History NotAlwaysWorking / TropesFToL

* HeroicBSOD: In [[https://notalwaysright.com/the-guest-that-unwittingly-broke-a-boomers-brain/307849/ this story,]] the manager - who is noted as not being at all bigoted - has a minor mental breakdown when one of his employees has to spell out that the difference [[FailedASpotCheck he can't work out]] about a regular guest is that the guest has gone through a gender transition since their last visit, and has to subsequently be repeatedly corrected by the employee when he can't wrap his mind around the change. To his credit, he has a JerkassRealization when he gets home and counts himself very lucky that he didn't have his breakdown within earshot of the guest.

** [[https://notalwaysright.com/not-projected-good-afternoon/109322/ This theatre]] apparently has a fire in its projector room, destroying the film.[[note]]Though [[http://disq.us/p/1smgg8s one ex-projectionist commenter]] has suggested that the "fire" was a projector malfunction that melted the film, which emitted a lot of smoke, and was mishandled by staff.[[/note]] When the teenaged submitter and their friend run and fetch an employee, the employee is skeptical at first, thinking they're trying to sneak into a R-rated feature. Eventually, the lights in the theatre switch on, but no alarm is raised, and no announcement is made about whether to evacuate or if refunds will be issued. When the submitter and their friend ask another employee about a comped ticket to a showing of the same movie in another theatre, they are refused, with the employee apparently not even knowing about the 'fire. When the submitter returned from college a couple years later, the theatre had gone out of business.

** [[https://notalwaysright.com/not-projected-good-afternoon/109322/ This theatre]] apparently has a fire in its projector room, destroying the film.[[note]]Though [[http://disq.us/p/1smgg8s one ex-projectionist commenter]] has suggested that the "fire" was a projector malfunction that melted the film, which emitted a lot of smoke, and was mishandled by staff[[/note]] When the teenaged submitter and their friend encounter run and get an employee, the employee is skeptical at first, thinking they're trying to sneak into a R-rated feature. Eventually, the lights in the theatre switch on, but no alarm is raised, and no announcement is made about whether to evacuate or if refunds will be issued. When the submitter and their friend ask another employee about a comped ticket to a showing of the same movie in another theatre, they are refused, with the employee apparently not even knowing about the 'fire. When the submitter returned from college a couple years later, the theatre had gone out of business.

* LazyBum: As part of [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere "She didn't stay with us much longer,]] quitting because her [[SarcasmMode unreasonable manager]] would insist on picking her up each morning half an hour before starting time, and [[https://notalwaysright.com/going-the-distance-to-be-lazy/191159/ she did not like getting out of bed that early."]]

** [[https://notalwaysright.com/wow-not-a-single-drop-of-compassion-part-3/299679/ Part 4:]] Another miscarriage example, where the boss forces the submitter to come to work without giving her time to recover.

** [[https://notalwaysright.com/not-exactly-your-average-joe/321491/ This story]] has the submitter taking over after another IT temp worker called "Joe," [[VillainWithGoodPublicity who is missed by the other workers, only for it to turn out that he had skeleton after skeleton in his closet]]. To begin with, the submitter discovers that Joe was stealing computers from the office by telling the other workers they were broken and had to be replaced. Then the submitter discovers a computer at work that Joe was unable to take with him and finds out Joe was using it as a digital PornStash. Then Joe, being unable to hack it elsewhere, tries to get his old position back, and on finding the submitter has it, tries pestering the submitter to quit, only to be told to back off by the temp agency. Joe ignores this and gets the police sicced on him, which in turn leads to the revelation that Joe was wanted for dealing, and the computer with the porn turns out to also contain records of this. By the end of the story, ''the FBI'' has confiscated the computer as evidence and Joe is serving a five-year prison sentence.

** [[https://notalwaysright.com/this-spells-trouble-part-6/325380/ This worker]] throws her entire workplace's documentation into disarray because she was responsible for typing up handwritten reports, and she was abusing the spellcheck program's 'Add to Dictionary' function because [[KnowNothingKnowItAll she was convinced that her (terrible) was right and the computer was wrong]].

** [[https://notalwaysright.com/the-epic-of-the-impossible-store/172885/ This story]],[[note]]identical to [[https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromRetail/comments/1un3r8/worst_case_scenario/ a story on Reddit]] for one reason or another[[/note]] to make a ''very'' long story short, involves a group of retail store managers visiting a store that was completely run into the ground by a store manager who'd slacked off and stolen from the store, before quitting just before the new regional manager came in to check on her. She leaves behind (for the visiting managers to deal with) a filthy disaster area of a grocery store full of trash, months-old build-up of gunk, unboxed merchandise left in odd places, and employees who do not actually know how to do their jobs in ways that aren't how the manager did things, some resisting attempts to learn how to do their jobs the right way (i.e. no taking extra breaks during lulls in the day, always taking out the garbage to the dumpster instead of the Trash Room) to the point of getting in fights with the visiting managers and/or quitting. It's telling that amongst ''NAW'' commenters, the word "Trash Room" has become a euphemism for businesses that embody this trope.

* IncrediblyLamePun: [[https://notalwaysright.com/germans-dont-joke-about-sports/251202/ This story]] probably features the one time that making one of these could be a fireable offence.

* LamePunReaction: [[http://notalwaysright.com/wishing-for-pun-tea-total This person]] groans at an employee's tea pun.

* ALessonLearnedTooWell: [[https://notalwaysright.com/dont-make-things-harder-for-yourself/276449/ This co-worker]] takes much longer to do tasks than everyone else. The submitter shadows her to see what the problem is, and finds that she's "researching" just about everything about every order she processes, even when that's supposed to be done by other departments, taking ten minutes on orders that usually take thirty seconds. When the submitter asks her about this, she explains that at previous jobs, every order she processed was considered "her" order, so if something went wrong, she would be held responsible, so she felt she had to follow up on ''every little thing''. On the other hand, she's so worried about getting into trouble that the submitter can't decide if her previous jobs were ''that'' scary or if she's just so paranoid she did all those extra tasks herself out of fear she wasn't doing enough.[[note]]Most commenters favour the former explanation[[/note]]

* LiteralMetaphor: "As I've been saying, gentlemen, if you want to talk to the witness, you're really going to have to [[http://notalwaysright.com/were-not-clownin-around talk to the clown down there."]]

*** Finally (after forbidding even ''bathroom breaks'' because they'd require the store to be sealed off because he's so cheap that he doesn't want to pay for more than 1 person being present at the store, as stated above), he stops console repairs because he thinks ordering the parts ahead of schedule is a risk of ''them'' just sitting around! In short, he effectively dismisses the value of ''any'' source of income besides people expressly looking to buy old games. No surprise that that one basket wasn't enough to keep the store afloat.

** [[https://notalwaysright.com/all-she-sees-is-a-costumed-villain/62313/ This cashier]] at a thrift store believes the submitter is stealing a dress because she (the submitter) is using it for a costume, and as such is “stealing” it from a poor person, even though the submitter is ready to pay for the dress. The manager that comes to help [[WhatWereYouThinking scolds the cashier]] [[YouHaveGOTToBeKiddingMe for her nonexistent logic]] before checking the submitter out himself. The cashier ends up [[TheyJustDontGetIt continuing her inane activities]], [[LaserGuidedKarma getting fired for]] attempting to get a young boy arrested because he doesn’t look “poor” enough.

*** The medication was in a lockbox inside the OP’s desk in the OP’s office. The office was locked, and the three keys that could unlock the door were in possession of the OP, the building owner, and the janitor, meaning in order to get inside the office, she (the coworker) would have had to either break in or enter the office while it was being cleaned.
*** The desk was locked, and the only keys that could have unlocked the desk drawer were in the possession of the OP, meaning that she would have either had to break into the desk or find a key that nobody knew about.
*** The only keys to the lockbox were in the OP’s possession, meaning that the coworker would have needed to break in or have a copy of the lockbox key, which is almost impossible, given that the only two keys to the lockbox were in OP’s possession.

--->'''Boss:''' “You see, the more money you make, the more you spend. I want to save you from this terrible vicious circle.”

** For a more localized example, the upper management of [[https://notalwaysright.com/why-do-we-even-have-that-team/199708/ this bank]] tried to outsource their confirms department to India, getting a team that was probably ''the'' most unprofessional group of workers possible - highlights include never using the bank's system, ignoring work orders unless they came specifically from the London office, making an incredible amount of errors and refusing to fix them, not answering the phones because everyone in the office went on break without warning, blowing off customers on the phone for personal conversations, swearing in Hindi and English to [[BilingualBackfire people who spoke both languages]], regularly making serious breaches of regulation by sending transaction lists to ''every'' counterparty, and generally being so awful that customers thought [[PoesLaw they were scammers impersonating the bank]]. Eventually, the status quo settles down as follows: The original confirms department receives all requests, forwards them to India, and then does the work themselves as before, immediately deleting the Indian office's response when it inevitably comes in a week late and problem-riddled - which means management sees the Indian office as a success, since as far as they can see their responses are no longer coming in more than a week late. Fittingly enough, the story is entitled '[[WesternAnimation/TheEmperorsNewGroove Why do we even HAVE that team?]]'

** [[http://notalwaysright.com/the-great-scam-of-09 This telemarketer selling warranties for car parts]] refuses to reveal which car of the submitter warranty has supposedly run out, by claiming Security Reasons[[note]]The reason being that the telemarketer was trying to make it sound like the submitter had done business with her company before, and also probably because they didn't have a clue what car it was in the first place[[/note]]. The submitter, being GenreSavvy, forces the conversation into an endless loop until the telemarketer gives up.

** [[https://notalwaysright.com/business-is-really-booming/323590/ This manager]] and some of his colleagues disabled the fire alarms so they wouldn't have to disrupt work for a false alarm. When the building receives a (false) bomb alert, it takes an additional twenty minutes for their floor to evacuate because they didn't hear the alarms, which could have been deadly in a real emergency. [[LaserGuidedKarma The managers were fired, arrested, and sent to prison]], as California takes its fire safety *very* seriously.