Not Always Working / Tropes M To S

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

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M

• Macho Masochism: “Bah, safety equipment is for sissies.”
• Mailman vs. Dog: A bizarre inversion in this story. For some reason, this mailman tried to invoke this trope by coaxing the submitter's dog into shredding the mail and reacting to him, then claiming the dog was aggressive. The submitter catches him in the act and reports him to his bosses, but never finds out what he was trying to accomplish with this deceit.
• Major General Song: This customer is refused service due to a bigoted waitress thinking that she isn't an American. She proceeds to sing the first verse of the song to prove that she really is American, while the waitress is later fired for her bigotry.
• Major Injury Underreaction: This new hire cuts his finger so deep with a box cutter than the blade skips off the joint, but still insists on finishing his shift, visibly impressing his ex-Marine manager.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Note to workers who do this: CCTV cameras are a thing and will probably catch you at it.
  • Along with the mistreatment and subsequent firing of a fellow employee, this gets this boss and his girlfriend fired themselves.
  • The night manager in this story did this with a subordinate on a restaurant's grill. The night before an inspection was scheduled. Oh, and they didn't do any actual work, either. Upon looking at security footage to determine why this was the case, the Squicked out management fired them, threw out the grill, and sued them for the cost of a replacement.
• Malaproper: An enthusiastic store owner orders a full set of LGBTQ+ flags to decorate with... plus the flag of Lebanon, because he confused 'lesbian' with 'Lebanese'.
• Malicious Misnaming:
  • This assistant manager, in addition to forcing a pregnant worker to do work that would put her unborn child in danger, insists on incorrectly referring to her as Karen, even though the submitter's real name is clearly visible on her name tag. Luckily, the store manager quickly notices and scolds the assistant manager for her behavior, and later transfers her to another store when she tries to pull the same stunt on another pregnant worker.
  • The barista in this story continuously and blatantly deliberately calls the submitter, Jim, by the wrong name - Germ for Jim, Janine for what is presumably James or Jamie, and Burp for Bob. Jim eventually stops going to that coffee shop, and he clearly wasn't the only one the barista did this to, as the shop has apparently lost a significant amount of business since Jim decided to get his caffeine fix elsewhere.
• Mama Bear: Don't tell THIS mother that her daughter's migraine and double vision are psychosomatic. They weren't, and if mama hadn't complained to the doctor in charge, the daughter could have gone blind, or worse. No report on what happened to the first doctor in the story.
  • Here is a Mama-in-law Bear.
• Mathematician's Answer: "Do you have a middle name?" "Yes."
• Mean Boss: Lots of them – to the point where they require their own page. Many of the rest fall into the category of Pointy-Haired Boss.
• "Metaphor" Is My Middle Name: This coworker's kid. Literally.
• Mistaken for Evidence: This manager accuses the submitter of being a homophobic sexist, citing an email sent by him to her in which she claims he called her a "bullshit lesbian". However, the senior manager points out that the acronym, B.S.L., which she thought was proof, actually meant "British Sign Language." The manager was threatened with dismissal when she refused to apologize to the submitter when she herself used a homophobic slur at the submitter when he revealed he's actually gay to refute her accusation.
• Mistaken for Gay: Subverted in this story where an employee thinks OP has done this to them (unless they actually are gay, which is never specified) but in reality they have been mistaken for another employee named Gay, who the original employee is escorting OP to meet.
• Mistaken for Junkie:
  • This customer is asked to leave a store because the worker thinks that they are high, when in reality, they're just loopy from a really bad migraine.
  • These horrible pharmacy employees assume, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the submitter, a mother standing outside with her feverish baby daughter, is a crack whore planning to shoplift. Thankfully, a third employee recognizes the situation for what it is, and ignores their disgusting warnings not to treat her like a human being.
  • In this story, a hotel receptionist sees a guest suffering a severe nosebleed, and promptly (and quite wrongly) concludes he has taken cocaine. The guest's friends try to explain that, no, it's just a natural nosebleed, but the receptionist clearly doesn't believe them. A couple of times after this, the hotel cleaners suddenly open the doors to the group's room while they are inside, which the poster suspects were attempts to catch them using drugs.
• Mistaken for Pedophile:
  • This girl's boyfriend gets brought to a police station when a cashier thought she saw a 20-something male kissing an 11- to 14-year-old girl; the young girl is 26.
  • Second verse, same as the first. Even the ages are nearly the same.
  • And now for something completely different: someone mistaken for a pedophile because the receptionist thinks a lady born in 1992 is only eleven years old in 2013. Even worse, this comes after the receptionist clearly sees the boyfriend's birth date was only two years before the girlfriend's - he justifies this by claiming "I thought he was trying to trick me".
  • And here it's a nurse. After being the third one to not know a woman gave birth without an epidural, she also thinks she's a teenage single parent; and when her husband shows up, she immediately accuses him of being a pedophile and goes to call the cops. Luckily, his mother, who also works at the hospital, is there and drags the idiot nurse off. When the girl wakes up next, she's greeted by another nurse who was put there by the mother-in-law to keep other stupid nurses away.
  • This manager believes that the submitter, a 25-year-old woman, is a teenager trying to get a teachers' discount (as the submitter just got certified to teach). When the submitter's 30-year-old fiancé makes a statement about climbing into bed with her, the manager calls security. Luckily for the couple, the submitter is able to straighten the situation out before the manager got the police over and get the meal comped, but it means that the manager ignored the alcohol on the table as well as the submitter's photo ID, which had her date of birth clearly printed on it.
• Mistaken for Pregnant:
  • This one. "I don't understand why some women are so sensitive about their pregnancy!"
  • One wonders how this employee keeps up the misunderstanding for so long.
  • No amount of proof can persuade this student nurse that the patient is not pregnant.
  • This nurse was so busy looking at the computer that she didn't realize the patient in front of her was a man and not a pregnant female!
  • This waiter at a pub inexplicably decides that if any woman is of childbearing age, there's a possibility that they might be pregnant (whether they know it or not), so he can't sell them alcohol.
• Mistaken for Racist:
  • Not racism, but this worker was reprimanded by their supervisor for insensitivity towards the disabled. The supervisor thought the employee was using the term "Mr. Walker" as a derogatory name because he uses crutches to walk, the real reason is that the man's name really is Mr. Walker. The worker sarcastically suggests calling the disabled man "Hey, you!" or just simply ignoring him completely, but the sarcasm flies completely over the supervisor's head and he agrees with him.
  • Here's a case of Mistaken for Nazi, with a side order of Sustained Misunderstanding.
  • This worker and manager both come to the conclusion that a person is refusing to do business with the worker solely because she is wearing a burka, even though the person repeatedly tells them that she's deaf, and she legitimately cannot do business with that worker because the burka prevents her from reading their lips.
  • This front desk manager is scolded by his boss for racially profiling applicants even though the submitter gives numerous valid reasons for not accepting the non-white applicants including not replying to calls that are noted on the resumes, living in a different continent, having interviewed people of color and the boss rejecting an Asian candidate because she didn't understand his accent on top of the submitter being First Nations, and being in a rural town that is 80% white. The boss then suggests a black person whom the submitter doesn't want because said applicant came in with no resume and in unprofessional attire, is unable to speak English (which is the language the system and paperwork uses), and barely speaks French in an accent that is so thick that the submitter can barely understand him. In response, the boss scolds the submitter for being racist, only hearing "he's black" and "he has an accent", and hires the guy anyway. The new hire is shown to have a terrible attitude, no work ethic, and a complete inability to do or learn his job, lasting less than a month. However, the boss learned never to doubt the submitter's reasons for choosing whether to hire someone again.
  • This new worker thought the submitter was racist against him due to the weird way he looked at him and complains to human resources. However, both HR and the submitter explains he has prosopagnosia, a condition that makes it difficult for him to recognize faces, and he gave the new worker a weird look as he was trying to figure out who was he speaking with.
  • This submitter admitted to not particularly enjoying Eartha Kitt's version of "Santa Baby", and the coworker who asked for her opinion assumed that this was because Kitt was black. The submitter, however, was quite complimentary toward Kitt and just hated the lyrics. Ironically, the coworker had made insulting comments about their Asian coworkers' lunches in the past.
• Mistaken for Romance: This waiter apparently assumes that the submitter is his pregnant friend's significant other, and gives him some nasty looks because they split the bill.
• Mistaken for Servant:
  • In this story, a deli worker at a grocery store mistakes an office store worker (the submitter) for a grocery store employee. When the submitter points out that he does not work at the grocery store, the manager drags him to the office and begins berating him for causing trouble. After the manager threatens to write him up for insubordination, the submitter points out his completely different uniform from the one the grocery store workers are wearing, at which point the manager realizes she had effectively been screaming at a customer. The ending implies that she was fired not long after the incident.
  • A more disturbing case in this story. The submitter is mistaken by another customer for an employee at a department store, even though she is wearing a Maleficent shirt, which looks nothing like the uniform. When the submitter refuses to help, the customer brings over the manager, who starts brutally screaming in the submitter's face at near point-blank range without even allowing her a chance to say that she doesn't work there. Fortunately, a security guard comes to the submitter's aid after she begs him to get the manager away from her. The police are also called, and the manager is implied to have had assault charges pressed against him for his outburst.
  • Exploited by the submitter here: He was hired as a networks engineer at a call center, but the first day the owner mistook him for a "coffee boy". The submitter ran with the mistake because in three years, no one realized he was still being paid as though he were in the position he was actually qualified for; in fact, he's being paid more to make coffee than he would have been to maintain networks, because his boss keeps giving him high performance ratings, so he keeps getting raises.
  • A weird case here, where a new hire for a pizza place is mistaken for an employee who already works there and looks eerily like the new hire. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the employee is very unpopular due to laziness and when the new hire shows up to start her first shift, one of the supervisors flips her lid and bodily throws the new hire out of the building, thinking she's the bad employee. The manager apologizes, fires the supervisor, and invites the new hire back, but when the new hire shows up again, the shift manager also mistakes her for the bad employee and reacts the exact same way the now ex-supervisor did. While both the supervisor and the shift manager were fired and then arrested for assault, after the second incident the new hire understandably decides she no longer wants to work for this pizza place and goes to work at a different one. The first pizza place is stated to have later closed for unrelated reasons (though that it was hiring such hot-headed employees most assuredly didn't help).
  • Another disturbing case with this craft store, where two employees mistake the submitter for a worker, one of them being a manager with major anger issues who tries to violently drag the submitter away, prompting the submitter to defend herself. Even when she threatens him with pepper spray, the manager continues to threaten physical violence on her until the cops show up and arrest him.
• Mistaken for Special Guest: These shoe salespeople know a mystery shopper is visiting the store, so they give a man with a notebook royal treatment, while giving the barely-out-of-high-school submitter barely any attention at all. The submitter is the mystery shopper, and suffice to say, she didn't give a positive evaluation.
• Mistaken for Subculture: This story with a mix of Mistaken for Junkie. Two American pizzeria cashiers refuse to serve a Maori uncle and nephew, thinking they were "druggie tattoo freaks" due to their Ta Moko tattoos, and trying to force them to leave. When the nephew tries to explain their Ta Mokos are actually part of their culture and it’s against regulation to not serve customers just because they come from a different race, the cashiers think they're making it up. Thankfully, their manager knows Maori culture and apologizes to the customers by giving them a free pizza.
• Morton's Fork:
  • This hotel manager is insistent that a customer's free night at the hotel was fraudulent. She ends up having one of these forced upon her: either she admits the beds were not cleaned as she says they were, or she admits that a maid ignored a 'do not disturb' sign on the door and took their towels.
  • This mechanic gets another one forced on him, after replacing a sensor in the submitter's car that had already been replaced the year previous and did not cost nearly as much as he's trying to charge for it now. It's even better in this case because there's a second layer to it - either he admits he's lying to rip the submitter off specifically, whether by lying about the status of the old sensor or the price of the new one, or he admits he's been deliberately installing faulty sensors that barely last a year into people's cars to rip off not only the submitter but every other customer he's ever had.
• Moving the Goalposts: Every time this sales worker forced the company to pay them fairly, they changed the policy so they wouldn't, and claimed it was retroactive so they didn't owe what they had before the change. After repeatedly trying to go to the department of labor, the worker finally just quit, and so did the rest of the sales department.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • This college department head, who had a history of being racist and sexist, made the mistake of assuming a pair of women were in the nursing program. One of them came over and set things straight—not only was she a criminal justice major, she was also the granddaughter of a major benefactor of the college. He was fired before the following term.
  • This clothing store employee blatantly insults a customer, calling her a fatass among other things and telling her to get out of the store. When the customer's friend helps out, the employee begins insulting him too, and learns too late that the friend happens to own the store they're in. Unsurprisingly, the employee is fired on the spot.
  • This example overlaps with Out-Gambitted; while the coworker doing the "mugging" knows the assistant manager, the "monster's" father owns the company. The coworker almost immediately quits upon learning this.
  • This new hire sees what he thinks is a teenager enter the store and immediately decides to yell at him and tell him to leave the store, going so far as to threaten to call the owner over it and saying that because he's good friends with said owner, they'll side with him on this. He places the call - and notices the "teenager"'s cell phone starts ringing. Turns out he just cussed out the Older Than They Look owner of the store, who fires him on the spot for being an asshole.
  • This disabled employee gets abused by his new manager for being mute, and one day is ordered to answer the phone despite this. She eventually fires the employee for repeatedly pressing a button and hanging up instead of talking, but he later returns with his brother, the CEO, with whom he had just had a Morse code conversation over the phone. The now-furious CEO scolds the manager for discrimination and fires her instead.
  • This new employee tries to scam a customer into giving him a large tip^note he claims that a free bag of chips and dip are "on me"; the actual policy is that every order over $10 gets free chips and dip... failing to notice that the customer in question is a shift manager at the very same restaurant.
  • Another case crossing over with Out-Gambitted - when this supervisor tries to play a prank on the submitter by claiming they have a rat problem, the submitter responds by telling him that, as draconian as Alberta's pest control is, a rat problem would get them shut down. By the time the poster's done with him, the supervisor's having a panic attack.
  • A new manager of a stationery supplier here acts extremely rudely to what they assume is a secretary of a business. Too bad for them, it was actually the owner, filling in for the sick secretary. The owner terminates their contract and tells their partners about the incident; the stationery supplier goes under shortly after, because it turns out that company was their biggest client.
  • This office manager screams at a worker who she believes is using a cell phone at work. As it turns out, not only was the phone actually a work phone that he was using to discuss a job with the owner, but the worker was also the owner's son. When the manager attempts to write up the worker, the unamused owner chews her out over the phone - it was her third instance of harassing the worker that month. When she refuses to admit wrongdoing, the owner suspends her for two weeks. Upon returning, the first thing the manager does is try to fire the submitter for framing her, which instead gets her fired for retaliation. She later loses a wrongful termination lawsuit due to a mountain of evidence against her, including a recording of the worker's phone conversation, where she could be clearly be heard screaming at him.
  • This bouncer refuses to let the submitter enter a pub, mistaking her for a drunken woman, and insults her before she can explain that she owns the bar. She calls her husband, who owns the bar alongside her, and upon learning what happened (and overhearing the bouncer's continued insults over the phone), he promptly fires the Jerkass bouncer for harassing his wife and then bans him from their pub for life.
  • This woman pushes the submitter's wheelchair-bound brother towards an exit against his will, claiming that he needs a "walk for extra-special attention". When the submitter intervenes, the woman shoves them against a printer and accuses them of being a misogynyst before poking the brother on the cheek. The submitter calls security, at which point the woman reveals she was only there for an interview for a position in IT... whose manager just happens to be the submitter's brother. Needless to say, she doesn't get the job, and is kicked out of the building by security for assaulting the IT manager.
• Mundane Solution: How did this supervisor handle an employee stealing money from the store tills? By showing her that the supervisor had to pay it all back, and that her thefts were only hurting the coworkers around her.
• Mushroom Samba: Caused one employee to think there were cockroaches in a PlayStation 2.
• My Eyes Are Up Here: One need not be subtle when telling their boss this.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The submitter of this story after realizing he unknowingly scammed a number of businesses with deceptively priced credit card systems that they have to pay at least $199 to get out of.
• My God, You Are Serious!: In this story, the submitter assumes their manager is joking when she informs them she's firing them because she's having a bad day and needs to hurt someone. When the manager actually hands them the pink slip, they respond thusly.
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: A coworker whose first language isn't English believes the word 'teabagging' to be the correct term to describe the action of people who block lanes in swimming pools and just bob up and down like teabags.^ExplanationFor those unfamiliar with the term, it's a sexual activity involving the testicles.
• My Nayme Is:
  • This passport office employee adamantly believes that the submitter has been "lied to" and attempts to "correct" what the employee believes to be a missing hyphenation, even after the submitter explicitly states that it's an unconventionally spelled middle name. The supervisor is more aware, though, and sends the employee on break, implying that she will be let go for that.
  • This DMV employee outright turns away the submitter because she believes that the submitter's name is spelled wrong on the submitter's birth certificate and social security card. The submitter's mother immediately calls for a manager, who, just like in the previous example, is baffled at how an employee would think that someone would not know how spell their own name.
• My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours:
  • This student points out that if they're liable for taxes in California, they want the services their taxes pay for. They will gladly pay the $8 in taxes... from a refund of $10,000 out-of-state tuition.
  • In an example overlapping with Screw the Rules, I Make Them, this supervisor implements a new rule in his company's social media policy requiring all employees to add him on their social media accounts so he can monitor them. The submitter refuses and the boss threatens to fire him for insubordination. The submitter then reveals that while it's legal in their state for companies to monitor public social media posts, it is also illegal to force employees to give up their right to privacy if they have private social media accounts. The supervisor immediately backs down, and is later written up by his superiors for implementing the change to the policy without consulting the legal team.

N

• Naked People Are Funny: When a Senior Chief Petty Officer in the navy tells his subordinates that if the fire alarm goes off (the barracks' fire alarm was faulty and going off at random times, but that didn't mean it wasn't potentially a fire), they were to immediately drop what they were doing and get out of the barracks. One Marine who had been showering when the alarm went off followed orders dutifully and left without stopping to grab a towel. To his credit, the SCPO didn't get mad and merely amended his orders to say that anyone who was naked could grab something to cover up on their way out.
• Nepotism: There are exceptions, but many employees shown to be married or otherwise related to a higher-up in their company can and will get away with laziness, incompetence and even criminal acts, because either they think that family connection to a higher-up makes them above the rules, or said higher-up actively covers for them. Thankfully, Laser-Guided Karma is still in effect, and most such employees end up fired by the end of the story - if not by said relation, then alongside them if they were actively allowing that employee's problem(s) to slide.
• Nervous Wreck: This new hire proves to be terrified of accidentally offending customers, to the point where he doesn't clean out fitting rooms, even when they're empty, for fear of somehow offending a customer. He also outright freezes when customers approach him, and customers express concern for him. He eventually decides working with other people isn't working out for him and resigns. As he leaves, the submitter gives him contact details for a mental health organization.
• Never Heard That One Before:
  • One employee came up with a way to deal with the dreaded "It must be free" joke whenever a barcode won't scan.
  • Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?
• Never Learned to Read: This young man, while looking for a job, reveals that he never learned to read or write because he was homeschooled and his entire "education" consisted of his parents reading him Bible stories.
• Never Mess with Granny: The 75-year-old customer in this story puts a Mean Boss in his place after he wrongfully fires the submitter and steals the tip she gave her.
• Never My Fault: An unfortunately common exchange is a Pointy-Haired Boss proposing something stupid, an employee questioning them, and then getting threatened to follow orders or else. Later, when the dumb thing turns out to have been a bad idea, the boss blames the employee for either not 'doing it right' or not trying harder to make the boss realize their idea was stupid.
  • This boss completely forgets about an interview with the submitter, and as such decides to label them as a "no-call, no-show", despite the submitter arriving early and being in the process of calling them about it. The submitter understandably bails on that company and gets a better job elsewhere.
  • This boss starts to hand the submitter two documents (one an extremely important original with signatures, the other a copy), then decides that they don't need the copy. They then proceed to tear the original in half. The boss then panics and blames the employee for it, even going so far as to say that they "saw what they did," despite said employee pointing out that the documents never left the boss's hands. Even worse, the submitter states this was neither the first nor last time something like this happened.
  • This receptionist refuses to accept it was her fault that she made a note in a patient's file that the patient should make a call first before scheduling an appointment, but didn't make any effort to call the patient and notify them about this, blaming it on the patient and claiming she should know since it's in the file, completely oblivious to the fact that said patient does not have on-demand access to her own file from anywhere in the world like she seems to think. Then it gets worse when the receptionist accuses the patient of being a liar and tries to get her to leave, despite the patient's name being on the doctor's list to get her prescriptions ASAP. The doctor has the receptionist removed while she continues to argue she didn't do anything wrong.
  • This employee refuses to accept that she was at fault for making a couple pay for their son's birthday party twice, even though they had already paid a month prior, and tries to blame everything on her fellow coworker, even though they were both guilty for the whole thing.
  • These two hotel receptionists take an unauthorized $700 deposit from the submitter, and then place the blame on her for "spending" all of the money that they wrongfully took. After having to call her mother to cover the hotel bill from home, the submitter complains to the hotel chain about the incident. She gets her money back, and the receptionists get suspended for taking it without her permission.
  • This boss tries to place all of the blame on the submitter for the massive failure of a major business dinner, despite the submitter trying to patch every missing piece that came about because of the boss's laziness, failure to follow procedure, and going behind the general manager's back. When the general manager finds out that the boss had made all the demands and unfairly punished the submitter, he reverses the submitter's punishment and instead suspends the boss without pay for two weeks before firing her. The submitter reveals that she got a promotion a week prior to submitting the story.
  • This coworker yells at the submitter for leaving the tools in the company truck, even when the submitter makes it clear that it is allowed by policy. The reason the coworker is complaining? The coworker took the truck out the previous day and had left the windows rolled down overnight.
  • This manager refuses to admit he forgot to give change to the submitter and insists that it was her fault for "losing the change" despite the fact the change was with him the whole time on camera!
  • This trucker refuses to accept that it was his fault that he didn't listen to a female employee's directions to her store, instead he blames her for being a woman who knows nothing. The employee's coworker reported the trucker's behavior to his boss, and the store never saw the trucker again after that.
  • This waitress intentionally ruins a customer's order by specifying an obscene amount of extra mushrooms on a dish that doesn't normally come with them, then dismisses it as an accident. Her boss doesn't buy the excuse, and the waitress is fired immediately for sabotaging the order.
  • This employee accuses the disabled submitter for using a disabled parking space without a disability. When the submitter, an amputee, reveals her prosthetic leg, the employee insists that she's not at fault. This pushes the submitter's Berserk Button big time, and she gets a manager involved. Incredibly, before the manager can speak, the employee begins a long rant and continues to deny responsibility for her actions. The manager immediately sends the employee to the office, and the submitter is given a $50 gift certificate as an apology. While it is not specifically stated what happened afterwards, the ending implies that the employee was fired.
  • "It's not my responsibility to communicate schedule changes. I'm not going to baby everyone here because they're too lazy to check their own schedules." The kicker is the employee has been checking their schedule; when they complain to HR, they discover that the manager has been changing the schedules of employees she doesn't like at the last possible moment to give herself an excuse to write them up or fire them, which results in her swiftly losing her own job.
  • The inspector in this story repeatedly insists that the office did nothing wrong because they sent a notice, despite the fact they sent it to the wrong address (the employee expected it at a mailing address, they sent it to the physical one that no one had any reason to be at without the inspector in tow).
  • This company refuses to acknowledge that there's a problem with their hand gritters that causes the belt to come undone in under two minutes, repeatedly claiming that the submitter's coworkers are somehow using it wrong and that no one else has complained about this issue (nevermind, as the submitter points out, that their area got the first snowfall in the entire country, so no one else has had reason to use them yet). The submitter gives up trying to tell them about it and installs a personal modification that fixes the issue right away. Lo and behold, another month later and everyone who has purchased the same gritter is making the same complaint, so they call the submitter back to ask about his modification, while still doing their damnedest to keep from admitting that there's a problem with their gritter; the submitter tells them, since they weren't interested in his initial complaint, he's not interested in sharing his fix, and come next summer, the problematic gritter is nowhere to be found in their catalogue.
• No Bisexuals: This coworker doesn't seem to understand the submitter is bisexual and not gay, thinking he is currently dating a girl because either the girl is transgender or he's being "forced to date her" by his parents and not because he loves his girlfriend. Despite his many attempts to explain his bisexuality, she still calls him gay and thinks he's into Camp Gay stereotypes as well.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • A story with very nearly the same name: three customers decide to leave a $13 tip for a server who's serving them poorly, thinking she's having a bad day. What does the server do? A thank you? Nope! The server calls the cops on them when they leave, lying that the customers tried to dine and dash and only paid four dollars, despite the fact the customers saw the server counting the money paid for their food at the counter! Thankfully, the cops believe the customers due to their willingness to cooperate and the presence of a security camera. The customers call to complain about the server's conduct when the police never call them back; the server gets "serious discipline" and the customers get an $80 refund (almost double what they paid for the meal, including the tip) for their trouble.
  • Nearly happens in this story as well; a passenger about to board a plane stops to help another customer who's having a heart attack by doing CPR, with other people actually stepping over the two to board the plane. Once the patient is being taken care of by paramedics, the passenger tries to board the plane... but the gate agent says he forfeited the right when he didn't board. There happens to be a higher-up nearby, however, who dresses down the gate agent appropriately, and makes sure the good Samaritan gets to board, even throwing in an upgrade and free miles for his trouble.
  • The submitter of this story asks for a fairground ride that has strobe lights and blares music (which were switched on as the light faded with no prior warning) to have a sign warning about those things for epileptic customers. After being laughed away by the people running the fair, they go to the county, and only gets change out of them by pointing out that they're responsible for any injuries. As a result, the ride gets a sign... and the submitter gets blacklisted from buying tickets to the fair for life.
• No Indoor Voice:
  • A discreet customer meets a not-so-discreet clerk.
  • This manager gets caught screaming full-blast at an employee in front of customers by the owner after getting away with it so many times before.
• No Periods, Period: Averted when this teenage employee gets her period unexpectedly.
• Non-Indicative Name: Apparently: "I do apologize, but the accidental damage plan does not cover accidental damage."
• Non-Verbal Miscommunication: You can actually understand him?
• Noodle Incident:
  • Whatever happened to mandate this sign change.
  • This coworker has a "whorehouse" routine for persistent annoyances. How and why he came up with it is left to the imagination.
  • "Please never ask me how I knew that would work."
  • For some reason, one of the instruction signs for new employees at this convenience store's kitchen reads: "If you s*** in the mop station, you get to clean it up." The submitter decides they probably don't want to know and doesn't ask about it.
  • Something very strange is happening in this restaurant. The submitter is the only customer there, weird noises can be heard from the kitchen the whole time, and each time the waiter comes to serve the submitter, he comes out with new injuries. Furthermore, the submitter's meal takes too long, and the coffee doesn't taste right, and when the by-now-unnerved submitter tries to leave, the waiter tries to stop them and pleads with them not to leave a bad review. Oh, and when the submitter looks for more information on the restaurant on Google Maps, they can't find it.
  • The end of this story:
    Boss: “Well, that bin we made you fill up with that junk from yesterday…”
    Submitter: “Yeah?”
    Boss: “It spontaneously caught fire…”
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • The owners of this vegan bakery require employees to stir recipes with their bare hands, don't bother to install heat in the building during January, and locks the employees inside for several days to keep a health inspector from finding out the building is in use (preventing them from escaping if there had been a fire).
  • Zigzagged here, where a refinery holds regular safety drills to ensure their preparedness in case of emergency; so regular, in fact, that it turns out most of the employees are only prepared for emergency on the days when drills are scheduled. When an unscheduled drill happens, it's a disaster, and one man even breaks both his legs trying to reach his safety equipment. Unfortunately management don't get the point, deciding that the unscheduled drill was to blame and going straight back to the regular ones.
  • This restaurant is another example. A worker is stupid enough to try using a faulty deep fryer even though there's a lid on it, causing it to burst into flames. But things only escalate because both a fire blanket and two fire extinguishers are ineffective because they're out of date and haven't been inspected in years. After the incident, the company wisely decides to inspect its fire protection equipment more often.
  • These managers get the idea of increasing worker productivity by disabling the fire alarms so they don't lose time from drills. As a result, when there's a bomb scare, it takes twenty minutes for the floor to evacuate. After the scheme was discovered, the managers lost their jobs and were sent to prison.
  • When the fire alarm goes off at this hotel, a number of people take their time evacuating because the alarm sounds like an alarm clock going off as opposed to a fire alarm.
  • This lab's fire alarm gets muted into a dull beep by (ironically enough) a fireproof door.
    We are now having a stern talk with the safety people while agreeing that if there is a fire we are, literally, toast.
  • In this mismanaged factory, due to a combination of poor upkeep, spurious alarms, and apathetic employees, evacuating the factory during fire drills takes twelve minutes, during which time the submitter has to answer a lot of phone calls saying "is this real or a drill?" The factory eventually gets its evacuation time down to a reasonable time, but it ends up closed down anyway.
• No Sense of Personal Space: This worker tries to persuade a young woman to buy some expensive makeup, and when she refuses, pours some foundation into her hand and tries to smear it on the customer's face. When the customer hits her arm to stop her and makes her drop the bottle on the floor, the worker yells that she's being assaulted.
• No, You: Happens here, combined with Insult Backfire.
• Not Even Bothering with an Excuse: At the end of this story.
  Manager: "This [grill] is clearly faulty. Why are you saying it isn't?"
  Cashier: "The returns are hard!"
• Not Hyperbole:
  • In the experience of the technician in this story, calls about fans 'hanging from the wires' usually means 'the canopy fell off, but the down-rod is still in place'. He's utterly shocked when it turns out that the submitter's fan really was hanging by its wiring.
  • While doing a juggling act, a juggler remarks: "I hope I don’t screw this next part up. After all, I just had laser eye surgery this week and I can’t see very well" while juggling multiple objects, and then remarks: "I hope I don’t slip. I spilled hot cooking oil on my feet yesterday and they still really hurt!" while juggling while balancing on a tower of chairs. Both remarks elicit laughter from the audience...so imagine the submitter's surprise when after the act is over, the juggler puts eye drops in his eyes and takes his shoes off to reveal that they are heavily bandaged!
• No True Scotsman: A Jewish duty manager commits several layers worth of this while trying to justify throwing out close to £15,000 worth of the restaurant's food because it wasn't kosher. The restaurant has kosher options already? The mere existence of non-kosher food is against her religion. The submitter is also Jewish and has no trouble with non-kosher food being served? He's "probably just a convert", while the duty manager is ethnically Jewish. By her logic, the restaurant should also have only halal food for a Muslim coworker? Only Jews' religious wishes need be observed, because of the Holocaust. The kicker is that after she was fired, the submitter later ran into her eating a bacon sandwich (Her excuse? "It's hard sometimes!").
• Number of the Beast:
  • Apparently it's not just customers that try to avoid amount of $6.66, as seen with this convenience store cashier and this one too.
  • While it's not the focal point of this story, the submitter briefly mentions having a laugh with a customer after his total came to $6.66.

O

• Obstructive Bureaucrat:
  • Right here along with a heaping dose of transphobia. Luckily the manager averted the trope.
  • This trope happens in a drive-thru, of all places.
  • The idiotic Quality Assurance manager in this story scored the submitter (an ISP phone rep) a zero in dealing with a customer, for going off script. Despite the fact that by doing so (as a result of a passing comment the customer made), they actually managed to solve the customer's problem, making him extremely happy in the process and preventing him from taking his business elsewhere. The submitter, understandably, decided to work to rule as a result, meaning that proper customer service was forever sacrificed by the QA manager's unbelievable stupidity.
  • This poor sod has to jump through hoop after hoop so that he doesn't have to pay the Catholic Church, which he never attended.
  • This state government has a rule that stores have to put price stickers on each and every item, and the devices they gave to print the stickers are finnicky and problematic. The government offers the submitter's store a waiver for this rule… if they pass an inspection to make sure that every single item has a correct sticker on it. The manager suspects it's to give the government an excuse to charge the store a fee for each inspection. It takes nearly six months of inspections for the store to get the waiver.
  • These civil servants don't recognize the submitter's fiancé's divorce certificate because it "doesn't look official enough."
• Offscreen Inertia: Inverted here, where a cashier actually is still in the same spot they were fifteen minutes ago because of the lunch rush, but a manager still assumes that what she asked for got done.
• Oh, Crap!: A new mother goes to the daycare to pick up her infant, only to find the daycare personnel locking up for the night, having completely forgotten her baby and making every possible excuse not to go look for her.
• Old-School Chivalry:
  • This waitress firmly believes that the man is supposed to pay for his girlfriend's meal and not the other way around; it doesn't matter if the woman isn't his girlfriend, nor does it matter that it's the man's birthday, nor does it matter when the restaurant's owner fires her for being a jerk about it and gives them the meal on the house.
  • Like the previous example, this cashier refuses to serve couples if the girl pays for anything, even if they're not really together. Also like the previous example, she gets a pink slip for her behavior.
  • This waiter doesn't say anything, but he gives the submitter several nasty looks when he and the woman he's dining with, who is not in fact his significant other, split the bill.
  • And here we have a waiter demanding of a male customer, "You need to pay for her!" when the other person wasn't even a "her" at all, but a trans man.
• Older Than They Look:
  • A 28-year-old woman is mistaken for a teenager.
  • Two people are mistaken for teenagers in this story — a 22-year-old woman and a 28-year-old man.
  • This 25-year-old kept getting questioned by a bouncer at a nightclub.
  • This memorabilia store owner is in his mid-30s despite looking to be in his teens. A new employee at the store doesn't realize this until after he's cussed him out.
• Omniglot: Who knew that a hot dog vendor would know 25 languages?
• One Side of the Story:
  • There are several instances where a worker continuously berates another person for something, without letting them get a complete sentence in edgewise, and when the other person finally gets to speak, says something that completely disproves what the ranting worker was raving about. Like here.
  • A more tragic example here. A waitress brings a customer to tears by insulting the customer for being extremely thin, among other things, assuming that the customer is anorexic (or possibly bulimic). If the waitress had bothered to ask and not jump to conclusions, she would've learned that the customer was like that because she was hospitalized. Fortunately, the waitress was fired on the spot since it wasn't her first such incident, and the customer was given a 70% discount. However, one can only hope the ex-waitress felt REALLY awful after that. (Given that her prior assumptions were health-related, a Sustained Misunderstanding may be the more likely outcome.)
    • Here's a similar case; the submitter recently had a tonsillectomy, and the waitress refuses to take the submitter's order, believing her to be bulimic, despite the submitter and her mother trying to explain otherwise. Even the manager is skeptical of the submitter's explanation until she shows him the stitches from the tonsil surgery. The manager, out of guilt, comps the meal, and later fires the waitress.
  • Another tragic example where two employees of a drugstore see a mom and her sick kid waiting outside the drugstore for it to open, and immediately assume she's a "crack whore" with a "crack baby". Nope, the kid has a bad fever, and neither the baby nor the mom were able to sleep as a result. Thankfully, a third worker, a parent himself, is far more understanding.
  • Another instance, when a manager first mistakes the submitter for one of his employees (even though her clothes don't look anything like the uniform), and then starts berating and screaming full-blast at her before she can even say that she doesn't work there. Fortunately, a security guard comes to the submitter's aid and the police are also called, and the psychotic manager ultimately has charges pressed against him for his outburst.
  • An employee tries to force the submitter to buy a real Christmas tree instead of an artificial one, cutting the submitter off whenever they try to get a word in. It takes fifteen minutes before the submitter finally manages to get out they are looking for a fake tree because they literally cannot have a real tree because they're allergic to fir and pine trees. The employee is so embarrassed (or scared of the submitter) after the submitter explains that he immediately flees from them. It's later revealed that the employee got better commissions on real trees, hence why he was so pushy.
  • In this story, the submitter is reported to HR for "making derogatory remarks about the disabled" (they were watching a video about a toddler taking an instruction too literally and the co-worker had thought it was offensive). HR doesn't even bother seeing the video and even twists the submitter's words to make it sound like they watched the video on company time (which they didn't) and reprimands the submitter. The submitter responds by handing in their notice.
• One-Steve Limit: Unsurprisingly, averted. A store worker calls the customer service department, expecting them to be able to find the contact info for a potential customer based on the fact that "his name was Steve, he came in at 4:00, and he has black hair", apparently believing this will be a simple task since "there can't be that many Steves around here!" The CS worker tries to explain that they have customer records for at least twenty Steves/Stephens in his area alone and that they don't have detailed biographical data on every single person who walks through the doors, but the idiot just gets mad, accusing the CS worker of being unhelpful, and declares that he'll report the incident to his manager.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The submitter of this story can tell something's very wrong when a normally exemplary restaurant employee answers the phone in a confused, utterly incoherent fashion. In addition, anyone who knows her well enough not to dismiss her as a drug-addicted moron is concerned that she's spouting nonsense and forgetting to remove metal spoons from soup before microwaving it. Turns out, the poor girl hasn't had enough time for even vaguely adequate sleep since taking a second job at another restaurant^note four hours, half the total recommended time you're supposed to sleep, to get home and to work and sleep, and after Boss 1 gives her a week off in response to her blacking out during an enforced coffee break and Boss 2, who is not so understanding, preempts a presumably intended resignation by firing her, she's back to her old self.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: At a New Year's Eve party being hosted by Alcoholics Anonymous (and, obviously, a no-booze party), the hired DJ opened things off by yelling "Let’s get this party started; the more you drink the more fun we have!" ^note He apologized, and then excused himself to yell at his boss for not telling him it was an AA party, but it's clear he saw the incident as this trope.
• Operator from India: The bank in this story decided to outsource their confirms department to India... and got what was possibly the most breathtakingly incompetent group of workers in the entire subcontinent. They're so bad that customers who dealt with them regularly called the bank, thinking they were a group of scammers impersonating said bank because they were so unprofessional. The story ends with the old department returning to handle all their normal duties while ignoring the India branch's dubious contributions.
• Overcomplicated Menu Order: A guy makes a drink order so complicated that it apparently took several minutes to order, and the barista was able to make the drink in less time then it took to order it. Thus winning a bet with the boss and earning all the baristas lunch on him. Apparently that bet was made especially to help boost morale in situations involving complicated orders.

P-Q

• Paper-Thin Disguise: An unintentional example that nearly gets the submitter in trouble—she's not initially recognized because she'd tied her hair in a ponytail, which the submitter unties to prove her identity. As the submitter remarks, who knows what would have happened if she'd gotten a haircut or dye job!
• Pass the Popcorn: Invoked by OP in this story. As they listen to their feuding coworker and boss, they actually make themselves some popcorn to enjoy it with.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish":
  • This worker used "password" as his password...and then he forgot it.
  • The password is always the pet's name. Always.
• Percussive Maintenance: Used by the crew of a nuclear submarine to free a gauge that had a tendency to stick. The new Engineer Officer is furious about this, but when the division chief provides a written-up troubleshooting procedure — based on the official manual — it recommends "gently mechanically agitat[ing] the equipment" as the first step.
• Percussive Therapy:
  • In this story, when the ice cream machine breaks for the umpteenth time.
    Manager: “My cheating—” *Clang!* “—useless ex-husband—” *Clang!* “—is more reliable—” *Clang!* “—than you!“
  • This rather odd worker, who's being driven to distraction by a Jerkass manager, finds herself being wronged by a Vengeful Vending Machine and shouts "NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON!" before headbutting the machine.
• Perspective Flip: In a meta sense, this site is one for Not Always Right.
  • Here's one employee who submitted their own gaffe.
  • This one inverts the perspective of the typical Bilingual Backfire-based story from NAR, though with much less insulting the worker.
  • This one very well could have been an NAR story, what with the unseen customer demanding free services after having to wait for five minutes.
  • This one, where the submitter does not go on a screaming rampage over the item they want being unavailable and the cashier gives them their alternate choice for free because of it, could have been an NAR story as well.
  • This story is pretty blatantly a Perspective Flip of this NAR one, as pointed out in the comments — the difference being that the NAR story has the customer openly mocking the cashier over what they thought was a spelling error, whereas the NAW one has them merely expressing confusion and being snarked at (and then downright told to leave) for no reason.
• Pet Monstrosity: This service Chihuahua. The employee's reaction to mistaking it for a bat of all things makes the adorable, harmless dog seem like a vicious animal.
• The Pig-Pen: This co-worker is so messy the story has a Content Warning for how gross it is. He smells like he never goes to the bathroom, he's a messy eater (when the submitter mentions he "eats like a pig," it's Not Hyperbole), and his cubicle is covered in snot. The only reason he wasn't fired for this – despite countless complaints – is that he seemed to by very good at his job… until a new manager took over and realized he was padding his numbers, leading to his dismissal. His cubicle was such a pigsty that after his dismissal they disassembled the walls and threw them out, along with just about everything else in the cubicle.
• Pink Means Feminine: This mechanic, upon seeing that the customer who has come to collect their vehicle is female, assumes the pink Mini Cooper they have must be hers, and refuses to believe her when told she's actually come to collect a van (apparently either thinking she would lie about what she's come for, or being so offended by a woman driving a van that he decided to try and force her to take another customer's car). Unsurprisingly, this gets him fired.
• Playing Sick: This employee repeatedly calls in sick, seventh time in a month and the 28th time in a year, until the supervisor asks for a doctor's note. Once the employee produces an absolutely outrageous note, he finally gets fired.
• Playing the Victim Card: This jerk manager is a rude asshole to his employees and gets away with it due being Camp Gay and cries discrimination and homophobia anytime someone criticizes him.
• Plot Allergy: This fast food employee is allergic to artificial sweetener. This means she can only be given certain tasks that don't involve touching anything that could potentially trigger her allergies, including cups filled with diet soda. The manager tells her to cover for a coworker (a task that would involve touching the cups) and doesn't believe her story about the allergy. Sure enough, the employee has to call in sick the next day. The owner is not pleased.
• Poe's Law:
  • "The reason I never realized this was a fake call was because, sadly, it was not even close to the weirdest calls I've had."
  • This story begins with the submitter telling us about how notoriously awful the baggers at their local grocery store are. Knowing this, they still have to contemplate this trope when a bagger responds to a request to put a loaf of bread in a separate bag by completely ruining that bread, putting a two-liter of soda in with it despite the request, and then shaking it until it's ready to explode trying to tie the bag closed.
• Pointy-Haired Boss: There are a lot of bosses in the stories that make you say "I can't believe this idiot is a boss." Enough in fact, to warrant their own page.
• Police Code for Everything: The best a theater worker can come up with for "There's a dog loose in the building" is asking for "Technician Scooby" over the walkie-talkie.
• Political Overcorrectness:
  • And down a rather narrow path. As usual.
  • This budding Knight Templar.
  • This movie theater employee refuses to sell two white customers tickets to see Black Panther (2018), saying the movie is for black customers only, and pointing out how white people like them wouldn't understand it and are just taking away seats for black customers who deserve it. A black customer behind them is confused by the employee's logic and his female manager chews him out for his insane logic. The white customers got their tickets for free and a movie pass for their troubles.
  • In this story, the submitter laughs at a video of a toddler being foolish. One co-worker says it's wrong to laugh at the video, saying the child may be autistic (with no proof that he is) and reports them to HR for "making derogatory remarks about the disabled." HR doesn't even bother seeing the video and even twists the submitter's words to make it sound like they watched the video on company time (which they didn't) and reprimands the submitter. The submitter responds by handing in their notice.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • A misinterpreted order for a virgin daiquiri results in... "Did you just give RUM to a FIVE-YEAR-OLD?!" Thankfully the kid didn't actually drink it.
  • This boss at a library pulls the submitter into her office to tell them that a(n unpleasant) coworker had filed a complaint about them...but does not tell the submitter what the complaint was actually about (apparently taking the coworkers' request to remain anonymous without further question to mean that the details of the complaint couldn't be discussed either) and instead gives them the incredibly vague warning of "just get along better with your coworkers". Because of this, the submitter is left not knowing what to do other than to force herself to be happy toward everyone and ends up getting bullied so intensely by the aforementioned coworker (for petty reasons like asking for clarification for directions) that she ends up physically ill. This among other factors leads to the submitter quitting to take a much nicer job away from the horridly run library.
  • This submitter hears one of their flight's pilots mutter "Well, I'll be damned. So it is" while leaning over them and looking out of the window, leading to the submitter having a quiet panic for the rest of the flight for fear that something's wrong with the plane. After landing they find out that the pilot (who'd been on his way back from the restroom) had simply been observing a double rainbow.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure:
  • Ladies and gentleman, a rarity in these times... a person who doesn't know about Star Wars!
  • The employees of this restaurant apparently haven't heard the jingle that lists the ingredients of a certain signature sandwich they carry.^note Though it's never explicitly stated, it's likely a Big Mac at McDonald's. One wonders how the employee can simply shrug off leaving the meat off a sandwich that normally has it, though, jingle or no jingle.
• Potty Emergency: This clerk refuses to give the poor kid access to the bathrooms unless he buys something first. When the inevitable happens, the clerk tries to blame the kid.
• Potty Failure: When this happens to a boy in this submission, the manager screams at the top of his lungs at the boy and his mother and threatens to have them arrested. Between the manager's outburst and him subsequently calling the customer and her child "white trash", his entire staff promptly quits on the spot, including one supervisor who has a son with similar bladder problems. In the end, the manager ends up having to explain the entire incident to his boss (who also has a similarly-aged son), who then reprimands him for his poor handling of the situation and subsequent loss of staff.
• Pretentious Pronunciation: The rather haughty host at this vegetarian restaurant runs into this quite a bit.
• Promoted to Scapegoat:
  • This newly promoted manager is written up one day by the GM for not "setting the mood". The next day, he tries to do just that, only for the GM to show up in a bad mood and write him up again, this time for insubordination.
  • This person didn't even get promoted for it - the company just decided that they had to blame someone for a decrease in productivity (rather than, y'know, find out the actual reason and do something about it, but that's asking too much for a company featured on this website), picked the guy who's doing a job on his own that requires at least two people, and submitted fake HR reports about his activities. Not surprisingly, he left a month later for a new job.
  • The poor employee in this story is given a temporary promotion only to fire people on behalf of their suddenly-conveniently-away-on-business manager. Fortunately, they have a friend in corporate, who realizes the same amount of overhead can be saved by firing the irresponsible manager instead and officially giving the put-upon employee his job.
• Psychopathic Manchild: This apprentice tattoo artist decides to ruin a client's tattoo (essentially mutilating the poor lady) because he's "too good" to do the butterfly design she wanted. When his boss, the submitter, chews him out and fires him for his actions, he has a hissy fit and throws his equipment on the floor. This is followed by near-immediate Laser-Guided Karma — the owner proceeds to call all the other tattoo parlors in the city to tell them about what he'd done (essentially blacklisting him from the tattoo industry), and presses charges against the fired apprentice for his tantrum. Topping it all off, the woman whose tattoo the ex-apprentice ruined sues him for it and, according to the submitter, wins.
• Pull the Thread: One way to deal with a telemarketer.
  • Occurs again here.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: The title of a story about a Lethally Stupid equipment operator is "Fire. Him. Before. He. Kills. Someone."
• Quit Your Whining: This manager does this to an overly pessimistic new hire, with a pick-me-up rant.

R

• Racial Face Blindness: Ironically, by another Asian. This jerkass custom clerk assumed the submitter was a Singaporean despite her passport saying she's an Australian citizen.
• Rapid-Fire Interrupting:
  • Here, a security guard repeatedly cuts off a museum patron, refusing her access because the guard thinks she's not old enough. Once she finally gets to prove it, the guard acts as if the preceding exchange didn't happen, leaving her annoyed.
  • In this story, a convenience store supervisor constantly interrupts an employee and chastises them for not asking for a customer's ID. It isn't until the end that the employee gets in that the customer wasn't buying alcohol.
  • This one has a man (the submitter) getting tampons for his wife, which the cashier refuses to sell him because he is a man. He refuses to let the submitter explain that they're not for him, as well as accusing him of stealing and of being transgender (even calling him a transphobic slur in the process). When the submitter finally has a chance to tell him they're for his wife, the cashier blames him for not telling him despite the fact that he kept interrupting him.
• A Rare Sentence: "Well, do you like garlic and balls?" "I can honestly say nobody's ever asked me that question before."
• Read the Fine Print: The employees at a CD/DVD store in this story are actively dissuaded from doing this by their area manager, who just wants them all to sign the "dumb government thing" she's handed out to all of them; she gets extremely annoyed when the poster insists on taking it home to read in detail. After some help from the HR manager at their other job, the poster learns that the company owes its employees a large sum of back pay, and the form they've been given forfeits their right to claim it in exchange for a $50 "bonus". The poster receives $800 in owed wages; their colleagues, who had signed without reading, likely miss out on thousands.
• Real Men Wear Pink: ... and argue about The Twilight Saga.
  • ... and make small talk about manicures.
  • ... and LOVE kittens!
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Rare, but they exist.
  • This pizza store owner, for example, fully cooperates with a mother after her daughter is T-boned by one of his workers. The mother reveals to the owner that not only did the employee lie about all of the details in an attempt to cover it up, but the first thing he did after the crash was call his boss because he didn't want to lose his job.
    Owner: Well, he won't have to worry about that anymore!
  • One manager calls in the Only Sane Man on his staff to ask for their opinion. "Are all my employees idiotic?"
  • Pretty much any time a bigger authority steps in to handle a Not Always Working employee or manager.
  • This Park Manager scolds her two employees for charging a couple for their son’s birthday party even thought the couple already paid a month ago, and assures them something like this will never happen again.
  • Owner of a gym finds a man sleeping in the changing room. He finds out the man's homeless^note Because his ex-wife was sleeping with his previous boss who fired him when he found out. Ouch. and has been mooching for meals off of other patrons. His response? Hire the man on the spot as a live-in janitor, on the condition that he pay back the people who bought him food as he's able.
  • A transgender person is initially refused help with changing the gender on her license due to an ignorant employee. And then the manager shows up. Bonus points for the manager putting a note on the new license saying that the employee's "going to be getting a detailed lesson about gender issues, and at the end of that lesson I’m firing her for her behavior" - at least he is trying to educate his employees so the situation is less likely to happen again.
  • In this story, the owner initially states that there's nothing he can do about the submitter not getting their vacation time, until he learns that she made the request eight months in advance. He subsequently investigates and almost immediately discovers that the manager at the store denied the submitter's request so she could have her own, last-minute vacation, and then threatened to fire them if they missed a single shift while she was gone. The owner allows the submitter to take their vacation, and forces the manager to cancel hers and work every single shift she had scheduled the submitter for as punishment for her actions and threats.
  • After misplacing a till full of money and forgetting about it until questioned by the submitter, this store director acknowledged that he'd have to write himself up just like he would to anyone else doing the same.
  • After an ice-cream shop customer finds an unknown object in their milkshake (which turns out to be part of a lemon seed), the manager not only gets them a second milkshake on the house but also a tour of the kitchen to confirm that everything is properly cleaned and nobody lost a fingernail in the first shake.
  • This hotel owner makes sure to personally visit and inspect all five of his properties, greet every employee, and make sure all their concerns are addressed as well as the guests' are.
  • This restaurant manager has a policy where new kitchen staff have to wait tables for their first week, and new wait staff have to help in the kitchen for the same, to prevent arguments over whose job is easier/harder.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • The submitter of this story writes a letter version of one of these to a jobseeker's grandfather chastising the old man for unwittingly interfering with his grandson's jobseeking by giving him outdated and counterproductive advice.
  • This bar owner seemingly offers the jobless submitter a position at his bar... only to retract it and break into a rant berating them for being "worthless and unhireable" before kicking them out of his bar. He then follows the submitter out of the bar, continuing to harass and insult them as they walk away. The end result? Half his staff pulls a collective Take This Job and Shove It, including the cook and both his managers. He then fires the remainder of his staff the next day out of frustration, which ends up being the final nail in his business' coffin as he was forced to shut down a week later.
  • This construction worker in on the receiving end of a particularly angry one from the submitter's aunt when she dismisses him for being a Lazy Bum (with the little work he did being very poorly done and in some cases giving more for the aunt to have to get repaired) and he has the gall to guilt-trip her into paying him for the "work" he did. The submitter's aunt complains to the company in response, which gets the worker fired from the company altogether after they discover his history of similar complaints from his other clients.
  • This manager gets one from the submitter after trying to horn in on an already-successful sale and driving away the customer one too many times. He never tries to steal any sales again after this.
    Manager: Now, [Submitter], why do you think you lost that sale?"
    Submitter: [without thinking] Because you're an a**hole.
    Manager: [flabbergasted] W-what?!
    I realized I'd done goofed, but at that rate, I figured in for a penny, in for a pound.
    Submitter: [Manager], I had that, just like I’ve had every sale you’ve stolen from me. I was helping that customer for ten minutes and got her from that $75 piece of crap you sold her to the $200 one with a two-year service plan. You spent thirty seconds talking to her, and she dropped back down to the crappy clearance model. Ever notice that none of our customers want to talk to you? You are the worst salesperson in this store, you need to stop stealing all of our sales, and the next time you take one of my customers like that, we’re going to have a big problem.
• Red Scare: This temp worker thinks the submitter's father is a communist because he's Korean (he's South Korean). But what really sets him up to be this trope is when the temp realizes all the equipment the submitter's father uses is made in China, which prompts him to start breaking it. He winds up being arrested, but not before destroying $5,000 worth of equipment.
• Reflexive Response:
  • This employee is so used to people asking for a free replacement to a water-damaged phone (which is against the replacement policy) that it takes a minute before it registers that the customer is asking to purchase a replacement.
  • This theater worker replied with information regarding Twilight show times, despite the customer asking for tickets to The Hobbit. Presumably, she got questions about Twilight a lot.
    • Similarly, this employee yells at a customer that they are sold out of tickets for a very popular space movie, before the customer even specifies what movie they actually want to see.
  • Apparently, everyone in this store is too used to arguing with people trying to buy alcohol without an ID. Sort of overlaps with Won't Take "Yes" for an Answer.
    • Another instance of this ends with a customer deliberately dropping the wine bottle on the floor just to end the argument.
    • And a third instance, though this one thankfully ends with the cashier realizing their mistake.
    • A fourth instance, but at least the manager that was brought over kept their head on straight.
    • This person isn't even trying to buy anything other than ice, and the cashier still argues about a lack of ID over it.
    • This woman is buying sausages; however, the cashier doesn't even look at what the submitter is buying when he asks for an ID. He ends up calling a manager, who takes her picture and is ready to ban her from the store as well as blackball her from every gas station in the state when the submitter gets fed up and practically shoves the sausages into the manager's face, at which point the manager finally realizes that the submitter wasn't doing anything wrong. When he asks the cashier why he didn't ask what was being bought, the cashier is shown to have fallen asleep.
  • An entire series of reflexive responses, though the barista cuts himself off in the middle of each one the moment he realizes the customer has already given the answer. He then praises the customer for the "most coherent order ever."
  • Apparently the case for this cable guy, who assumes a customer's problems connecting to the Internet is with their router, and not because the 40 feet of cable knocked down to their front lawn by branches the customer was actually calling about. Best bit: cable guy chastises the customer for not mentioning that in the report, right before actually reading said report that very explicitly mentions it.
  • Also the case for this eye doctor's employee, as he tells the customer:
    Employee: You can't take the first pair you try on!
    Customer: Why not?
    Employee: I don't know! It's never happened to me before!
  • This pharmacy does not do ear piercings on weekends, because they're too busy on those days. Ignore that there is absolutely nobody else except them and the one customer in either the pharmacy or the big store nearby that actually brings in customers - the pharmacist continues refusing service by insisting ten or so people with prescriptions will materialize from the empty car park the instant they start doing an ear piercing.
  • This employee, who catches herself in the act and humorously blames "programming".
  • This cashier snaps at a customer for asking about free things, when she did nothing of the sort.
  • This barista is evidently so used to getting hit on at work that she spends some time explaining to the poster that she's not interested in him and she only smiles at him because it's her job — while he patiently tries to explain that he only wanted to tell her that she dropped her phone.
• Removing the Crucial Teammate: Some managers inadvertently cause this when they try to cut costs. This Asian woman with a PhD in applied mathematics, this man who was responsible for maintaining the factory's machines which broke down after he got fired, and this man who was the only person in the entire company who knew how to use a critical software, are just a few examples of this happening.
• Repetitive Audio Glitch: In this store, the only music playing on the speakers is a karaoke version of Pharrell Williams's "Happy" played over and over and over again. It drives the submitter – a customer – insane, so they approach a worker to complain, only to find that the workers are getting it worse because they can't stop it, and unlike the customers, can't leave the store.
  (I left without buying anything, feeling sorry for the employees who couldn’t do the same. To this day, that song makes me cringe.)
• Revealing Cover Up:
  • A perfect example right here. The medical office receptionists accused a patient of having skipped her bill, because they didn't want the doctors to learn they'd gone out for lunch in the middle of their shift and left the desk unattended.
  • A dentist says the First Nations insurance subsidy will not cover a child with a broken tooth, and offers to discount the treatment out-of-pocket. Turns out that this is because they've been filing fraudulent claims on all their First Nations patients, and Mama Bear calling the subsidy to ask why they're suddenly not covered unravels the whole scam.
  • This waitress accuses a customer of trying to scam for free food when he never got it to begin with, even getting the manager (her dad) involved when the customer tries to defend himself. The manager ends up calling in the restaurant's owner, however, who knows better and reveals that the waitress ate the customer's food herself. The customer and his wife get their entire meal comped, the waitress is promptly fired, and the manager follows suit soon after for covering for his daughter.
  • The manager in this story covers for his son botching an inventory check by firing the employee who tried to correct him under completely fabricated sexual assault claims, even threatening to call the police. Except, because of his actions in claiming sexual assault, senior management and the HR department have to investigate the claim when they otherwise wouldn't have been involved. Laser-Guided Karma promptly follows - after CCTV footage of the supposed incident is pulled and reviewed, the crooked manager and incompetent son are busted for their lies, and both are fired within the week.
  • In this story, two gas stations compete in a contest to give away stickers. The submitter's station just barely loses out to their rival nearby. The rival station then, despite having won, goes to the regional manager to accuse the first station of cheating, demanding they be disqualified from every future contest of this nature. This launches an investigation against both stations, and reveals that while the first station's tactics (giving out ten stickers instead of one for customers who meet purchase requirements) were borderline, the rival station's tactics (ringing up large purchases as multiple purchases of smaller amounts) were outright in violation of the rules. The rival station is disqualified and forced to return the reward they had unfairly won.
  • This manager changes the submitter's schedule in an attempt to frame her for not showing up. The submitter responds by showing the manager's boss a picture of the actual schedule,^note She had been taking pictures of the schedule to help her remember it which results in the manager getting chewed out. The manager then implements a new rule prohibiting employees from taking pictures of the schedule. Despite this, the submitter takes a picture anyway in case the manager tries to pull off the same stunt. Sure enough, the manager does change the schedule and again attempts to frame the submitter, who then calls the manager out on her bullying and harassment and gives the manager's boss the new picture. The manager is fired some time later, but not before she fires the submitter in retaliation.
  • This hotel supervisor hosted a bridal party in the conference room after being forbidden to do exactly that by management, deliberately made a newer clerk throw out some ruined tablecloths without proper documentation and replacement (procedures the clerk didn't know because they were the supervisor's responsibility), and then tried to fire the clerk for the lack of tablecloths at the next conference. Luckily, the security cameras had video and audio of both confrontations, proving the tablecloth shortage was because of the supervisor's party and not the clerk's fault.
  • This lady lied to her husband that she was in an accident and badly hurt, so she could go to the spa for a few days, not realizing her coworkers would call him to ask why she'd no-call-no-showed at work. When she returns completely uninjured, the combination of truancy and dishonesty gets her fired immediately.
  • In this story, some unsecured road cones and supplies from a road work project get washed into the nearby office complex by a flood. A maintenance worker from the office complex collects the supplies and tries to return them, gets rebuffed by the foreman, and calls the management instead. Long story short, 1) the foreman is drunk on the job and abusing the workers to keep them from reporting him, and 2) one of the intimidated workers stole replacement supplies to hide that he'd left them unsecured.
  • This story. The submitter is approached by a creepy regular who immediately begins to flirt with her. She stands her ground and kicks the pervert out, loud enough that her boss can hear, and then promptly calls him out for ignoring the situation. After reporting the incident (and the manager's ignorance of it) to a company hotline, she comes in the next day to find herself fired for excessive absence. Immediately suspicious (as she had never been late before), she calls the hotline again and tells them what happened, including the fact that the manager fired her. Within only a few hours, a bigwig calls the submitter, frantically pleading her for information on the incident, which she gladly provides. The bigwig then drops by the submitter's store to investigate further, and, among a mountain of other incriminating evidence against the manager, discovers three hastily-scrawled, bare-bones no-call-no-show write-ups. Not only were they for days the submitter either worked (and thus could not have missed) or mandatory days off (which she wouldn't have been allowed to work anyway), but they had forged signatures on them. The end result is that the submitter is fully reinstated with back pay, a new manager is assigned to the store (who also promises to keep the pervert from returning), and the old manager is fired and facing felony charges for the forged write-ups.
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense:
  • One employee's boss can't understand why she doesn't go to a significantly more expensive college instead of a nearby local college for her education. Since the boss has been wealthy her entire life, she sees student loan debt as a minor, easily solved annoyance.
    Boss: Debt is the American way. I was $38,000 in debt when I graduated, and I paid it off just fine.
  • A potential employer doesn't understand an unemployed applicant's claim that they are living on... savings from their previous job.
• Ridiculous Procrastinator: This boss, despite constant reminders from his workers, routinely puts off paying his utility bill until the electricity gets shut off.
• Right Behind Me:
  • If one feels obliged to sexually harass and insult a customer, make sure her much-larger-than-you boyfriend is not listening in.
  • Before making comments that would make a coworker uncomfortable, make sure said coworker isn't within earshot.
  • Invoked but subverted here, when a worker asks how things could be worse.
  • "A doctor, who I didn't see until he SLAMS his paperwork down on the desk, interjects."
  • "Just then, a toilet flushes, and the manager comes out of the stall."
• Rouge Angles of Satin: "How many F's are in 'tough'? I've tried one and two, but it still says I'm wrong!"
• Rule of Three:
  • This patient with an asthma problem has to mention three times that she's allergic to certain drugs. At least none of the doctors present repeated their own previous mistake, but they should have been paying more attention to the chart.
  • This new mother likewise has three nurses in a row trying to perform a post-epidural checkup on her. It starts off innocently enough (the first two are just used to everyone else having epidurals, although the second does feel the need to comment on how only "freak hippies" give birth without them) but then goes to hell for the third one, who ignores physical proof that she did not have one, assumes she's a teenager waiting for "mommy and daddy", and as such threatens to call the cops on her husband once he arrives. Fortunately, her mother-in-law happens to work at that hospital, and after dragging the problem nurse away by the ear, arranges for a different nurse to sit with the patient full-time in order to make sure she's not pestered any further.
  • The submitter of this story has to tell the general manager that the rolls of fabric in the office are custom orders three times because she doesn't understand that they're not for general sale. She still fails to understand that they're not for general sale and puts them on the floor anyway, resulting in one of the orders being ruined.

S

• Sarcasm-Blind:
  • "Sure, I'll... schedule my parents' anniversary for a different day next time." "That's more like it!"
  • This collector somehow failed to realize that the debtor's comment about having to start a meth lab to make the suggested payment (NZ$1000 per week, or about US$800 - this after the debtor explaining he only made NZ$320 in that time) was not an option the debtor was seriously considering. To top it off, the collector somehow failed to realize the suggestion was illegal.
  • This one almost led to an increase in one individual's student loan payments.
• Scary Black Man: This customer, which leads to a case of Mistaken For Stalker.
• Schmuck Bait: "Hey, this file I just got in my email says it has an important message about my bank account! It's not from my bank, though, but it must be important, since it says 'IMPORTANT'!"
• Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: "When I was young, we just found a scrawny kid and beat him up when we were bored.”
• Sci Fi Ghetto:invoked This bookstore seems to have fallen victim to it, much to the disappointment of both the customer and the employee.
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!:
  • This bus driver seems to use the trope regularly, given that he seems to have a reputation with the bus company that hired him.
  • This elderly co-worker is routinely verbally belligerent, but complaints about her never go anywhere because she claims it's ageism. It's only after she deliberately rams the submitter with a cart – and it's attested by both camera footage and the submitter's injuries –that she's fired.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!:
  • This character seems to be under the impression this is the case for her, since her uncle's the assistant manager. Comes apart when her uncle is the one to fire her.
  • This coworker is "in tight" with the assistant manager, and uses this as an excuse to boss an employee around. Unfortunately for him, he's trying to boss around the son of the business's owner. Oops.
  • This coworker is deathly afraid that this is the case with the sales manager (who happens to be the boss's wife), to the point that said coworker tries to stop the submitter from writing a complaint to them, even erasing a draft of the email in the effort. ("This is for your own good!") It turns out the boss appreciates the complainer's honesty and guts, and the sales manager's work improves significantly as a result of the complaint.
  • This waitress is rude to customers, brings out the wrong food, and then flat-out ignores their complaints, claiming that nobody will stop her because her dad's the owner. And, of course, she then goes absolutely ballistic when the customers refuse to give her a tip for the piss-poor service.
  • Another waitress, being the daughter of the restaurant's manager, tries to invoke this when she is fired by the head chef for stealing a customer's food and lying about it... only for the chef to reveal that he owns the restaurant. Bonus points for the chef firing the manager as well afterwards.
  • This story concerns an asshole who constantly sexually harasses female employees of a theatre production, and his equally-asshole father who refuses to acknowledge that any wrongdoing is taking place no matter how much the other employees complain. It backfires on them when a security employee who has had enough duct-tapes him to a table after he gets particularly aggressive with her, and when the boss threatens to have her fired over it, the owner steps in and fires him and his son instead, in the meantime setting them up for the security employee to sue them both for the sexual harassment (the son for doing it, the father for pretending it wasn't happening).
  • The owner of this restaurant defies any attempts by other people to claim this, as a matter of restaurant policy.
  • These cops refuse to do anything about a groom not only refusing to quiet down his party but also having far more people in his hotel room than the fire code allows, simply because he happens to be in the military. Fortunately, his commanding officer isn't having it, and the groom ends up demoted and discharged for it.
  • This male employee has been harassing female coworkers by making lewd comments at them and getting away with it, both because he's gay and because the HR manager is his sister-in-law; she doesn't take the complaints seriously because she thinks it's not harassment when the man is gay. However, the company's higher ups disagree. They fire the gay employee for harassment and demote his sister-in-law, who later quits as she refuses to take training about harassment at the workplace.
  • This customer is the manager's cousin, and the cashier is instructed to give them whatever deal they ask for because the manager can't be bothered to deal with the family drama that will result for not giving them special treatment. It ends up backfiring when the next time he asks for a massive discount, the district manager is in the store, who shuts the nepotism down and makes an on-the-spot policy that that particular customer is to be charged double.
  • This story involves a waitress who is terrible at her job, but has convinced the manager that she can't be fired because her boyfriend will quit. Upon learning that her boyfriend is not the head chef, as he'd been led to believe, but a junior chef who is almost as bad as she is, the manager fires her immediately. The chef doesn't follow through on the threat, but is himself fired shortly afterwards.
  • This department manager at a law firm brings his son in for an internship over the submitter's objections, lying that the owner was okay with it. The son turns out to be a Lazy Bum who spends the whole time on his phone. When the submitter complains of this to the manager, the manager tells him that he should have asked his son to do things instead of ordered him. But even more concerningly, the father has allowed his son access to sensitive and confidential files about clients, so the submitter has to shut down his computer. He then finds out that the son has been deleting some files and making vulgar edits to others, necessitating a system-wide restoration to a previous backup, losing a day's worth of work as a result. The manager's son never comes to the office again, and the manager himself is forced to resign.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!:
  • This arena employee tries to stop a teenage girl and her younger sister from leaving their seats and going to the bathroom, claiming those under 18 cannot leave their seats without an adult, a rule she made up. When the teenager points out no such rule exists and she's 18 and tries to leave, the employee calls security to stop them and lies that the girls tried to cause a scene and made threats. Too bad there were onlookers who called out on her lies and how she didn't bother younger children than the girls who were also leaving their seats without their parents. Even the security criticizes the employee for making up the rules and her unlawful interference with patrons. The employee was given disciplinary action and wasn't allowed back to work until she memorized their policy.
  • This company's policy is that every manager has to work at least one holiday so the rest of the store's employees can have a chance to take them off. Naturally, there's one manager who's decided he will not work any holidays - if the entire rest of the store has to work every Thanksgiving and Christmas rather than spend them with their families to facilitate this, so be it. He's soon demoted and moved to a different store when someone picks up on this and reports it to corporate—but not before that manager is also forced to work both Thanksgiving and Christmas.
  • Again for this manager - days off at the gymnasium they work for are on a first-come, first-serve basis, but even though the submitter is the first one, the manager schedules them for a day they wanted off anyway because nobody else wanted to work that day either. To top it off, the submitter puts in their two weeks' notice (which would likely have happened anyway)... and the manager tries to schedule the submitter after their last day.
  • This manager tries to invoke it by saying "YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! I'M THE MANAGER!" For context, the manager is trying to give a customer a pizza that got dropped on the floor - which is not only in violation of health and safety codes, but also happened right in front of the customer. Eventually the employee wins the argument.
  • This tax agent, against company rules, sends a customer's tax return to the IRS without checking her latest check stub, delaying the customer from getting her tax refund. And when the tax company, as an apology for the delay, gives her the money now until she can pay back the company with her tax refund once it arrives, the same tax agent who was responsible for this mess in the first place, rather than wait for the customer to come to the company after her work at school was done, came to the customer's school unannounced to not only give her the money but make her sign an unfair contract that would charge the customer if she didn't pay back the company in 45 days, something the company didn't approve. Due to the agent's greedy nature and working behind the company's backs, causing the customer much trouble and stress, the CEO of the company gave the customer a cash settlement for her troubles and fired the agent.
  • This library administrator practically embodies this trope, believing in change for change's sake. He implements a new rule to the time off policy, stating that an employee receives a mark every time they take off, whether it is urgent or not. If an employee gets 3 marks in a month, they can't take any more time off for the next 3 months. This backfires when the author receives a mark just because she has to take her mother to the hospital due to Stevens-Johnson syndrome. Not surprisingly, when another administrator hears about the incident, they quickly scrap the Jerkass administrator's policy.
  • This pet store manager is a prime example. When the submitter comes in early with her dog, the manager demands to see it and orders the submitter to stock shelves off the clock, despite the fact that A) she cannot work off the clock, and B) company policy prohibits the submitter from handing her dog over. The submitter refuses, citing the policy, and the store manager writes her up for insubordination after she does clock in. Unbeknownst to the store manager, however, the submitter reported her behavior to the corporate manager beforehand, and the write-up gave her the perfect reason to call him. The store manager threatens to fire the submitter as she makes the call, only for the corporate manager to point out the store manager's willful violation of policy, and then chew her out for a good half hour over it.
  • This receptionist at a private dental clinic, rather than follow the clinic's rule that patients who wish to cancel an appointment must call early or at least twenty-four hours before the appointment or they will be charged with late fees, makes up her own rule that patients must call them exactly six days before canceling their appointment - even calling earlier than six days won't count. Even after being fired by her boss for her stupid rule, since a lot of patients were unfairly charged for this, she could never explain why she insisted on canceling before six days.
  • This bar owner has clearly let the power go to his head, as he shows up to his bar drunk as a skunk and gets more drinks, then has the submitter and her husband thrown out when they complain about his drunkenness and liberal use of racist and ableist slurs.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Beautiful!:
  • This person certainly thinks so, but... "Let's see if you being 'pretty' will matter to your manager, shall we?"
  • "I'M PRETTIER! MEN SHOULD BE INTERESTED IN ME!"
  • A rare male example here, in which the male absolutely refuses to to listen to his female manager (the submitter), thinking she's jealous of his "hot" and "buff" body. The submitter tells him to clock out and leave, but he continues to brag about his "hot" and "buff" body, insulting two other coworkers in the process. This gets him instantly fired by the store owner, who was right behind him.
  • This girl shows up to work in a factory and completely disregards the dress code there, wearing fancy clothes and refusing to wear steel-toed boots. Even when she finally gives in and puts on the correct boots and vest the following day, she still refuses to work on a machine because she'll get dirty. The girl is then fired after she refuses to help with crates for fear of breaking a nail, having lasted just two days in total.
  • One woman in an office uses her feminine charms to get what she wants. Unfortunately for her, her charms don't work on her boss, so she ends up having to swap her office (rearranged so that the computer screen is not visible from the outside; services obtained by said methods so nobody will know she's not actually working) with another employee who has an actual business need for said rearrangements (they work on financial data that they don't necessarily want the casual observer to see).
• Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: A railway ticket inspector confirms that someone else is sitting in the submitter's reserved standard class seat, but says that if the other passenger doesn't move voluntarily, there's nothing he can do about it. Since there don't seem to be any other seats in standard class, and he's basically been told the rules about where you sit aren't real, the submitter decides to take his standard class ticket and sit in first class, since the inspector has admitted he can't stop him from doing so.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: A frequent occurrence with submitters as they are either: 1) a customer deciding to take their business elsewhere, having had enough of the business's antics, or 2) employees tired of the business's treatment of its workers deciding to Take This Job and Shove It.
  • The submitter of this story decides to change their bank after the current bank proves willing to a) freeze accounts due to suspicious activity without contacting the account holder to tell them their account is frozen or make sure the purchases were actually fraudulent, b) not dispute activity that prompted them to freeze an account, c) refuse to acknowledge the possibility of false positives even after the account holder repeatedly confirms that they made the "fraudulent" purchases, and d) clear checks from frozen accounts.
  • The customer in this story, after a flirty bank teller locks his account on false threat allegations for refusing her advances, zeros his account out and moves to another bank practically the moment the wrongful termination is reversed.
  • The pizza restaurant second supervisor in this story, seemingly as an act of petty revenge against the submitter (the first supervisor) for an earlier scheduling conflict she herself caused, spends thirty minutes on an insanely busy evening voiding the orders they put in so the customers don't get their food. She then openly and loudly mocks the submitter. End result: over a hundred customers and ultimately two thirds of the staff walk out, costing the owner $1500 in unpaid bills (and that's not even counting the $700 the second supervisor was ultimately found to have stolen from the till).
  • This scam caller quits his job after one phone call accidentally results in a ten-year-old tripping and cutting themselves.
  • The submitter of this story changes cell phone providers the moment their current contract is over because the company failed to computerise a service suspension that was supposed to be in place while they were deployed in Iraq, resulting in a $3,700 bill that the company expected them to drive from Texas to Colorado with their deployment papers to get out of and an argument with customer support.
  • A law firm hires a new girl into a senior role. This gradually results in the second- and third-most senior lawyers resigning, since they have no promotion opportunities. Soon after that, management start shifting the duties of the most-senior lawyer (the submitter) to her, leading up to the submitter being passed over for promotion in favor of the new girl. This makes the submitter quit as well. One day after the submitter quits, the new girl quits too, essentially having decapitated the three most-senior lawyers from the firm.
  • In a non-protagonistic example of this trope, this apathetic new hire quits and storms out in the middle of her orientation when the submitter explains the company's zero-tolerance policy on Nepotism. Turns out the new hire is (or at least claimed to be) the owner's daughter.
• The Scrooge: This bank manager is one on level with the likes of Scrooge McDuck and Mr. Krabs; what kind of person calls the police over someone accidentally being given one dollar too much?
• Secret Test: A hotel manager here sabotages a guest's request in order to make one, with unpleasant results.
• Secret Test of Character: Here, where a situation involving a man attempting to purchase a gun under suspicious circumstances turns out to be a test of the employee.
• Separated by a Common Language:
  • Taken up to eleven here. The waitress looks at the British woman like she's speaking Mandarin Chinese, but when the British woman tries speaking in an American accent, the waitress understands her just fine.
  • In this story at a London pub, an American customer orders fries and uses the British lingo for them, "chips". However, the waitress, unaware that the customer knows British lingo, thinks he meant "crisps", which are what potato chips are called in Britain, and calls the customer "a stupid American" when he points out she gave the wrong food. The insulted customer and his friends leave the pub and refuse to pay for the food they ordered earlier and didn't eat.
  • In this story set in Glasgow, the workers at a fast food restaurant have a worrying conversation where they note there are "jobbies" in the kitchen. The worker was referring to temp workers, but "jobbie" is noted by the submitter to be a Scottish slang word for poo, causing confusion.
• Serial Escalation:
  • The Epic of the Impossible Store. First it just looks like the old manager was a horrible slacker who left the store to rot and booked it when the District Manager investigated. Then all the employees (who were all part-timers except one) start quitting. Then it turns out that the manager had been using her sloppy practices to cover stealing from the store (among other things, she'd mark good shipments as too damaged to be sold, then sell them anyway at a discount and pocket the money). Then it comes up that the manager stole her employees' bonuses and lied to them that corporate did it, and convinced them to quit en masse when the District Manager started investigating. Then they find out about the Trash Room...
  • In this story, the simple matter of changing the submitter's sister's phone number ends up blowing up into a bigger and bigger mess due to incompetent employees at a cell phone provider, starting with the wrong phone number being changed multiple times and just going on from there. The family's troubles with the company don't end even after they terminate their contract.
  • This story opens with the submitter taking over from another IT temp named Joe. At first they discover that Joe was either taking longer than necessary repairing computers or stealing them by pretending they were broken beyond repair. Then they discover Joe was using one computer as his personal Porn Stash. Then Joe tries to get his old job back and starts harassing the submitter to get it, getting arrested in the process. Then it's revealed that Joe was wanted on suspicion of dealing, and they find evidence proving it on the same computer as the Porn Stash. By the end of the story, the FBI has confiscated the computer as evidence, and Joe is serving a five-year prison sentence.
• Sibling Rivalry: Bickering between the two owners of this Italian restaurant eventually escalates into a several week-long screaming match, to the point where people start coming to the place just to hear them fight. It doesn't last very long after they decide that their declining business is somehow the fault of the rest of the staff.
  • This story received an unexpected sequel, in which the submitter returns to the area to find another new Italian restaurant with a very similar sign. Lo and behold, it's the brothers again. It turns out their elderly mother heard about what happened and took a trip across the Atlantic just to kick their asses and force them to work together.
    Moral of the story: there is no force of nature that’s more terrifying and more capable of stopping familial conflict than an enraged Italian matriarch.
• A Sinister Clue: Referenced here.
• Skewed Priorities: Enough of a factor to warrant its own page!
• Small Name, Big Ego:
  • This stationery supplier insulted one of the owners of a small company (thinking it was the secretary), and kept belittling the owner in a who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are manner, resulting in the small company terminating their existing contract. The stationery supplier went out of business not long after--it turns out the small company was their biggest customer.
  • A new transfer employee thinks she's the fastest in opening and unloading boxes for a retail store chain. When she's transferred to another store stockroom, her superior points out only opening a box an hour is slow, since two local regular employees can do two or more boxes an hour. Refusing to accept there are other people better at her task than her, she has a fit and calls corporate which got her fired for lying about the circumstances.
  • This DJ contacts a music venue and demands they cancel already-booked bands to give her their performance slots. When she's only booked for a single performance (because the venue manager had never heard of the self-proclaimed "most famous DJ in the area"), she arrives for setup to demand the site immediately replace all their lighting with lights from her preferred "eco-friendly" shop, move the (permanently fixed) stage so she'll have natural light for her gig, and tries to harass other performers into giving her their scheduled slots because she's a "celebrity". When she starts her performance, her friends immediately start harassing anyone who might have access to a camera because she holds copyright on all images of herself. The lousy performance and harassment results in enough complaints to get her booted early; the venue manager finds out a few days later that most other venues in the area had banned the wannabe-DJ for similar behavior.
  • A new employee nicknamed Frank seems to think he's knows better than everyone despite being new. Due to his cultural upbringing, he refuses to listen to anyone who's younger or a woman, which means he refuses to listen to the submitter and his coworker when they point out his mistakes due to looking younger and being a woman respectively. Eventually, Frank is fired due to his refusal to learn from his superiors while refusing to admit he was wrong.
  • This newbie seems to think he's very important and can order anyone around because he acts like a bootlicker to the managers. He demands that the submitter, who is his supervisor, to give a report on a coworker who came in a little late despite it not being a big deal. Then the newbie has the nerve to swear at his supervisor when the latter refuses his demands and threatens to quit if they don't do what he says. However, this backfires since the supervisor was already annoyed with the newbie's antics and tells him to go back to work or quit since he wasn't the important worker that he thought he was. Thankfully, the supervisor didn't have to deal with the newbie for long since he was later fired.
  • This lazy operator has been getting away with ignoring instructions for ages, as the only person who can fire him for job performance issues is the boss, who's dealing with cancer treatment. However, it turns out this doesn't apply to repeatedly parking in the disabled bay, damaging company property by hitting it with his car or stealing company property. (He just borrowed it, without permission, and lost it, what's the problem?) Convinced he's popular with his colleagues, he boasts that his firing will lead to a mass walkout by the staff, and even tries to organize one. However, he's such an unpleasant person in general that everyone, including his supposed friends, are glad to see him go.
  • This woman who just transferred to the submitter's team claims she is a brilliant worker that can solve anything but is later revealed to be lazy and incompetent but she refuses accept responsibility and blame it on others or claims anyone who calls her out is a bully or sexist.
  • This maintenance man believes that simply being maintenance gives him the privilege to barge into dorm rooms unannounced. When he barges in on somebody changing their bandages after their surgery he has the gall to blame them for doing something disgusting when he barged in, under the second deluded belief that students on a college campus should be learning 100% of the time even in their dorm rooms. The situation ends with his firing when he rants about how people in on-campus housing shouldn't expect privacy and that disabled people shouldn't be allowed to live on campus at all.
  • This worker refuses to let a little thing like the fire alarm going off interrupt her work. When she's finally left the building she threatens to report the fire marshal who got her out to HR.
• Smug Snake: The workers in these stories, until they lose that smile:
  • This cashier takes away a customer's ID and passport as fakes because she believes nobody actually lives in Washington, DC. The customer calls the police on her because the cashier is planning to destroy her ID and passport (while smiling smugly thinking it's the customer who's going to be arrested). Unfortunately, the cashier loses it when the cop calls her an idiot for thinking nobody lives in DC and not realizing her IDs are legitimate.
  • Another cashier stops a young girl from leaving because she sees the girl writing something in her notebook and immediately jumps to the conclusion that she was going to steal a car, loudly proclaiming that she caught a thief. However, when the police and the girl explain to the cashier what's written in the notebook are not car license plate numbers but the dates of when she found license plates from different US states, she tries desperately to justify her accusations that the girl is a thief. The cashier got in trouble with the police instead.
  • A "nurse" calls a patient an idiot for coming to a medical lab and tells her to leave because the patient came for a catheter, which the "nurse" claims they don't do - and then it's revealed she's not actually a nurse and has no idea what she's talking about. After the patient gets her blood taken from her doctor, the "nurse" continues to insult the patient, telling her that she's going to die because her doctor is stupid right before she's paged in by the Big Boss; the submitter learns later that she was fired on the spot for turning away eleven other patients over jumping to conclusions, couldn't for the life of her figure out why she was being fired, and had to be dragged away by security while screaming about stupid people and stupid doctors.
  • This night security supervisor at a resort orders the couple who runs the bike rental shop to close down despite there being customers still being helped. When the couple ignores the security supervisor's warnings, he gets mad and calls the couple's boss, the General Manager, thinking the boss will side with him. Instead, the General Manager praises the couple for their work in helping the customers and tells the security supervisor to help the customers or stop bothering them and leave. Losing it, the security supervisor threatens to have the couple fired, but the customers come to the couple's defense and complained about the security supervisor's behavior to corporate. The supervisor was fired and denied unemployment benefits.
  • This clerk rejects an ID and calls the police because he claims that the woman on the ID can't be the submitter, even though the submitter states that she looks exactly the same as the ID photo down to the hairstyle and shirt color, and then makes her "give back" a packet of chocolates that the store doesn't sell, charging her for them even when she starts feeling dizzy due to her diabetes. When the police do come, the police officer confirms that the ID does belong to the submitter and that the store does not sell the chocolates that the submitter is accused of stealing. When the clerk admits that the submitter did tell the clerk both that the store does not sell that brand and that she has diabetes, the officer berates and threatens to arrest the clerk for refusing to give her the chocolates, noting that because she was clearly ill, the police officer would have allowed her to have the chocolates even if she was stealing them.
  • This girl demands a job at a custom knife store, admitting that she is only getting a job because her dad wants her to get one and she doesn't plan on doing any actual work. This fact, combined with the fact that the company isn't hiring anyway, means that the submitter's friend refuses to give her a job. The girl threatens to complain to the owner, claiming to know "him," and leaves, later coming back with her father. Said father threatens to get the submitter fired by the owner, when the submitter makes a deal: if he can call the owner and relay the owner's approval, she'll hire the girl. When the father starts talking on the phone, the submitter calls him out, noting that she's the owner, based on the fact that the picture on the wall next to the owner's number is of the submitter, that her name tag has "Owner" printed on it, and the name on said name tag is the same as the sign outside.
  • After a customer complained to a deli cashier that the chicken she's selling is the wrong order as the price is lower than the customer usually ordered, the cashier tries to act smug, saying the customer lost a chance to get chicken at a cheaper price, only to lose that smile when the customer points out the cashier would have been written up or even fired for selling the wrong item at the wrong price.
  • This fast food manager gloats to the submitter's uncle (her boss) about firing one of the lower managers just because she could, and even goes so far as to say there's nothing he can do to stop her from firing other employees under similar circumstances due to at-will employment protections. The submitter's uncle promptly demonstrates one thing he can do: fire that manager on the spot, because she was already on her last chance with the company for a similar incident at the store she had been transferred from.
• Snail Mail:
  • This story features the USPS outsourcing some of their deliveries for the Christmas rush, which leads to the submitter discovering that one of the contractors they hired had simply taken all his packages meant for three apartment complexes to one apartment complex and dumped them all there.
  • Similarly, this inept postal worker thought it was a good idea to leave their packages in a car whose door was unlocked – and it wasn't even the correct recipient's car.
• Snipe Hunt:
  • This 12-plex movie theater employee is told that there is a secret 13th theater.
  • This grocery store employee is told to shake the vinaigrette dressings to mix them.
  • This young employee is sent to get skirting board ladders by a prank-loving boss. However the employee is Genre Savvy enough to know when he's being pranked, so he instead spends four hours at home playing video games and then calls the boss out on it when he's summoned back.
  • A subversion here — the newbie found the snipe in question (skyhooks). Turns out they're pretty expensive, too. The boss stopped using snipe hunts after this.
• So Bad, It's Good: Invoked by this story. Whoever chose the hold song - a rendition of "Lavender's Blue" by a man who absolutely, positively cannot sing - either chose it as an act of spite, had horrifically bad taste in music, or had some sort of conflict of interest. The song was so awful that everyone who heard it burst out laughing, and multiple people tried to bring its poor quality to the company's attention before the submitter succeeded, causing an office-wide distraction resulting from the worker's Bile Fascination.
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: This story about a new hire who asks HR to send his team a message that he's in a relationship and shouldn't be flirted with, and only communicates via e-mail because at his last job, the fact he talked to some people led to resentment and a toxic atmosphere (during breaks he buries his head in a book). When the poster does manage to talk to him, he doesn't come across as vain or arrogant, just very aware that he looks like Chris Hemsworth, and trying to minimise the impact this has on his work.
• The Social Darwinist:
  • This manager never donates to cancer research because he believes that diseases like cancer help prevent overpopulation.
  • This man, assuming that two kids with sight problems are siblings (they're actually cousins) and that their problems have a genetic component (it doesn't; one of them was blinded by an infection) proceeds to accuse the OP (who is the parent to one of them) of being irresponsible by (he thinks) having two kids when it's "obvious" there is genetic blindness in their family.
• Social Media Is Bad:
  • This General warns new graduates of Special Forces group that Social Media is a fearsome enemy that they cannot defeat as anything bad they do in public and caught on video is enough to ruin their unit's reputation.
  • This new marketing manager flies into a rage upon finding an employee "playing around on Facebook", ranting about how social media is "just a fad" and it's unprofessional to be using it at work — and refusing to listen to the person trying to explain that it's their job, due to being in charge of the company's social media. He then has all social media sites blocked at the office, making it impossible for the SM team to do their jobs, and also threatening a campaign the company has already invested thousands of pounds in. When this lands him in trouble with the higher-ups, he takes it out on the staff and threatens to fire them, which promptly blows up in his face as they make a complaint threatening to quit en masse, and he's transferred to "pursue other career options", while someone more competent is given his job.
• Soda Can Shakeup: How the submitter of this story manages to catch the office's food thief red-handed.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • These prankster employees unwittingly foil a shoplifting scheme that includes their assistant manager as a collaborator.
  • The original customers here want a necklace that must be transferred from another store. Because of the way the system works, the transfer request won't go through until the next morning, so when the submitter checks on it the next day, they find out that it was purchased by an employee the previous night. The submitter goes on to learn that that location's night supervisor had been purchasing jewelry with her employee discount and selling it to customers at just above that discounted price (but still far less than the regular asking price), pocketing the difference, for five years. Too bad that that couple happened to want her most recent target.
  • This manager, shortly after beginning work at a pizza place, disconnected the security cameras so they wouldn't catch him Stealing from the Till among other things, and running the restaurant into the ground. However, a new delivery guy dusted around the disconnected cables and re-connected them thinking that he'd bumped them on accident, meaning that for a week before the delivery guy went to the owner to report the manager's thieving ways, the cameras were on and caught his misbehavior. That one week of hard evidence was enough to get him sent to prison for grand larceny. The look on his face when he realized the cameras were still on was priceless.
• Speaks Fluent Animal:
  • No, seriously, that's a really smart raccoon.
  • And here is a really smart bee.
• Spoonerism: The shitted feets.
• Stay in the Kitchen:
  • This video game store cashier is disgusted when a girl walks in to retrieve a game. The game was for the girl's brother, but the cashier's disgust and remarks are, well, disgusting.
  • Thankfully, not all misogynists are beyond redemption.
  • This cashier seems to think that women are completely incapable of doing any woodwork.
  • When a cashier gives a female customer a hard time (including dropping the trope name), the customer's five-year-old brother proceeds to lay a verbal smackdown.
  • A bizarre case here where a female employee clearly believes that auto maintenance and repair is beyond a woman, but the male employee she summons clearly sees that in this case, the woman who had to pop the hood had things in hand.
  • Inverted here, when a man isn't employed because the worker thinks they're not as hard-working as women. As the story says, sexual discrimination laws go both ways - and, of course, the employer is still dumb enough to tell this to that man's face.
  • Another inversion here, with a female employee who will bend over backwards for female customers, but is dismissive and rude towards male ones, including making up stories about them being rude to her (e.g. claiming the submitter was trying to get a refund for expired food he bought months ago, rather than warning them of long-expired food still on their shelves).
  • This woman has had to deal with many home improvement stores that fall deep into this trope, so imagine how she feels once she finds a store that averts it. To top it off, said store is run by a woman, perhaps inverting the trope as well.
  • This registrar is a jerkass sexist who won't register girls for the mall's sports activities (Soccer, Football and Hockey) but instead puts them into ballet and gymnastics because he thinks all girls like those and hate sports. What's worse, the organizer of these activities allows it because he only cares whether all of the activities have at least 9 kids attending each otherwise they be canceled, claiming it's fair and equal despite the fact the girls basically have no choice in what they get to do. It eventually backfires once a couple of Mama Bears, unhappy about the situation, organize a boycott, leading to most—if not all—of the activities being cancelled.
    • This registrar is better in this regard; his excuse is that every other girl signing up legitimately did want ballet, so he assumed this one wanted that too, and is quick to fix the mistake when she points out she wants to play football. Unfortunately, the organizer is just as sexist as the last example; he even talks as if the girl will end up dropping off the team immediately, even after being shown video evidence of her liking the game and being very, very good at it. At least the organizer (albeit grudgingly) allows her the chance to try. Also, this incident takes place in Darwin, so they may have been talking about Australian Rules Football, which is a very rough sport.
    • Rounding out the possibilities, this registrar is a jerkass sexist who, without the knowledge of the parents, sign up girls for ballet and gymnastics despite their requests, and even threatened physical violence on a woman who complained about it. Unlike the previous two stories, the organizer is not happy when he finds out, and ends up firing the clerk on the spot and correcting the misplacements that he can. (Bonus points: Apparently, the clerk was later arrested on sexual assault charges for a different incident.)
  • This nurse repeatedly reminds a patient that an operation will make her sterile, ignoring the patient repeatedly saying that she was already sterile due to the condition she's getting the operation for. Eventually the nurse snaps and says that the patient's godly duty as a woman is to have children. At least the nurse was kept away from the patient when the incident was reported to the surgeon.
  • This waitress actually cuts a female sailor's military ID in half because she thinks women can't serve in any capacity in the Navy and it's therefore a fake ID. The customer ended up getting the meal free instead, along with a coupon for another free meal at a later time, while the waitress was chewed out by the manager over the incident.
  • The new manager in an aerospace company dismisses what he thinks is an overpaid secretary. Nope, she was the only one with the applied mathematics skills necessary for the group to do the work... and the CEO, once it becomes known why certain projects had been stalled for months, tears into the supervisor before firing him.
  • This car dealer who assumes that the wife of a pair is only interested in the aesthetic features of the car, and is subsequently surprised when not only is she the one doing the test driving, she proceeds to rattle off everything that's wrong with the car afterwards.
  • In an inversion, this male employee refuses to help a male customer with back problems carry bags of gardening rocks to his car on the grounds that "he is man and is strong enough to do it himself" and complains that a female employee, who did help the customer, shouldn't do that as it's "that man's job" even thought both the customer and female employee repeatedly point out the customer's back problems. And it turns out, this wasn't the first time the male employee did something like this.
  • This coworker doesn't think it's a man's job to clean, and tries to order his own manager (who is female) to do the cleaning instead, snapping his fingers and shouting as if he's the boss of her. This gets him sentenced to cleaning the staff room during the evenings, not that he's budged on his views even remotely.
  • This part time seasonal worker outright orders the female submitter, who is the store manager (and five levels above him) to clean up a mess he was asked to sweep up thirty minutes prior, under the logic that “MEN don’t clean.” When the submitter attempts to write him up for refusing to work, the worker quits on the spot.
  • This boss assumes that two female new hires saying they'd use the fridge if it wasn't covered in mould is them volunteering to clean it, and if they do that, he'll let the guys know not to let it get that bad again.
  • This submitter is brought in to test out games and the company only looks at her gender and selects her for testing out a browser game about taking care of babies. After the submitter asks them questions that make it very clear that her tastes lean towards the Bloodier and Gorier, they avoid making that mistake again.
  • In this story, the female submitter is given a subordinate to cover for another employee on maternity leave, only to be warned that the new worker might have issues. Sure enough, the submitter finds the new worker trying to get onto her computer. When the submitter tries to introduce herself, the new worker slams his hands on the desk, leaves in a huff, then complains to Human Resources. It turns out that the new worker thought the submitter would be his subordinate rather than the other way around, so he refused to listen to "some silly little girl" and demanded that he be given the submitter's position or he would quit. Evidently they went with the latter.
• Stealing the Credit: A hallmark of bad managers and incompetent coworkers.
  • In this story, the manager attempts it after a customer makes a compliment about the submitter bending over backwards to make a special drink. The store manager knows he's lying and gives the submitter a promotion for her professionalism. The Jerkass manager later changes shifts so that he doesn't have to work with the submitter anymore.
• Stealing from the Till: A fairly common occurrence among dishonest workers/bosses. A few examples:
  • One manager gets away with this (and other dishonest behavior) for a long time by unplugging the cables to the security cameras. He finally gets (incidentally) found out by a new delivery guy encountering the unplugged cables while dusting and plugging them back in, thinking he knocked them out by accident. The end result? The cameras catch one week's worth of footage of his dishonesty, which gets grand larceny charges pressed against him.
  • Somehow, the business owner in this story believed the tills were off by a couple hundred dollars each day because of a software glitch in the registers. When a new cashier's till is never off by more than a nickel, the boss eventually realizes it's not the registers that are the problem, it's the other cashiers.
  • Then there's this general manager, who, in addition to verbally abusing a waitress for seemingly no reason, proceeds to steal her tip right out of her hand and then fire her on the spot while screaming full-blast. The 75-year-old lady the waitress was serving is not amused by the GM's actions... and neither is the district manager, who promptly fires him the next day for screaming at the waitress and stealing her tip.
  • A more extreme example can be found here, involving a manager and his daughter embezzling from the financial services company they both work at for over six months, trying to get another employee to take the fall for them, and finally finding themselves in jail for stealing from multiple businesses they had worked for.
  • Due to COVID-19-related staff shortages, a newer worker is assigned to manage the warehouse. After seeing the haphazard way their manager stores the keys, they suggest to change the locks, and provide the labor. The next day, the new locks are broken, revealing that three of the regular warehouse staff have been stealing materials.
  • This new hire is shocked to find out that she's not allowed to just take $100 from the till for her own rent and leave an IOU in its place. That's how it worked at her old job... which was at her dad's restaurant... from which she was fired.
• Stock "Yuck!": This pizza place worker makes the assumption that teenagers ordering a pizza with anchovies is a prank call - and, in typical Not Always Working fashion, is unnecessarily rude about it, which gets him fired within five minutes.
• Stopped Reading Too Soon: "File does not contain all of the calculations." "Can you review each page and tell us what is missing?" "I didn't know I could change pages in the PDF!"
• Stupid Evil:
  • This boss proudly bullies the disabled employee, right in front of the employee's ACAS representative.
  • This produce manager, instead of apologizing over the phone to a wrongfully fired employee, delivers an outright brutal rant to the employee about how she deserved to be fired, not even seeming to know or even care that he is right in front of his boss the entire time. You can probably guess how well that turned out for him.
• Stupid Sexy Flanders: Discussed here, including the sexual orientation flip.
• "Success Through Sex" Accusation: A new hire at this poster's company decided he was the obvious person to get a promotion despite not having any of the required qualifications. When the female poster got the promotion instead, New Hire started telling everyone in the office she'd only gotten the promotion because she slept with the manager who made the final decision. Said manager is very openly gay. He's also a hobbyist drag queen, so once he found out about the claims he showed up in full drag (with a HR rep in tow) and publicly ripped New Hire to pieces in-character.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Multiple stories involve going to somebody higher in the corporate chain when communication with the customer-facing employees breaks down. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
  • Such is the case in this story, where the management at a chain store is apathetic to a customer discovering that they keep food on the shelves that had expired multiple years before, so the customer hides the food back where they found it and then calls the corporate hotline. The store closes down, reopens under new management, and only a few of the old employees are retained.
  • Also the case here. The submitter, after being wrongfully fired by her manager for reporting an incident with a creepy customer, ends up catching the attention of one of the company's bigwigs, who hastily drops by for an investigation of the incident. The bigwig discovers, among a treasure trove of other incriminating evidence, a trio of forged write-ups that the manager used as the basis for the submitter's firing. End result? The submitter gets fully reinstated, the manager is fired and hit with felony charges for the forged documents, and his replacement is one who promises to stop the creepy regular's antics.
• Super Gullible: This restaurant manager simply cannot comprehend that a customer who without exception has something wrong with her meals is simply lying in order to claim free food. It's not even the normal spineless 'I know they're lying but I'll give them what they want anyway to prevent complaints'; this guy genuinely thinks that apparently his waiters always write down this specific woman's orders on an Idiot Ball, or else everyone on his staff a grudge against a random customer's Cobb salads. Even after a cook tells the manager that he watched the submitter make the salad and that there was no problem, he refuses to believe that the customer is a scammer.
• Surrounded by Idiots:
  • This poor cashier gets stuck with a grill worker who cannot seem to get a burger right.
  • This poor clerk nearly says it verbatim after resolving a ticket written by an incompetent inspector.
• Suspect Is Hatless:
  • This worker at a nursing home, who describes a resident as the one who "has gray hair and glasses, and is sitting in a wheelchair." A coworker points out that that description doesn't narrow it down very much.
  • The only clue the submitter is given on the identity of a secret shopper is "she's a lady".
• Sustained Misunderstanding:
  • "Oh... I didn't know they let Nazis donate."
  • This fast food worker continues to believe the customer wanted a latte despite both the customer and the manager saying otherwise.
  • A teenager buying diapers for her new baby sibling gets harassed by a nosy cashier who assumes that she is a teen mom and refuses to listen to her explanation otherwise. It's bad enough that the teen winds up going to a different store to buy the diapers.
  • This liquor store clerk insists that the 30-year-old submitter cannot buy wine because he's not exactly 21 years old, and maintains her stance even when her manager intervenes.
  • This beach guard refuses to let the submitter enter the beach without a beach tag, not seeming to care about the newly-purchased tag that the submitter practically shoves in his face.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The makers of this gritter have had no other complaints, and if the submitter can't get it to work, he must be using it wrong. But if he's made a modification that fixed it, they'd be quite interested to know what it was. Just, you know, out of general curiosity, not because anybody else has had the same issue.
• Sweet Tooth: Of the negative kind.
  • This coworker stole candy from the submitter's desk on the grounds of "sharing is caring" much to her annoyance since she's a diabetic and needs that candy in case of an emergency, prompting the coworker to call her mean. Their boss calls out the coworker's actions and gives him an ultimatum: if he wants candy from the submitter, he has to pay her $5 per piece or he will write him up for stealing.
  • This lady is a notorious sweet tooth who demands her coworkers give her any sweet food they bring for lunch. When the submitter brings a single slice of lemon cake for herself, the sweet tooth goes mad on how "selfish" the submitter is. The submitter's bosses not only do nothing on the sweet tooth's behavior but even tell the submitter to bring cake for the sweet tooth every time for lunch. The submitter instead reports to Human Resources who discipline the sweet tooth and her enabling bosses. While the sweet tooth never changed, the submitter now brings coffee cake for lunch since her coworker hates it.
  • Upon learning the submitter receives German chocolate as a Christmas gift for his kids from a customer as a thank you. His coworker demands he open up the chocolate and share it with her despite the chocolate being for his kids. The coworker throws a temper tantrum, angrily demands the submitter give the chocolate to her despite the submitter and saner coworkers telling her the chocolate is his and not hers. It takes a lengthy meeting with Human Resources for her to calm down and apologize.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: This company does research for the Department of Defense. Normally, their security is on point enough, but the submitter learns of a proposal for a space-based ICBM system… because someone chucked a manual in the bathroom trash.