Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Not Always Working / Tropes T to Z

Go To

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

Back to the main page

    open/close all folders 

    T 
  • Take This Job and Shove It: A lot of stories that deal with a Bad, Mean, or Pointy-Haired Boss will often end this way, with the submitter quitting because they have had enough of their boss's bullshit.
    • Quoted word for word in the title of this story. The described company is facing record profits, but decides to distribute it all in hush money to the managers and stiff everybody on lower rungs... until an email from Human Resources to the managers detailing the lie gets sent to the wrong person. Cue mass exodus.
    • The submitter of this story quits their job at a pizzeria when the store manager cancels long-approved time off because his habit of hiring idiots who end up fired within a week has caused the restaurant to be understaffed. They had been willing to put up with working at this Incompetence, Inc. prior to this because they're planning to move away for college, but cancelling time off is the last straw. When the manager realizes their two-week notice was no mere tantrum but a serious decision to quit, he starts to retaliate against them, causing them to no-show for what would be their last shift and start heading to California a day early.
    • This story is about a guy working for a mortgage provider, who was intially just working the shredder (something that hadn't been made clear to him when he applied), before applying for a more interesting job with the same company processing applications. When the mortgage crunch hits, many workers get retrained as debt collectors, but his role is a protected one. And then he gets told that his "secondment" to his current role is almost over, at which point he will be retrained as a debt collector. When he questions this, he gets told that there's obviously been a miscommunication, but actually two positions were available; he got the secondment, and the permenant position went to someone else — someone who spends more time working with another team than actually doing the job. Further questions are basically met with a shrug. So he writes a resignation letter that details all his issues with the company since he was first put on shredder duty, sends it to his boss, and also distributes it around the building.
      Manager: “Uhhh, [My Name], I get that you’re upset, and I honestly don’t blame you, but are you sure you want to burn your bridges like this?”
      Me: “[Manager], I don’t want you to take this personally, but h*** yes, I do.”
  • Tampon Run: This story has the submitter getting tampons for his wife, but the cashier (initially) refuses to sell them to him because he is male and refuses to listen to his explanations that they're for his wife.
  • Tastes Like Purple: Quoted verbatim as an employee tries a slushee that ends up being a mix of cherry and blue raspberry.
  • Taxidermy Is Creepy: This manager taxidermies his dead pets, and encourages the submitter to do the same to their recently deceased dog. The submitter has to take a moment to vomit. Later, he goes further by texting the submitter links to taxidermy websites, and even goes to their home (where the submitter's mother has to chase him off), resulting in him being put on probation.
    Manager: “My last cat is a footrest.”
  • Teasing from Behind the Language Barrier: This submitter's uncle uses this to take care of a persistent caller that kept bothering his nephew:
    Uncle: (in Arabic) Why do you not listen? He is not here! I am in a kitchen! The bananas are not ripe yet. My nephew’s cat does not like me! Soccer is fun to watch. My ears are on fire! My face is made of coins! There are clocks all over the ceiling.
    Caller: *click*
  • Technologically Blind Elders: This shopkeeper's store has an iPad equipped with a credit card reader, but he refuses to honor the submitter's credit card or even accept the submitter's attempts to learn how to use it.
  • Technophobia:
    • This boss of an office takes it to an extreme: His office has absolutely no electronics in it (because, according to an employee, the boss "doesn't trust computers or the internet"), and every employee is required to do everything by hand with pencil and paper nor are they allowed to bring their cellphones into the office. The story takes place in 2012. Unsurprisingly, new hires (the submitter included) seldom last more than a day.
    • This railway company expects its workers to fax in their timesheets – in 2014! (The submitter suspects this is so that the agency can hold on to the wages of anyone who doesn't fax - i.e. everybody - for an additional week, something that's backed up when they do fax their timesheet and it emerges that it's been so long since anybody actually sent in a fax that the agency just stopped checking.)
  • Tempting Fate: The salespeople at this mall kiosk have been driving customers and workers at a nearby store up the wall with their rudeness and pushiness. The submitter – the store's manager – approaches mall management to complain about them, only for the manager to pooh-pooh the submitter's concerns and tell them not to bother him “unless they set your store on fire.” A few weeks later, one of the kiosk workers starts a small fire in the store's men's room by tossing a lit cigarette into the wastebasket. The kiosk's lease would be terminated.
  • That Came Out Wrong:
  • That's What She Said: Attempted by a female worker here: "God, that took forever! It felt so good to finally shove some meat in there!"
    • This one comes from a blood clinic worker, with the customer saying that he would've gone for it had the worker not done so.
  • They Just Dont Get It: Can be seen on their own page.
  • Threat Backfire: This vice-principal threatens to quit if the IT guy isn't fired. The principal accepts his resignation.
  • Tomato Surprise: This software company officer complains about the interface designer's work, until one meeting when the designer has a "Eureka!" Moment and shows him a colorblindness test image. Surprise, he's colorblind and had never been tested or diagnosed. In the last paragraph, the other workers get sidetracked sending each other colorblindness tests, and eight more discover they are colorblind to various hues and degrees.
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • This nurse downs an entire bag of pills, despite not knowing who they belong to or what they are for. Fortunately for her (and possibly unfortunately for the rest of us), they were mostly harmless lactose-intolerance pills, so no Darwin Award for her (at least, not yet).
    • These coworkers stop in the middle of a stairwell during a fire drill to take a selfie, endangering the people behind them as well as themselves. Had this been an actual emergency, photobombing their selfie (as the submitter suggested) would have been too light a reaction.
    • This guy has a nut allergy severe enough for him to take an Epi-pen to work everyday and thinks the reason for nearly dying after eating an ALMOND JOY! was that that it had coconut in it.
    • This office director points out that he's allergic to the nuts in the cake the office brought to celebrate a worker's birthday... and then pops a piece of the cake into his mouth anyway because he just wanted to see what it tasted like. Miraculously, he doesn't appear to have a reaction to it.
    • This genius soldier manages to corner himself with landmines. Fortunately he's extricated without coming to harm (aside from taking a verbal dressing-down by his commanding officer).
    • This submitter has PTSD and an aversion to being touched around the shoulders or back from behind. Despite their coworkers knowing about this issue, one coworker keeps patting them on the back or shoulder to get their attention. And despite being told repeatedly to not do it, this guy keeps doing it, and then complains to HR when his latest disregard of the submitter's condition resulted in him being punched in panicked self-defense.
    • This coworker invites an armed robbery by counting cash in front of the store windows instead of taking it to the back like she's supposed to. This is so dumb the police investigation initially assumes she's an accomplice to the thief! When the submitter realizes the store still isn't going to fire her for this, they give their two weeks' notice.
    • This refinery has regularly scheduled emergency drills, which are always completed quickly and efficiently, so their safety service reports 100% preparedness. It turns out that everybody has gotten so used to the drills that they're prepared on those days and lax on other ones, so chaos ensues when they decide to run a non-scheduled drill. (Of the two workers given as an example, both of whom had forgotten their safety masks, one "crapped himself and made his peace" and the other broke both his legs in an attempt to reach his mask.) Management take action: they decide that they're never again going to have unplanned drills.
    • A coworker's friend decides to prank said coworker by saying "Give me all the money!" while they're waiting to use the night drop at the bank. Karma strikes immediately: while the coworker's defensive swing didn't do any damage, the friend slips during a flinch and knocks himself unconscious on a handrail.
    • A fuel truck driver gets a military base locked down for four hours because he decides that during the gate checks is a good time to joke about his vehicle contents being equivalent to a bomb. As a commenter points out, "That is how you get shot."
    • A new coworker with a severe peanut allergy has a reaction, assumed to be down to the incomplete allergen rules at the workplace (while allergen-containing foods cannot be eaten there, they can still be stored to be eaten outside). The incident causes a quick Obvious Rule Patch to prevent it happening again. However, all sympathy is lost when it's discovered that the new coworker had caused his own reaction by taking a bite from another coworker's peanut butter cups. It's not made clear whether he deliberately did it to get the coworker in trouble or because he was too dumb to realize what food he was stealing.
    • In which a new hire sees nothing wrong with eating scones full of broken glass.
    • Along with many, many other boneheaded choices, this intern, after being told not to steal other workers' lunches, finally brings his own… in the form of a pound of raw steak… which, upon finding he couldn't grill it at work, ate it raw. He recovered, but also worrisome is the fact that the story treats his incompetence as a joke.
    • This bigoted area manager insults the Irish… when he manages an Irish pub, he's talking to its Irish general manager, and his management company is owned by an Irishman.
    • This guy loses half of a finger on a sawmill moulding machine, and when asked by the safety investiation how he managed to bypass the safety guards, he repeats the exact same motion and loses the rest of his finger.
  • A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: This submitter is a slow walker for mobility reasons, and tries to ask where a product is twice only for the workers they talk to to instantly walk off toward the aisle thinking the submitter is right behind them, before the submitter can tell them she can't keep up with them. When the submitter manages to avoid this with a third worker, they find the first two workers in the aisle in question wondering where they'd gone.
  • Trash of the Titans:
    • The retail store at the center of the infamous "Trash Room" story. Even before arriving at the Trash Room, the higher-ups with the store find the store a mess with unboxed merch all over the place, the floors caked with dirt and grime, and the backrooms a disaster area.
    • According to this story, "difficulties with break room cleanliness are endemic to the tax industry." To prove it, they relate the story of a workplace fridge that was paid for by a manager with his own money (thus making it his property) and is left in the office after he retires. With the owner no longer working there, the fridge falls into disrepair and food is left to rot in it from tax season to tax season. Due to a combination of the ownership question and diffusion of responsibility, the problem only gets worse until Corporate – tired of the smell – grabs the bull by the horns and rip out the fridge… which makes things From Bad to Worse as workers stuck their foods in unrefrigerated cabinets, making the smell worse, with some cabinets having to be removed because they looked like "something out of The Last of Us." That debacle ends when the former manager demands that Corporate get a new fridge… which the workers abuse like they did the old one.
  • Troll: When the submitter's boyfriend runs into a racist cashier who assumes he doesn't speak English despite the fact that he just did, the boyfriend responds by swapping to Mandarin until the cashier leaves in frustration, then swaps right back to English.

    U-V 
  • Understatement: In this story, the submitter states that her ex-boss was "kind of an a**hole" before recounting how he made demeaning comments to her about how she should know how to clean things because she's a housewife. The story's title is "'Kind Of' Seems Mild".
  • Unfortunate Name: A variation with "Ms. T". It's not so much that her name is unfortunate, it's that under the company's email naming conventions, her email handle would fall under this, so (after a bit of persuasion), she agrees to go by the handle "tfarr@[company].com".
  • The Unintelligible: Encountered in this inexplicable phone call. One commenter speculates that the call was redirected to an after-hours call center and garbled by a failing connection.
  • The Unsmile: This tech support worker is told by their boss that they need to "smile more" (even though they already joke around with users), so they start giving "the most forced, creepy smile humanly possible" as a way of Bothering by the Book until their boss tells them to stop.
  • Unwanted Assistance: invoked
    • An optician has to bend the glasses to fit properly on the patient's face...then proceeds to unbend them so they'll fit in the hard case. Eventually the patient uses a paraphrase of the former trope name "Stop Helping Me".
    • This cable rep claims he/she can help the submitter, but is being difficult in settling an unjustified shipping cost. The submitter asks for someone else to help her instead.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
    • A callous daycare worker tells a five-year-old girl that Santa doesn't exist. The girl's mother angrily confronts the worker, and reveals that her husband died on Christmas Day the previous year. A visit from Santa was the one thing keeping the poor girl's spirits up that Christmas Season, and now the worker most likely ruined Christmas forever for her daughter. Several parents witnessed the confrontation, and they were so outraged over the worker's actions that they ended their own kids' enrollment at the daycare, crippling the business in the process. Needless to say, the worker got fired afterwards for her misconduct and the consequences that ensued.
    • These road workers carelessly paved over a railroad crossing, causing a train to derail into a factory that may have been staffed at the time (it's mentioned that one of the witnesses was on the evening shift).
  • Unwitting Pawn:
    • This hotel front desk agent almost ends up this for a credit card thief because she doesn't understand how keyless entry approval worksnote . Luckily, the submitter catches her (months-long) mistake long before the thief is due to arrive, and quickly retrains her in order to put an end to the mistake before locking the thief out of her room.
    • The submitter of this story is hired by a company that sells credit card systems to businesses and manages to be the most successful salesman. However, the company disappears overnight after paying salespeople twice what they were expecting, and the reason why becomes clear after one of his customers attempts to have him assaulted, resulting in him looking the company up online and realizing he has unintentionally scammed a massive number of businesses: turns out, the "contracts" he was selling are uncancellable leases with a $199 minimum fee to get out, on top of a number of hidden fees not disclosed to the salespeople, and the company's MO is to sell aggressively and then flee the city before merchants can be warned about them. The submitter sends apology letters to every one of the customers he can remember and then, realizing he is likely a pariah, flees the city himself.
  • Vengeful Vending Machine:
  • Verbal Backspace: This contributor confidently asserts that they'll buy all the leftover candy canes, and when told there's two hundred of them amends this to thirty, in the same tone.
  • Vetinari Job Security:
    • "It took exactly two days for the new owner to realize that he had fired the only man who knew all of the recipes and who dealt with over half our regular clientele."
    • This salesperson has a Wrong Genre Savvy moment here because she assumes this is the case. She's very firmly proven otherwise.
    • The new manager in an aerospace company dismisses what he thinks is an overpaid secretary (Stay in the Kitchen is heavily implied). Nope, she was the only one with the applied mathematics skills necessary for the group to do the work... and it's not nearly as easy to replace her as the manager thinks it would be, especially since he actually believes people with master's degrees in applied mathematics would be beating down their door to apply for an unpaid internship. So idiotic was this move that one coworker actually called the manager a "f*** moron" to his face. Four months later, the coworker still hasn't been replaced; meanwhile, the former coworker has found a better-paying job with a competitor, and the CEO, once it became known why certain projects had been stalled for months, tore into the supervisor before firing him.
    • This manager managed to invoke it, by giving the submitter the most difficult possible tasks as part of a bullying campaign. When she ends up firing the submitter for not giving in to her bullying (resulting in the manager losing a wrongful dismissal suit), it turns out that, since the submitter was doing all the hard work on a project, nobody else had the required knowledge to finish it. And while the submitter certainly can help them out, they make it clear that there's no way they're going to lift a finger for their horrible boss.
    • The manager at this bank appears to have it, since when she was off work to have her baby, nobody had been assigned to replace her, and the rest of the staff are obliviously running around like headless chickens because there's no manager, allowing the submitter's money to be stolen. (But it's not their fault! Their manager had a baby!)
    • This guy actively exploits this trope, because he has a very rare qualification. Unfortunately for him, he drives his company to the point where they'd rather pay an outside agency double the money for the work and be rid of him.
    • This waitress's boyfriend, a chef, has threatened to quit if anything happens to her, which means the restaurant manager won't fire her even after months of atrocious behavior. Then it turns out the manager thought she was dating the highly-valued head chef, when she's actually dating an equally rude junior chef who only barely passed training, is in just as much trouble, and whom nobody would miss.
  • Villain with Good Publicity:
    • The horrid manager in this story has convinced her employees that corporate denied them their bonuses and she was fighting to get them back, when in reality it was the other way around - the manager stole the bonuses and corporate was investigating her. She even got them to quit on the acting managers coming in to try and salvage the train wreck the store had become under her leadership.
    • In this story, the submitter replaces an IT temp named "Joe," whom everyone seems to miss. However, over the course of working there, the submitter finds that Joe was stealing computers by falsely telling the office that they were beyond repair, and that he'd been using one "broken" computer as his personal Porn Stash. And from then on, they find even more skeletons in Joe's closet, to the point where the FBI confiscates his computer as evidence and Joe receives a five-year prison sentence.

    W-X 
  • Wacky Cravings: The poster thinks this is going on in this story, and tries to warn the customer about the dangers. It turned out that while the customer's daughter is pregnant, she doesn't have a craving for mayonnaise — she's making deviled eggs for the baby shower.
  • Waif-Fu: Two former bouncers are hired for a security firm and notice a 5'1" girl in one of their training courses. They complain about the girl getting higher pay than them, just as one of the men is brought up for a demonstration with her. She then proceeds to flip him flat on his ass during the demonstration, much to his surprise. The instructor's line at the end sums it up perfectly.
    Instructor: Celebrities hire guys like you to stand in front of them and look scary; millionaire businessmen hire people like her if they want real security.
  • Walking Techbane: This submitter starts the story off with a list of various phone problems from over the years.
  • Waxing Lyrical:
  • What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: The worst they can say is no.
  • What Does This Button Do?: This new employee finds an unlabeled button near the register and presses it, thinking it might release something that they would have to clean. Turns out that button was the silent alarm and pressing it alerted the police. The employee doesn't end up reprimanded because, as their bosses say, they are not the first employee to do so. "People just like pushing buttons, even if they don’t know what they’re for."
  • Wham Line:
    • At the end of this story:
      Oh, and did I mention the boss was my step-dad?
    • In this story, about employees getting locked in while working late, dealing with the aftermath causes the boss and his wife to miss their flight to the U.S. for Christmas.
      The flight he was booked on, but had to cancel, was Pan Am 103.
    • One for this submitter after explaining her side of the situation to the general manager (and what saves her job):
      General Manager: You do know that our security system records audio, don’t you?
    • This submitter refuses service to an extremely rude and impatient woman who turned out to be a mystery shopper that the submitter's manager knew about but didn't actually inform them about until after the incident. The regional manager, known to be a hothead, arrives and takes the submitter to the back office to hear the story. The submitter, believing their job to be on the line, explains what happened and the regional manager drops this gem:
      Regional Manager: I’m finally glad that someone else has the balls to stand up to my wife.
  • Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: This airline booking agent seems to think this trope is in play as she doesn't quite comprehend that the "people" in question are the submitter's pets.
    Booking agent: “You booked tickets for [submitter's name], L. Milo Hamilton, Walter E. Disney, Ernest T. Bass, Bertram T. Cates, and Fredrick II, correct?”
    […]
    Submitter: “Ma’am, do you really believe I am flying with five people named after: a famous — and now deceased — sports announcer, the father of Mickey Mouse, two fictional characters from the early 1960s, and what is widely proclaimed to be the last king of Austria? I think you need to reconsider that. Otherwise, I will soon be the richest person alive, as I have either created time-travel or mastered cloning.”
    Booking agent: “People name their kids random names all the time.”
  • Who's on First?:
    • And Qué's on second.
    • The difference between "band" and "banned".
    • Anita Bellman. Not "I need a bellman."
    • And an example that involves someone actually named "Hu".
    • A possible Inversion in this story. Some unnamed border collies are brought into an animal shelter from different parts of Ireland. To tell them apart, the manager listed them under the names of the places they came from, but then forgot to give them proper names. As a result, the submitter, a German unfamiliar with Irish language or naming customs, accidentally names one of them "Mayo."
    • This story:
      Manager: “This is one of the cocktails we’re adding to the menu. It has butterfly pee in it, but [Mixologist] insists it’s safe, so tell the guests it’s sterile if they ask about it.”
      Mixologist: <doing a 'Picard-worthy facepalm'> “Butterfly pea! P-E-A! Not P-E-E!”
    • Fom the days when not everyone knew the proper terminology for computers, this poor worker has to deal with a computer problem and an irate customer at the same time, leading to the following exchange:
      Submitter: “All right. Where is the cursor?”
      Worker: *nearly crying* “He’s on the other side of the window, and he won’t stop yelling!”
  • Who Watches the Watchmen?: Invoked by the title in this story where a safety inspector is scheduled for an investigation on Friday but decides to spontaneously arrive on a Wednesday. He is told to return on Friday, as the pregnant submitter and her co-worker who recently had surgery are the only ones on site and can't move the refrigerator to access the false wall hiding the water heater he needs to inspect. He has a fit and berates the submitter. However, it ends with an Offscreen Moment of Awesome for a customer who reports him to his company.
  • Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?:
  • Why We Can't Have Nice Things: This company stopped giving "fools' errands" to new employees after one nearly cost them over £1800.
  • Workers Cannot Do Math:
    • Here are two people who don't understand fractions.
    • Here's one that doesn't understand subtraction, and hands the submitter $5 more than what they were supposed to.
    • Here's one who doesn't know how to convert a "recipe" for a quart of paint to a gallon.note 
    • “The new store in [city] just made $9,000 last week. That’s almost a million!” That's an epic case of Misplaced a Decimal Point, at best.
    • When a person fails to understand that 12 ounces are three quarters of a pound, it's somewhat understandable. When that person can't comprehend a fraction like "three quarters", it's this trope.
    • A dozen is twelve, but somehow these two never learned that.
      • Likewise, this cashier thinks that a dozen means twenty, but is quickly proven wrong when her manager makes her fetch a carton of a dozen eggs and then count them out to him. She was fired over the debacle soon after.
      • This bakery doesn't understand that a half-dozen is six, either.
      • This submitter splits two dozen donuts between three boxes, to which the cashier tries to charge them for three dozen, and the manager backs them up - apparently a "dozen" to these people is simply however many donuts happen to be in a box, rather than a concrete number.
    • This liquor store cashier doesn't seem to get that a customer born in 1989 is old enough to purchase alcohol in the UK in 2011. When the submitter tries to correct her and say that they are 21, she tries to use her own mathematics to prove them wrong... only to end up with 18 as her answer, which is still old enough to buy alcohol under UK law. Fortunately, the owner eventually steps in and rings up the submitter, and the cashier is fired some time later.
    • This sandwich shop worker doesn't understand what "cut it in half" means and has to be told to cut the sandwich into 2 pieces.
    • This lawyer cannot get a single printer to print a Word document - which turns out to be because he's telling the printers to print the fourth page of a document that only has three pages.
    • This coworker doesn't get that a drink which is three-thirds coffee would be all coffee.
    • This cashier doesn't know how "buy one, get one free" works.
      • This one, meanwhile, misunderstands the "buy" part and thinks the customer gets everything free.
    • The introduction to this story mentions that some of the interviews the submitter went to were doomed from the start, because they were looking for someone with five to ten years' experience with software that wasn't even two years old.
    • Same deal in this story, where the interviewer is looking for people with ten years' worth of work experience, but then refuses to hire the submitter who has double that, because he's not in his mid-20's and therefore cannot possibly know anything about computers. The submitter points out the ridiculousness of this as he's leaving by telling them "good luck finding someone who graduated at age 10".
    • This agent cancels a woman's tuition account because the woman didn't pay anything over the last two months, even when both the agent and the submitter plainly see that the woman's charges for those two months is zero dollars.
    • The submitter here gets an electric bill for £0.00. When he sends nothing, the company threatens to send bailiffs to recoup the amount of the debt, continually failing to understand that the bill is for "NAUGHT pounds and NAUGHT pence." It gets to the point that the submitter simply sends a check for £0.00 to satisfy the electric company.
    • A 32-year old new hire in this story is adamant that 6 x 2 = 13 despite two other people and two calculators telling her the answer is 12.
    • This cashier doesn't seem to understand the concept of sales tax, repeatedly insisting that the submitter's meal costs "$11 plus tax" rather than telling them the actual total amount with tax included. The shop's owner is not amused.
  • Word-Salad Humor: Whenever this lady is faced with a service worker going into autopilot, she says something completely nonsensical in order to reset their brain. When she mistakenly tries to use an expired coupon, she has to say "For high tea, I like to grab the bean berries off of my turkey bushes before the surfboards see them" to get the cashier out of the resulting "Sorry, ma'am, this coupon is expired" loop.
  • Worst Aid: The "Medical Office", "Hospital", and "Health & Body" tags are full of doctor don'ts, nurse nuisances, and receptionist rejections.
    • This story is particularly cringe-worthy.
    • Sometimes, it pays to explain things to the doctor—the hospital goes into a wild goose chase over a nurse's incorrect diagnosis until the patient finally is able to talk to a doctor and tell them what's wrong. The doctor gets a major Oh, Crap! moment when the patient's description of the symptoms hits home—turns out the patient had cancer!
    • These paramedics state that an elderly woman is being "uncooperative" all while completely ignoring the woman's family's insistence that she only speaks Finnish.
    • This doctor fails to notice a five-year-old girl has asthma, dismissing the girl's mother's arguments, even though she is a nurse and knows the symptoms of asthma. Worse, the doctor claimed to be a member of the board of Asthma Awareness. Fortunately, another doctor knows better and sends the girl to ICU, where she makes a full recovery.
  • Working Through the Cold: This submitter is told to show up to work or be fired, notwithstanding the fact that they're suffering from pinkeye. The manager that forced them would later be forced to sanitize everything the submitter touched as punishment.
  • Would Hurt a Child: Not in the usual sense that this trope implies, but this callous NICU nurse cares so little about her patients that she lays a premature baby down flat after nursing (causing her to vomit) and carelessly gives her breast milk from another baby's mother (which could have been contaminated).
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit:
    • Inverted with this manager, who thinks an 8-months-pregnant cashier is faking a sickness. Turns out, it was very real.
    • Also inverted with this manager, who threatens to discipline the submitter for feigning illness to take the previous day off, despite them exhibiting obvious signs of illness and even passing out in front of her. Fortunately, the manager was later fired.
    • In this story the submitter's manager reveals that a customer accused them of racially abusing him. It turns out that the customer bullied the submitter when they went to school, and then cried racism whenever the submitter complained. When the coworker's classmate vouches for the submitter, the manager immediately drops the complaint.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: Quite a number of bosses and co-workers fall under this.
    • In this case, the manager believes he's in a Not Always Right story, handling a rude and aggressive customer. Turns out, he's in a Not Always Working story, with his waiter being mean.
    • This cashier thinks she is the Only Sane Man in a Not Always Right story to the end, refusing to let herself be proven wrong.
    • This repair company thinks they're in a Not Always Right story with yet another customer overreporting a problem (saying a ceiling fan was hanging by its wires; every other time someone's ever reported this to them, it was only the canopy that fell off). The electrician they eventually send to humor the crazy customer is quite surprised to find that said customer's problem was Not Hyperbole - unlike every other customer who reported that issue, her fan really was hanging by its wires and ready to fall at any moment.
  • Wrong Restaurant: Subverted in this story. A man goes into a vegetarian restaurant and orders a steak. The newly hired waitress (telling the story) has to inform him that as a vegetarian restaurant, they don't serve steak. But then the owner's daughter reveals that they do serve steak. It turns out she doesn't know what "vegetarian" means, and the owner doesn't have the heart to tell her - which leads to the restaurant closing down just weeks later after an actual vegetarian restaurant opens across the street.

    Y-Z 
  • Yandere: This bank teller tries to financially ruin a customer by falsely claiming he threatened her with a gun, resulting in his account being frozen, because he rejected her attempts to flirt with him.
  • You Are Already Dead: Discussed in this story by the submitter's shift leader after the two successfully get through a particularly busy stretch during their shift.
    Shift leader: It was like one of those samurai animes: some big eight-headed dragon of a ‘customer monster’ attacks, and the hero dashes past… then a breeze wafts by and all the heads pop off. You’re like the wind!
  • You Are Better Than You Think You Are: A coffee-shop employee gives a self-loathing coworker a pick-me-up this way, Drill Sergeant Nasty style. Note that the narrator delivered it that way because they thought the "self-loathing" coworker was just whining to get attention, and given that it apparently worked, they were likely right.
  • You Can't Miss It: This receptionist gives directions from the current doctor's office to the office of a specialist for people with color-blind vision... citing landmarks by color. Thankfully, once the patient spells out the problem, the receptionist finally seems to realize what they were doing wrong.
  • You Didn't Ask: A perfect demonstration of just how annoying this trope really is.
  • You Keep Using That Word:
    • This developer keeps using the wrong terms for a piece of software, and can't be convinced to use the correct ones, except for one for loading icons that is little-known and, in all likelihood, taken as a much naughtier term.
    • This cook keeps saying the bag of chips (french fries) he cooked are gluten-free despite the fact the submitter saw him cook those chips in the same fryer used for the regular chips even though her mother told him the submitter's aunt has Celiac Disease. Despite the submitter pointing this out, the cook still keeps saying it's still "gluten-free" and it's not a big deal if her aunt doesn't know it. The submitter and her mother are not amused and refuses to take and pay for the chips much to the cook's anger who demands they pay for it which they ignore his calls until he gave up and stopped advertising he served gluten-free chips.
    • This co-worker is convinced that "lesbian" is French for "the bians," and lesbians are called "bians."
  • You Know What You Did: In this story, a shift manager fires the submitter and shouts at her for saying she doesn't know why, claiming that she knows full well what she's talking about. Turns out this was intentional: the manager hated her for being autistic and wanted to pass off her termination as "insubordination". Thankfully, when her boss, the head chef (who was also autistic) confronts her, she fails to produce any writeups to prove the "insubordination". This leads to the chef firing her instead for lying to him.
  • Younger Than They Look:
  • Zillion-Dollar Bill: Nope, $2 bills exist.

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top