around with the fence, opening up a hole. Then when the track crew try and get the kids away from the hole, the parents naturally tell them to leave their kids alone until the police have to get involved, and an announcement is made informing spectators that due to the kids' action and their parents' negligence, the remainder of the races have been cancelled. The submitter notes that the cops' prescence was likely the only thing saving the parents from being attacked by angry fans.
    • This postal worker isn't supposed to let people in when the post office is closed (like it is during her lunch break), but makes an exception when a woman desperately needs stamps. Then, after the woman turns abusive and demands a refund (stamps are non-refundable), the submitter regrets her decision.
      I no longer open that door during lunch for ANY reason. I don’t give a s*** if it’s some little old lady on the other side who just needs a single stamp to mail a card to her dying father.
    • This restaurant server was willing to let a five-year-old slide on the "under-4s eat free" policy, until the mother immediately claimed her near-teen was also under 4.
    • This coffee shop owner decides to take down a joke sign that says children left unattended will get a double espresso and a free puppy after an employee had to deal with a dense customer who took the sign completely seriously and cannot comprehend that it is a joke.
    • And this fast food worker let a mother who'd paid for a budget birthday event push what she was getting all the way to the prestiege event, only for her to still demand a discount because the mascot wasn't dancing enough.
      Lesson learned: Say a firm but polite ‘NO’ right from the get-go.
  • Wicked Stepmother: Averted for this girl.
  • Wig, Dress, Accent: Well, wig and glasses, anyway...and the customer actually did it by accident.
  • Wise Beyond Their Years: A lot of these customers seem to have somehow raised kids who have a lot more common sense than they do. Naturally, a lot of exchanges with the parents of these kids tend to involve the kid either mortified beyond belief or finally pushed too far by their Amazingly Embarrassing Parents.
    • "You cut that out right now! You need to be more polite!"
    • Weaponized by this museum guide:
      "Now, everyone always assumes that I’m talking to you when I go over these rules, but really, I know that you know how to behave. The grownups, on the other hand, think they can do anything because they’re grownups. So you keep an eye on your parents for me, okay?"
    • Then there's the unreasonably paranoid mother who tries to protect her children from a pair of harmless teenagers.
    • This guy raises his fist to a nine-year-old boy over a Christmas toy they're fighting for, but before he can do anything, the kid shows that he knows karate by laying the guy out and leaving him to run off humiliated.
    • This one politely returns the copy of Grand Theft Auto V his mother bought for him (despite the shop clerk's content warning) because "everyone's bad and rude and I almost said a bad word to one of the black men, so I wanna play something else". The shop clerk is impressed by his introspection.
  • Woman Scorned: This woman has a fight with her husband, who – not wanting to talk to her – stays in a hotel. The woman is so angry she calls the hotel trying to find him and tries to ring them for three hours. Whenever the hotel staff picks up the phone, she takes her anger out on them, unleashing a deluge of verbal abuse and Angrish to the point that the submitter wonders if she's having a fit. Not surprisingly, she and her husband are getting a divorce last the submitter heard.
    (I wish I could describe how much hate her voice had in it.)
  • Won't Take "Yes" for an Answer:
    • What do you mean, I don't have to wait for a table?!
    • "The store stays open 24 hours" is apparently how you get customers to waste gas coming to a store that's closed, now.
    • This story, which features someone ranting about not getting a credit that they're eligible for and about to receive the moment they shut up about it, has this trope's name as the title!
    • This customer, who took a $40 game to the checkout with the intention of claiming it was priced at $20, blurts out "Why is it ringing up for $40?!" without noticing that it's actually ringing up for $15. He talks over the cashier's attempts to explain this, convinced the cashier is telling him he has to pay the $40. Eventually the cashier manages to explain and says they can charge the extra $5 if he wants.
    • This customer complains that the helpline isn't open on Thanksgiving, and is apparently incapable of accepting that they are open on Thanksgiving, which is why they answered his call. It becomes clear, however, that he only phoned to complain and demand compensation, and when he's finally convinced they're open, he tries to claim he should be compensated for the inconvenience of his complaint being invalid.
    • This customer buys a box of Lego that is ringing up as $12.86, but which she says she got from under a sign saying $4. The cashier calls an associate, who says she can have it for $4. The customer insists on taking the associate to the Lego section, so she can point out where the sign was, only it's not there any more. The associate says she can have it for $4. The customer phones her boyfriend, who confirms that he also saw the sign saying $4. The associate says she can have it for $4. The customer storms off, outraged that nobody will believe her.
  • World War III: No, there aren't any history books about it... yet.
  • Word-Salad Humor: Some inarticulate customers can lead to unintentional examples. For instance, "I want a tree; it’s circular, but it’s a tree, and it’s a circle, but it’s only a half-circle, but it’s a tree. Oh! And you hang it on your window, and it’s a tree, and a circle."
  • World of Jerkass: The sheer volume of Entitled Bastards and Jerk Asses of various stripes in the site's stories may leave a reader with this impression of the world.
  • Worse with Context:
    • In this story, the submitter is at the grocery store they work at when down the aisle they find a small boy crying as his mother looks for something on the floor. The submitter ask what's going on and the mother explains that "[her son] lost Mouse!", which the submitter takes to mean that there is a mouse loose in the store. The mother responds: "No, you don't have a mouse loose in the store. Mouse is a snake.". Fortunately, the boy's pet snake is soon found unharmed and returned to him, and the boy's mother is advised to not let her son come into the store with a snake in his hoodie again.
    • This worker complains that a customer at a previous workplace tried to get them fired because her salad portion was too small. When their new coworker says that it sounds like a reasonable complaint that was merely blown out of proportion, the submitter clarifies that it was a self-serve buffet, meaning that the customer herself was the one who made the salad too small.
  • Worst Wedding Ever: The More You Read The Worse It Gets: Wedding Edition. The bride and groom get into a screaming fight during the dinner rehearsal (including a declaration that she's pregnant and doesn't know if he's the father), about a quarter of the expected guests turn up, some of the guests that do turn up get into a fight of their own that the police get called over, and the bride and groom have a second round during the reception resulting in the bride going home with her mother.
  • Worth It:
    • This Manager doesn't care what the fallout of his actions are after putting his foot down against an overly-entitled customer.
    • This guy definitely thinks it was.
    • This photo lab tech when it comes to trying to explain to a customer that he can't magically focus an unfocused picture.
  • Would Hit a Girl: Quite a few customers don't care about the gender of the employee they're assaulting.
  • Would Hurt a Child: Unfortunately, usually they never get that far though.
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit:
  • Wretched Hive:
    • An oddly localized version in a grocery store here. It starts with one customer shoving another customer into a store display and running off with the last Thanksgiving turkey, and the first customer getting back up and tackling her to the ground. A third customer steals everything out of the first customer's cart, including her purse, and a fourth customer swoops in and steals everything out of the second customer's cart AND the turkey that started this whole mess.
    • This story perhaps shows all the worst ways an all-you-can-eat pizza restaurant can go wrong, showing one such restaurant wherein the customers steal entire pizzas the minute they go out and leave nothing for the other customers, screaming unsupervised kids who try to tackle other customers or ruin pizzas just put out by slamming their hands into them (the latter occasionally resulting in burns because pizzas fresh out of the oven are incredibly hot objects), and tantrum-throwing adults who throw pizzas and smash dishes onto the floor when they don't get their way.
  • Writers Cannot Do Math: The dates on this story suggest it was somehow posted from at least three years after it appeared on the site.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • Wrong Restaurant:
    • Zig-zagged in this story, where a customer tries to buy cigarettes (with a fake ID) at a yogurt shop, and gets turned down for both having a fake ID and for going to the wrong store.
    • Most people are sufficiently familiar with the concept of a fast-food restaurant not to mistake one for a fine-dining establishment, but evidently not this group. They arrive dressed up for dinner, sit at a table and then grow irate because a waiter doesn't come to bring them water. When a worker tries to explain to them that they don't have waiters and how fast food works, they are apparently incapable of comprehending this concept, and continue to demand a waiter. Eventually another customer mocks them over it, causing them all to storm off in a huff.
    • In this story, two customers arrives at a Popeye's, realises it's not a KFC, and then seemingly expect the server to turn it into one.
    • Subverted in this story. A man goes into a vegetarian restaurant and orders a steak. The newly hired waitress (telling the story) has to inform him that as a vegetarian restaurant, they don't serve steak. But then the owner's daughter reveals that they do serve steak. It turns out the daughter decided to label the restaurant as "vegetarian" despite not knowing what the word means and the owner didn't want to hurt her feelings by telling her (despite her being an adult).
    • This guy orders a pizza for pick-up, but is unable to comprehend that the establishment he has walked into is not the pizza place he ordered from, but the burger place opposite. When the employees try to direct him to the correct place, he gets mad at them for expecting them to "do your jobs for you". He eventually leaves, but posts a negative review on Googlenote . And the staff get written up for it, even though nothing that happened was in any way their fault.

    X-Y-Z 

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