Failed A Spot Check / Not Always Right

Not Always Right and its many sister sites include far too many people who just don't notice what's two feet in front of them.

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Not Always Right

• The only explanation for these examples. Short version, a woman fails to notice her purse is on her arm, and another woman thinks her child has been lost when they're in a child harness on her back.
• And here, we have a critical failure... a customer asks if they have a certain movie, and the clerk has a copy of the requested film in their hand. Which, somehow, the customer doesn't see.
• Normally, seeing a man walk out of a store, gun in hand, would be cause for concern. But not in this case — it's a gun store.
• A man walks into a heritage fair, accuses the submitter (and essentially everyone else there) of being Mexican and orders him to go back to Mexico. The heritage fair in question is the Scottish Highland Games.
• This woman somehow managed to miss that the register was dismantled, the screen was off, and the three signs saying it was out of order. And when told it was undergoing maintenance, she accused the manager at it of being lazy. Especially amusing, given how much the manager had just assumed no one would be stupid enough to do so.
• This guy, upon learning that a store is unable to accept credit or debit cards at the time, tries to claim that "Y'all need to have signs up for that." As the cashier points out, there are no fewer than three such signs, including one right in his face, that he is failing to notice.
• This guy tries to enter a gym, but is unable to because the doors are locked. There is a sign on the door stating they are closed for a week for renovations, and he can clearly see people inside repainting the walls. He still calls their number and has to ask them if they're open.
• This customer fell for a string of Insane Troll Logic about the clerk being ginger and therefore immune to having their soul devoured for not giving the customer a discount. The clerk in question is blond.
• This guy walked into a burger joint thinking it was a coffee shop, despite the pictures of burgers on the walls.
• This woman can't tell that the coffee and doughnut shop is under construction and not operational.
• "About fifty computers and the same amount of phones are not working. You have nine and a half minutes to get it working." "How many people are working in the building right now?" "There is me, two security guards, and a couple of men replacing the generators."
• This guy is too stupid to realize that a store with the lights off, no customers, and a locked door is CLOSED, and that the correct way to solve this problem is not to throw bricks at the door. And he still attempted to make an order after being directly told that the door was locked and the store was closed.
• Similarly, this guy completely ignored the multiple signs and notices on the doors and windows stating that the restaurant was closed and throws a brick through the front window to let himself in. When in court for both civil and criminal charges, his argument is that “there should have been a sign saying you were closed.”
• This woman believes that the submitter is being lazy because he wasn't allowing anyone in, failing to recognize the strong odor from the sewage that had leaked into the room.
• "Good luck proving (her assault on a worker) without any police around!" Said to two uniformed police officers.
• This woman failed the Spot check to notice that the bakery she was ordering a wedding cake from didn't sell pastries and failed several Listen checks when the submitter tried three times to tell her that she was asking for services that they didn't give and attempting to point her in the direction of someone who could. She never realized that she was wrong, and raised a serious fuss over it, but luckily everyone she sent to argue her case (including her daughter and her four attorneys) paid more attention than she did and upon having the situation explained to them, promptly apologized and dropped it.
• Possibly a case of failing memory, but the elderly woman in this story mistakes her own husband for a stalker.
• Both the woman and her husband failed to notice that the hose is clearly labeled, a different color, and clearly doesn't fit in the car's nozzle slot properly when they decided to fill the tank with Diesel instead of regular gas, and then accuse the OP of laughing at them for not telling them that they were using the wrong type of fuel when the OP was helping other customers and can't see the pump from where the register is in any event.
• This woman was donating some "clothes" to a thrift store and hands the cashier several large black trash bags. When the submitter inspects the bags he finds that they're full of grass clippings. A coworker got rid of the grass while the submitter tries to process if the woman legitimately mixed up her clothes and grass clippings.
• This man is upset that a fast food store won't turn up the thermostat (which is impossible for them to do since it's controlled from another state). After threatening to come behind the counter and sort it out himself, and interpreting the manager's justified response to bring up calling the police as a threat against him, he demands the number to corporate. The manager actually gives him the store's number instead and goes into the back room to answer the subsequent call. While the submitter can hear both halves of the conversation, the angry customer is oblivious to the fact he's still talking to the same person.
• The customer in this story is outraged that a store greeter is sitting down and won't walk her to the product she wants, chalking it up to millennial laziness... until her own husband points out the greeter's crutches.
• This man has failed to notice there's a 29th of February every four years for so long that someone telling him it's February 29th rather than March 1st triggers a boomer rant about millennials being so lazy they need to invent new days. His wife implies that a youth mostly spent tripping on acid is responsible.
• Apparently this copy shop was dealing with people (even tech-savvy ones) having trouble understanding one particular step. These people are so incapable of reading printed instructions even when the step is printed in bold and there's a picture with the step circled.
• This woman called the wrong number (she was looking for a vacuum parts business) and completely misses the fact that the "hold music" is just an amalgamation of pest control ads and bug jokes.
• This man starts shouting and swearing at the cashier because he was unable to find the brand of laundry detergent they have on sale, claiming he has "searched this whole d*** store" and, as par for the course, blaming the cashier for the store "falsely advertising s*** you don’t have". All the time, he is just three feet away from a huge display of the stuff — something he would have known if he'd just let the cashier get a word in edgeways.
• This restaurant owner is enraged that he ordered a white kitchen and instead it's all blue; the customer service representative asks if this was before or after he removed the blue protective wrap from the doors and almost immediately gets hung up on.
• A meta version occurs in this story, which was originally tagged as UK (it now just says "Europe"). The OP says that the shirt in this story was brought at a local chain, but they not only provide the price in Euros instead of pounds, but they use American clothing sizes instead of British.
• This woman complains about the submitter's "fake" New Jersey accent, failing to notice that the submitter's car has New Jersey license plates and that the reason they have a New Jersey accent is that they are from New Jersey. She seems to think New Jersey only exists on television.
• This female submitter spent six years of her life being mistaken for an employee about a third of the times she went shopping. Those years? Nine to fourteen, and it stopped out of nowhere around the time she turned fifteen. The first time it happened, she was in a school uniform and looking at a product intended for children. It still took her mother getting involved for the customer to believe she wasn't an employee.
• This girl goes to the beach, gets mad about fish in the water, and is dumbfounded when the lifeguard says that fish live in the ocean. "Wait, this is the OCEAN???"
• This woman tries to board a train from a platform undergoing renovations. She apparently didn't notice the bolted ticket kiosks and the signs explaining the situation. She took 20 minutes of convincing to leave.
• The buyer for this online transaction doesn't realize they're in the same town as the seller until the delivery is halted by a snowstorm— the same snowstorm the buyer's experiencing! After realizing their mistake, they laugh it off and agree to pick up the item in person at a nearby coffee shop instead.
• This mom on a plane demands that the submitter close their window blind else the light will wake their sleeping child, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that a) most other passengers' windows are also open and b) said child is awake and playing a video game.
• This fast-food restaurant customer insists on standing at the register until his order arrives. When the cashier asks him to move to the waiting area, he starts ranting about [disease] panic going too far. Finally they get a word in... that he needs to move because the customer behind him needs to order, not because of anything about [disease].
• “Well, ma’am, I think I finally understand why you can’t find the second floor. First of all, we don’t have a paid membership; our card is free. Second of all, that’s a [Bookstore #2] Membership card, and you’re in [Bookstore]. Finally, you’re not in Pleasanton. You’re in Pleasant Hill. Pleasanton is about a thirty-minute drive south of here. You’re not only in the wrong store; you’re in the wrong city entirely. Have a nice day!”
• This customer's claim that he was shorted on tacos at the drive-thru is stymied by the simple observation "We don't have a drive-thru."
• If this story is to be believed, an unnerving amount of people who called the fire department didn't know their own address – to the point where the department started a media campaign to get people to remember them.
• Here we see a bizarre example of this trope crossed with They Just Dont Get It. Everyone else can plainly see three cashiers at the checkout, but the customer insists that there is no one there to the point of getting violent.
• This customer thinks that the chicken she's been served with is raw… having forgotten that she's wearing pink-tinted sunglasses.
• This rude customer decides to storm out and declare that he's taking his business to Home Depot instead... only for another customer to point out that this store is a Home Depot. The customer stops to curse at the heavens before continuing to storm out.
• This woman set down her phone for a bit to do something, then instead of picking it back up, put her computer mouse to her ear.

Not Always Working

• This employee completely misses the labels on the cabinets.
• Subverted here; the signs the customer apparently missed don't exist.
• Another subversion; the rotisserie trays the employee can't find... aren't where the coworker said they were. The coworker is very unhappy when she finds out.
• This manager apparently failed to notice that one of their employees uses a wheelchair for three years.
• A grocery store manager doesn't realize that the submitter doesn't work at her store until he points out the completely different uniform (with his company's name) that he's wearing. By that point she had already yelled at him and threatened to write him up. Oops.
• In this story, a waitress and the management at a ballpark restaurant nearly throws out a couple whom the waitress has claimed stole a table meant for a party that included one person in a wheelchair... with the blatant evidence toward the couple being the party in question (most obviously that the husband is in a wheelchair) somehow flying over their heads completely until they check the reservations. The embarrassed manager comps the couple's meal as an apology and later chastises the waitress.
• This store worker makes a running prank of asking coworkers to help them move stuff in a certain closet, then commenting on the smell of perfume. Every coworker assumes it's a local urban legend about a perfume-scented ghost, and not the shelves of perfume right in front of them.
• The cashier in this story becomes so focused on selling protection plans for printers (and getting the employee incentive for doing so) she fails to notice that she's not actually scanning the printers themselves, allowing the customers to leave without paying for them.
• It takes one night tech a few minutes to figure out what the day techs couldn't fix in over a year: that problems with a CRT monitor are being caused by a neighboring coworker's desk fan.
• This vindictive manager fires the submitter via text message during their vacation, not seeming to realize that she sent the message in a group chat. With her boss. The moron is swiftly fired and the submitter reinstated.
• This woman is absolutely irate that her printer has stopped functioning... while both she and her colleague are completely oblivious to the fact that their lights, computers and phones are also off because they tripped the power with their heaters.
• This restaurant is closed to customers to hold a private party... but they forgot to remove the sign afterwards, leaving them confused as to why nobody is coming in the next day until somebody asks if the sign's still valid.
• The guards in this story have absolutely zero reaction to a visible fire on the monitors, despite one camera becoming just an orange rectangle, until someone bangs on their window.
• A psychology teacher sets up an event where his students are caught shoplifting to intentionally put them through the emotional trauma (with the blessing and supervision of both the store manager and the police). Good in theory, but in practice none of the employees ever noticed, even as the students were instructed to 'steal' bigger and bigger items, up until one student managed to leave with the store's service ladder with the assistant manager holding the door open for him simply by claiming he was servicing the air conditioning and had forgotten his own ladder. The store (and the entire company, since it was the company's home location) went through extensive retraining afterwards.
• A cruise ship safety instructor runs a bomb search demonstration, with one 'bomb' that everybody knows about (a box with "bomb" written on it) and one that nobody knows about (that looks slightly more real, but still obviously fake). The demonstration comes and goes, and while the first one is found, the second one isn't, and the instructor assumes this trope of the crew... until he finds the second one back on his desk in his cabin. It turns out that he'd hidden it in the area assigned to his cabin's housekeeper, the one person who'd seen it before, and who assumed it was just lost property and returned it to its owner.

Not Always Related

• In her excitement, this mom, elated to be visiting her kid (the submitter) where they live now, fails to notice that at some point while she was raving about the things she and the submitter will be doing during said visit, she picked up a TV remote instead of her phone after setting it down for a moment and spoke into it for eight minutes straight.
• This poster mistook a drainage ditch for the will-be basement of a new church wing, when they both happened to be built at the same time. Consequently, he missed the entire church being built for several months because he was focused on the drainage ditch. Even seeing them put grass in the ditch didn't deter him; he just wondered "Why do they want grass in the basement?" ^note If this sounds familiar to long-time tropers, you're right: One commenter recalled seeing the story before on This Very Wiki back in the days of Troper Tales, to which the OP replied that he was indeed the same person who posted it way back then.

Not Always Learning

• This professor fails his listen check, having just heard that the freezer is broken and the meat inside has all gone bad, and yet still tries to ask for a turkey sandwich. To his credit, he quickly realizes his mistake and remembers what he'd been hearing.
• This student fails to notice that her hand is on fire.
• This professor fails to realize which sister is which when they decide to prank him. He's a psychology professor, so he later uses the incident as an example in the section of the class having to do with memory and pattern recognition.
• The submitter and their friend both fail to notice their classmates in the background listening in to their conversation... or that they'd switched their conversation to Cantonese at some point.
• This professor yells at his secretary over a package he is expecting — failing to notice that it is sitting on his desk. So she tapes it up in his doorway at eye-level so he can't miss it... and he just ducks under it and again demands to know where it is.
• The counselors at this summer camp are incapable of telling a pair of identical twins apart — except for the OP, who always can. The others spend ages trying to work out the difference between them, and always getting it wrong, until finally the camp director asks the OP how to tell the two apart. The answer? They wear different-colored sneakers and bathing suits.
• A very "yikes" example here; every Halloween an elementary school turns the building into a haunted house, and for the longest time one of the main elements was a maze wherein visitors had to run away from a chainsaw-wielding Jason Voorhees. "Jason"'s chainsaw normally had the chains removed so nobody would actually get hurt, but one year the actor forgot to remove the chain off the chainsaw... which nobody realized until in the middle of some kids' run through the school when "Jason"'s chainsaw ended up cutting clear through a wall when he pretended to swing at a kid. Unsurprisingly, "Jason" was dropped from all further haunted house events afterward.
• This college professor complains that they nearly hit a large rock with their car and asks the school to remove it, which seems to have happened. Later on, a student comes in asking for the prof's help in dealing with a large snapping turtle that's wandered onto campus. Guess what the rock's true identity was? And to top it off, the professor teaches biology.
  Professor: I don’t have faith in [School] anymore.
  Submitter: You’re the one who thought [the turtle] was a rock!
  Professor: Fine. I also don’t have faith in my optometrist.

Not Always Friendly

• More like "Failed a Taste Test" — this fruit fanatic failed to notice for most of their life that they had an allergic response to bananas. They thought the sour, burning sensation was how they were supposed to taste.
• A dad accidentally reprimands someone else's daughter when he thought his own was about to read an age-inappropriate book at a bookstore, not seeing the girl's face until it's too late.
• While giving a ride to a friend and her brother, the submitter mentions she had a baby, which the brother drily comments was obvious. The friend assumes it's a dig at the submitter's weight and jumps to her defense, but it's actually just that the back of the car is full of car seats.
• A woman in an airport demands somebody get out of her way, intending to barrel her way past them if they don't. They move out of the way at the last moment... and she walks straight into the pillar they were leaning against.
• A carjacker realizes too late that a stopped car by the side of a road probably wasn't a good target after all.

Not Always Hopeless

• The hotel guest in this story notices a newly-transitioning male-to-female clerk wearing the same outfit every day, and is worried that she can't afford clothes. The guest's wife has to point out to him that the other hotel workers are also wearing the same outfit every day — it's a uniform.

Not Always Healthy

• Numerous cases of doctors and nurses not reading the patient's medical record prior to or during an appointment and being shocked by a pre-existing condition that was on said record.
• The patient is an amputee. The doctor apparently fails to notice, since they ask if the patient has trouble walking.
• This doctor was too busy looking at his phone to notice a very obvious baby bump (as in, the poster is in her third trimester with triplets) and just assumes she must be there to get her birth control prescription renewed, because why else would a woman go to an OB/GYN?
• This woman was so preoccupied with her son's heart surgery that she didn't notice her missed periods until she went into labor.
• Two male doctors at a children's hospital are alarmed by the appearance of round solid shapes in a little girl's X-ray, assuming them to be tumors and discussing when and how to operate. A passing female technician immediately realizes that the round solids are... beads on the patient's hair tie, which she was wearing during the X-ray. One of the doctors admits his daughter wears the same style of hair tie, but still didn't realize the beads would show up on the film.
• These nurses clearly need to check patients' charts more closely, as they somehow managed to mix up the pregnant, 25-year-old poster with the 102-year-old dementia patient in the bed opposite, and very nearly injected her with said dementia patient's medication (which could have had who-knows-what consequences for her pregnancy).
• This nurse berates the submitter for asking them to retrieve an out-of-reach lunch menu, and tells the submitter to stand up and get it themselves. The submitter then reveals the reason they were in hospital — they'd just had a leg amputation, so no, they couldn't stand up.
• This teen had experienced difficulty breathing and constant choking sensations for years before finally telling off the doctor who keeps dismissing it as "anxiety". They go to a new doctor, who takes one look at their throat and makes an appointment for the patient to get their massively enlarged tonsils removed. End of problem.
• This doctor looks at the patient's blood test, diagnoses them with hyperthyroidism (overproductive thyroid gland), and recommends radiation or surgery. The patient asks if they should first reduce the hormone supplements they were already on for hypothyroidism (unproductive thyroid gland), prompting a Double Take.
• The nurse for a tonsillectomy calls the patient's mother to verify that the patient has not eaten anything for the past twelve hours. The mother replies that the patient is a grown woman and no longer lives with her parents — the nurse assumed the patient for a tonsillectomy would be a child and mistakenly committed a major privacy violation.
• In which thirty years of stomach problems, examined by multiple doctors, turns out to be lactose intolerance. When the submitter asked to be tested for that, their general doctor complained about fake diagnoses from the internet, raising the possibility they weren't looking for the condition because they didn't think it was real.
• This nurse demanded a female patient take a pregnancy test before her 20-week ultrasound to check on her pregnancy^note It's a girl. The patient just glared the nurse out of the room.

Not Always Legal

• "Ma'am, I've patrolled this street hundreds of times before, and I've never seen a single deer." Cue the woman being stopped for driving under the speed limit pointing out the doe that's standing twenty feet away, staring at them.
• "Are you aware that this is a bus lane?!" "Are you aware that this is a bus?"
• Emergency services can't find a severe traffic accident on a street that is LITERALLY VISIBLE FROM THE POLICE STATION, and near a lot they frequently ticket bad drivers at. The operator is very confused and implies that none of them ever learned the street's name, so they went in random (wrong) directions looking for a street they already knew very well, delaying treatment of the injured.
• This airport security guard tells the submitter that as long as the person they're picking up isn't present, they will have to move their vehicle, seemingly not noticing that said person was putting his luggage in the car right behind him.