Not Always Right / Tropes E to L

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E

• Eagleland: Some customers are more AMERICA! than Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series. Examples here and here. And those are the milder examples. The site also has non-Americans assuming that all Americans are Type 2, only to get proven wrong by the Americans they're trying to scam/talk down to.
  • This visitor to a Canadian theme park seems to think that VIP lines for Americans exist for some reason.
  • Unfortunately for this couple, not all Americans are idiots.
  • This is a classic example of a Type 2 Eaglelander. Thinks Canada is simply another part of the great United States? Check. Treats anyone who isn't immediately identifiable as "American" as an "immigrant (who probably came here illegally)"? Check. Has a prominent Texan accent? Check.
  • This guy thinks the fact that "this is America" means he can send a package faster than is physically possible (and for bonus points, the submitter was Canadian).
    Customer: “But… This is America!”
    Submitter: “Sir, what exactly are you expecting to happen when you say that?”
    Customer: “To get my own way, d*** it!”
    Submitter: “Does it usually work?”
    Customer: “Yes! Because this is America!”
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • For much of the site's early life, only certain stories were tagged by theme (e.g. "Geeks Rule" or "Bigotry"). Nowadays, every story is (albeit sometimes with dubious applicability).
  • Many early stories are grab-bags of assorted customer quotes with a common theme, which was gradually phased out in favor of one-shot anecdotes.
  • A few early stories are copied verbatim from other sources, most often Rinkworks' Computer Stupidities or Things People Said pages. The site now stresses that any submitted content must be original.
• The Easy Way or the Hard Way: Saying this doesn't work all that well in real life when you're just a teenager.
• El Spanish "-o": This man offers to "translate" because his buddy (supposedly) doesn't speak English.
  Police Officer: Okay, then… ask him where he got the tire.
  "Translator": Where-o get-o el tire-o?
  Police Officer and Buddy: staring in disbelief
• Elvis Lives: In Vegas, apparently.
• End of the World as We Know It: Which means warranties will be worthless.
• Enfante Terrible: This toddler smashes three jars of peanut butter because they don't like it. Naturally, the mother is hesitant about paying for it.
• Engaging Conversation: Here; also counts as a Geeky Turn-On.
• Enhance Button: Customers seem to expect photo labs to have one of these.
• Entertainment Above Their Age:
  • In This Is Why Jurassic Park is Rated PG-13, a girl who appears to be about five says she loves to draw dinosaurs covered in blood, implying that she's been watching Jurassic Park (though she might simply be a young girl with a disturbing imagination going through a dinosaur phase).
  • In Rated I For Immature, Part 2, two young kids try to buy Halo 3, only to be turned down because they're too young to buy an M-rated game, much to their ire.
  • In Rated C For Child Welfare, two parents try to take their kids who are six and eight to see Final Destination in 3D. When the OP objects to this, the father claims their kids' favorite movies are Saw and Saw II (though it's possible he was lying).
  • In They Grow Up (And Get Incarcerated) So Fast, Part 2, an eight-year-old boy wants to buy an M-rated game. The OP tells him he can't buy it without his mother's permission. His mother doesn't give a damn about the game's content as long as her son pays for it himself.
  • In A Grand Theft Tantrum, a boy who is said to look about nine years old demands the OP to let him buy Grand Theft Auto (Classic) and starts throwing video games around in a rage when the OP refuses to let him buy any because he's too young.
• Entitled Bastard: Arguably the most common trait of customers in these stories. If even a fraction of them are factual, there is a depressingly large number of customers convinced that rules and laws (even laws of physics) don't apply to them. A very common variant is customers demanding that they get something entirely free of charge if even one inconsequential thing goes wrong in the process of purchasing it (or sometimes even when it doesn't). Add stores where there actually are discounts extended to employees or through some other metric that very few people can apply for and things turn sour very quickly.
  • And then there's this woman, who seems to think that spending a lot of money at a store entitles her to be able to flag down any of its employees and have them taxi her about.
  • This customer goes so far as to tell a cashier, “You are my servant and you need to listen to what I say!”
  • This mother lets her kids trespass onto a neighbour's yard, and even gets her oldest kid to try and steal a solar panel for her (lying that she had the neighbour's permission to do so), and threatens to sue when the submitter pins the kid down after the kid attacks them while trying to get the panel back.
    Woman: “I can do as I please and so can my son.”
• Epic Fail: Some people go above and beyond mere eccentric or obnoxious behaviour to true failure:
  • The woman who tells her boyfriend he'll be sleeping on the couch, but they don't actually live together. That's just the start of a downward spiral; it leads to the boyfriend and the cashier getting engaged.
  • Two underage teenagers try to buy cigarettes but are obviously turned down. After trying to fool the cashier with a learner's permit (which has expired, has no picture on it, and clearly proves they're underage), they beg someone else to buy them cigarettes... a uniformed police officer, to be specific. Luckily, they gave up after that.
  • This man uses a car wash to wash his clothes, and demands a refund when it doesn't work! Using a service to do something it was never meant to do, and then complaining when it doesn't do that thing... way to go, guy.
  • This woman: upon having the concept of defragging her computer explained as "basically cleaning up your computer," she comes to the conclusion that this means put the thing in the dishwasher.
  • A scammer claims to be part of the government. For some reason, they called a government-operated center to attempt this.
  • This drunk man hits on a girl at a bar. She's already married. He says he could probably beat up her man. She smiles and doesn't disagree with the drunk, but when he tries it, she floors him. Drunk gets up and asks the bartender to throw the woman and her husband out, and when the bartender refuses, the drunk claims to be the owner's brother... whereupon the bartender reveals that she's also the owner and that while she doesn't have a brother, that woman he was just harassing and got punched out by is her little sister. And the cherry on top? He was finally thrown out by the bouncer, a.k.a. the husband of the bartender! Epic fail times four!
  • This woman is looking for doorknobs ... at a pool supply store. The submitter explaining this is being "rude" because he supposedly refused to sell them (as opposed to not having them at all). The person that the woman complains to minutes later? The submitter, who is also the manager. Upon finding this out, the woman speeds away and is pulled over by a police officer whom she cut off.
  • This woman complained about her lawnmower suddenly catching on fire and wanted a refund. This is certainly an issue, but it becomes clear that this woman has made a grievous error: While, it's true that lawnmowers run on oil, that doesn't mean any type of oil. This woman apparently poured vegetable oil rather than motor oil into the gas tank "because it's oil." So in the end, she wrecked her own lawnmower by her own stupidity.^note She also at some point in the conversation says that she poured a whole bottle of oil in. Although motor oil usually comes in bottles now, it historically came in cans. If the container in question was a can, then one has to wonder how she mixed the two up.
  • Back when professional-grade copy machines were much harder to work on, we have this story of a medical office getting an error message on a Friday afternoon that will require a service call on Monday morning. On Saturday, their maintenance man announces that he "knows" how to fix the problem and ends up literally spraying toner and developer powders all over the office. When the service rep shows up Monday, he tells the staff (which has been trying and failing to clean up the mess since Saturday) what type of mask they should be wearing to prevent health issues, then confirms that the maintenance guy completely killed the copier ... and probably three office computers as well. The doctor informs the maintenance company that since their guy destroyed the equipment by doing unauthorized work, they will be paying for all the repairs.
  • When trying to buy ice cream for the sale price... 1) make sure you have the correct size container of ice cream, 2) make sure the sale is current, 3) make sure you are in the correct store. And when you fail on all three points, don't yell at the cashier.
  • This genius somehow broke multiple displays of rare and extensive antiques just by trying to put a guitar back on a stand.
  • In this story, the customer actually complains when the OP, an employee of a store he visits, declines his Facebook request and blocks him when he keeps trying to send her a new one. Upon returning to the store, he wants the manager to either force her to unblock him or outright fire her for "disrespecting customers". He gets banned instead.
• Eskimos Aren't Real:
  • Native Americans.
  • Japan.
  • Gay people.
  • Pharmacists.
  • Beavers.
  • Leap years.
  • The Titanic.
  • New Jersey accents are only on television to get ratings.
  • Shakespeare is just a corporate mascot for Big Theatre.
• Eskimo Land: Some tourists seem to think Canada is this. Most Canadians just play along to get the ignorant customer out of there.
• Especially Zoidberg: Here:
  Customer: Can I buy some spray paint to get high on?
  Cashier: No, sir. That is illegal.
  Customer: Even during Sundance?
  Cashier: Especially during Sundance!
  Customer: Buzzkill! [walks out]
  • Also here:
    Elderly customer referring to another customer throwing a childish tantrum: If that were my daughter I'd slap her!
    Cashier: Even at her age?
    Customer: Especially at her age.
  • This story is about a customer who, on hearing that damaged books were free with any purchase, deliberately broke the spine of "a leather bound book signed by Neil Gaiman AND Terry Pratchett" they'd busted out of the rare book cabinet. Since there's only one book this could possibly be, one of the comments is "Even Aziraphale would be mad at him." Given the character, while rarely angry, is a dedicated bibliophile, this gets the reply "ESPECIALLY Aziraphale would be mad at him."
• Et Tu, Brute?: There are numerous stories where the manager will break policy, berate the OP for not doing so, or otherwise side with the entitled, unreasonable "Customer." Sometimes even costing the store money in the process. A particularly glaring example here where Manager initially sides with OP in upholding the restaurant's policy regarding the "to go" salad bar, until Customer specifically targeted OP at least three days in a row, buying the "to go" salad, and demanding a refund for not getting the lid, in advance, until Manager turns on and blames the employee for the refunds, and then Customer, "thanks" OP by overfilling the lid and spraying cottage cheese around while trying to close the plate onto the lid, which OP then has to go and clean up.
• Everybody Hates Mathematics: "Nonplussed Customers" And 1.5 - not one and a half!
  • Also, this customer cannot perform a grade two or three level multiplication.
  • This customer utterly fails at percentages.
  • Two young men try to steal alcohol because they're underage... except they aren't, they're both of legal age. They just failed to do the math and thought they were younger than they are.
• Everything Is Racist:
  • Puzzles are Serious Business.
  • These jeans are "straight leg". Does that mean that these are not gay-friendly?!
  • "Moral of the story: Don't assume that everything you see is a hate crime!"
  • This one has a lesbian accuse a convention volunteer of being a homophobe just for seeing if they have a blue wrist band required to attend the con while holding hands.
  • The store this employee works at has a policy of checking the receipt of every shopper to discourage theft. A black customer accuses the submitter (who is the employee stationed at the exit that day) of targeting him specifically, despite the fact that he was in a line where everybody was getting their receipts checked regardless of who they were. He backed off when the guy in line behind him, who also happened to be African-American, stood up for the employee.
  • Another "gay card" user. Because the OP did not go check his tire pressure immediately, due to being occupied with another customer, the "customer" begins ranting that OP was trying to deny him service because he's gay. OP, who is also gay, then goes to refuse him service.
  • Used for good in the case of "Captain Camp and The Russian Lady" who learn that the employees want customers to complain about a faulty anti-theft device, because it's the only way it's going to be fixed, and declare they can use their minority status to ensure they're listened to.
    Woman: I ham up accent on phone. He will ham up the gay. Use trigger word.
    Man: It's discrimination, darling!
    Woman: Captain Camp and The Russian Lady will aid you!
  • An (able-bodied) customer who accuses two workers of ableism because they grabbed someone's wheelchair without asking ... while it was careening downhill, completely out of control. No, the opinion of the guy in the chair doesn't matter.
  • A customer at an ice cream shop tells the cashier that she is trying to reduce her fat in-take. The minute the customer says the word "fat", the customer in line directly behind her explodes into a tirade about discrimination toward fat people even though the only mention of "fat" was referring to nutritional fat.
• Evil Brit: This woman seems to believe that terrorists can instantly adopt British accents if needed.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: "Why would you help people if you're not getting paid for it?"
• Evil Is Petty: This woman first goes to the newly hired, first job, sixteen-year-old employee to purchase the "to go" salad, rather than the all you can eat. When she demands the lid, in advance, knowing full well this is in violation of the written policy because the lid is clearly bigger than the plate meant to go with it, she badgers the employee, who stands by store policy. Not being able to get OP to budge, she slams the plate down and demands a refund. Manager provides refund, tells OP was correct. Woman leaves. End of story, right? WRONG. The woman returns and specifically targets the same employee, ignoring other cashiers, even if their lines are empty, including the manager, at least three more days in a row, until the manager, despite seeing the woman's behavior first hand, turns on and blames the employee for all the refunds and says "just do whatever it takes to make the customer happy." Lo and behold, the woman not only fills the lid to overflowing from the salad bar, but to add insult to injury and injury to insult crushes her salad with so much force that it squirts cottage cheese over the salad bar, and the floor, which then OP has to go and clean up while spewing "There. Now that wasn't so hard, was it? You have a nice day, sweetie!" to never return.
• Evil Twin: This story features twin sisters who work as cashiers at the same grocery store. One is polite and courteous while the other is snobby and judgmental, treating a woman rudely for having a young daughter and being on welfare, even though (as her sister points out) she had her own son when she was 15.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • A concept that seems to escape some customers.
  • And others expect this trope to an unhealthy extent.
  • And still others.
• Exact Words: But I didn't damage the pans with a hammer and chisel!
  • "I didn't say I'd hurt you."
  • This customer interprets "you have 90 days to return it with the receipt as long as the tags are still attached" to mean "even if you wear them in the pool with the tags still on, we can return them". Then he tries to argue that he didn't take them into the pool, despite said tags being mostly disintegrated with pool water and the trunks smelling of chlorine.
  • "I want a small popcorn, and don’t try to upsell me a medium!" "Can I interest you in a large then?"
  • This call center agent takes their manager at his word after being instructed to do "whatever it takes" to get a caller off the line.
  • "Let me know when there's a great flood, then you can skip my lunch!" This was during a major earthquake in Manila and as if on cue a large Biblical flood occurs outside complete with screaming from the terrified citizens.
  • This woman is so spiteful about being asked to move her car away from a coffee shop's fire exit that she moves it to the shop's loading area instead. Sure enough, the delivery truck shows up right after she does this and she's so reluctant to move again that she expects the truck to be "unloaded around her". The coffee shop's manager agrees to do so... by completely surrounding the woman's car with the delivered boxes and double-checking everything before it's put in the stockroom.
  • This insurance customer attempts to invoke this. When a system error causes their car's insurance to temporarily show as invalid, and the agent they speak to agrees to compensate for travel arrangements in the interim, they buy another car and insurance and attempt to get the company to pay the £7,200 they spend on them, arguing that no restrictions were made on what 'travel arrangements' meant. In the end, they walk away with nothing.
  • A boy repeatedly calls the same pizza restaurant with prank calls, driving the employees there crazy. One day, the submitter, absolutely done with the kid, responds to the kid asking for 100 pizzas by pretending to accept the order, saying they will bill the kid through the phone bill, and hanging up. The kid absolutely freaks out and tries to call back before giving up and being forced to confess to his parents. The parents apologize to the submitter for what happened and the boy never prank calls the pizza place again.
  • This customer reads a buy-one-get-one-free ad, and it's not clear whether they're being dumb or bullheaded when they insist on getting their free extra when they bought the first from a competitor, because the ad doesn't specify that both items have to come from the same store.
  • This prospective young teen babysitter uses careful exact words on his fliers, his Gender-Blender Name and the fact that he sounds female over the phone to hide his gender prior to arriving at a house, because he operates under the (correct, as it turns out) assumption that people wouldn't hire him if they knew he was male. To compensate, he makes his first sessions with families free, in the hope that he'll be given a chance.
  • This customer somehow manages to interprete "You can head up to the front and pay at the registers" as indicating he can do that, not that he's required to. When he's corrected on this point, he maintains a constant insistence that he's been suckered into buying this stuff under false pretences, despite the fact he picked it out before he was told that anyway.
• Exiled to the Couch: This woman tries to exile her boyfriend to the couch after he takes the side of a shop assistant over her. It doesn't quite work out... not least because they don't actually live in the same house. Hard to believe, but it actually gets worse for her from that point.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: This customer, who is absolutely outraged that he was charged for the adult channels when he never ordered them, and there's no-one else in the house except his teenage son, and then hangs up, presumably realising who he should be yelling at about it.
• Extreme Doormat: Generally speaking, managers who cave in to bratty customers' demands (whether out of worry over losing the customers' business (especially if they're large spenders) or just to get them to shut up) occur in the stories on such a regular basis that some users on the website claim that they warrant their own category on the website.
• Extreme Omnivore: Mmm, tickets.

F

• Face of a Thug: The worker in this story who not only helps a little girl find her mother but recovers her dropped teddy bear.
  Girl: You’re scary… but nice.
• Face Palm: Frequently a response of the staff in these stories. A search for "facepalm", in fact, currently brings up ten pages worth of stories where the reporter uses that exact term, usually at the end. Reading them all in succession is fun, as it turns into a Running Gag of sorts.
• Failed a Spot Check: Most commonly manifests as either not noticing signs or ignoring evidence for why a door is locked in their determination to enter. Now has enough examples to warrant their own page.
• Fake-Out Make-Out: That was fast.
• Fake Russian:invoked
  • This cop actually has a slight Russian accent, but he exaggerates it to scare off some pervert.
  • "The Russian Lady" likewise hams up her existing accent, in order to claim discrimination (at the request of the employees — It Makes Sense in Context).
• Fake Static: "You’re breaking up! Khhrrrrrrrtzzzzz!"
  • This customer tries the "you're breaking up" variant... on a landline.
• False Reassurance:
  • A story about an internet user who believed that the way to get an in-person visit from a technician was to not only verbally abuse the tech support line, but to threaten to come round to the company with a gun. This earned the false reassurance that someone would definitely be visiting the customer soon, possibly even running red lights to get there.
  • Similarly, this story, where an auto shop is offered second-hand wheels of dubious provenance for a luxury car, and tells the seller they have a customer who is looking for exactly those kinds of wheels ... because they've recognised that the wheels have been stolen from a car they service.
• Family Disunion: This cashier meets their stepmother as a customer The stepmother first correctly identifies the cashier's brother, mother, and estranged father. Then lets slip that the reason the cashier's father divorced their mother is that their mother had an affair with their stepfather. The revelation that this woman is the stepmother and the information she just told causes the cashier to stare speechless and the other customers to gasp in horror.
• Fanservice: When this woman contracts the submitter to do some touch-ups on a photo for an ad, the submitter receives an email asking them to make her breasts look bigger. Then, when they comply, they receive another email complaining of the bust increase. Then the submitter receives a third email…
  Client: “Sorry for the confusion. The first draft is fine. My husband decided to answer my emails for me.”
• Fantastic Racism: Allowing hobbits to buy clothes? Outrageous.
  • I hate robots. "F***ing cyborgs!" Okay, maybe this hunk of metal isn't that bad.
    • They are onto us. Beep! Though honestly, doesn't the same site make you wonder?...
    • Now cyborgs also distrust them human living persons.
  • There are also numerous stories where customers have somehow got it into their heads that the people who work at stores are not "real" or "normal" people, and subsequently become very offended when those workers turn out to have lives beyond taking verbal abuse from ungrateful customers all day.
• Fashion Hurts: This girl asks a craft seller to make a pair of huge crystal beads into earrings for her, despite the seller's warning that they're very heavy. About half an hour later, she comes back to the seller's booth complaining that her ears hurt, but refuses to believe that the beads themselves are too heavy, deciding that she must be allergic to the glass or the wire in the earrings. The seller gives up and just asks her if she's heard of the phrase "with beauty comes pain".
  Girl: Oh! I get it now! Wow, if it hurts this much I must look A-MA-ZING! (skips off)
• Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence:
  • This customer believes that another customer, quietly reading a book and drinking her coffee, is "offending" and "abusing" him simply by virtue of requiring a walking stick.
  • These ableist and racist busybodies take issue with an amputee eating near them for "flaunt[ing] their abnormalities around where everybody can see them.”
  • Similarly, this mother asks that the submitter remove a three-legged dog from them and their daughter's sight.
• Felony Misdemeanor:
  • "YOU SHOULD ALL BE ASHAMED!".
  • The pain! It never ends.
  • "I’m going to write a complaint to the store, telling your boss that you treated me VERY badly! This is not the last you are hearing of this! It is so incredibly rude TO HUM WHILE A CUSTOMER IS UPSET!"
  • This cable company receives a very irate phone call from a man who didn't like how his show was pre-empted.
    Caller: “I f*** hate Conan O'Brien!" […] “I hope you and every single employee of your company get diarrhea for an entire month!”
  • “Honey, you live in Bronco country, and if you don’t like that you have to leave!”
• Female Gaze: Completely Immersed In The Lesson, evidently.
• Female Misogynist:
  • In this story, an inattentive female customer, who was spending so much time talking on her cell phone, paying no attention to the employee, decides he has to serve her right then and there, despite the fact that the employee is coming to the aid of a coworker who is being sexually harassed, and when informed of this, immediately determines that the female coworker did something to provoke the harassment. The owner, who happened to be another customer at that point, gloriously calls her out when she threatens to call "corporate."
  • "I'm just a woman. I can't be expected to know how to do this! Just send a tech!" Said instruction? Plug in a lamp!
  • This one is especially horrendous as it combines with both Frivolous Lawsuit and Too Dumb to Live. The "customer" in this story immediately demands a MAN to work on her vehicle when greeted by a female mechanic. When a male mechanic is not available, she reluctantly lets the female mechanic work on her car, and when said mechanic finds numerous very dangerous issues, completely ignores the mechanic's advice, including the fact that the radiator had no coolant and the SUV was going to be driving in temperatures of 36 degrees Celsius. So when the car's engine inevitably blows up, from overheating, the female customer goes and forges her invoice to try and make "the stupid female mechanic" look at fault and sue the oil change establishment for $5000 plus the $400 in towing fees. Needless to say, her own bigotry bites her in the ass when it turns out that the female mechanic is the most experienced, most professional, and most talented of the employees and recognized the fraud immediately, printing another copy of the original invoice that proved her innocence, and the customer's culpability.
• Fingore: In this story, a five-year-old boy left unsupervised by his mother in a print shop loses one of his fingers to a printing machine.
• First Day from Hell: This teen's first day on the job has them find a pair of customers having sex in one of the fitting rooms and having to report them to the manager and see them escorted out. Fortunately another customer saw how traumatized the kid was and convinced their manager to give them a gift card for their troubles.
• First-Person Smartass: Every now and then, a submitter doesn't just tell the story, but tells what they thought about it at the time (or after) but couldn't say.
  • In this story:
    Customer: “I had plans for today! This is the worst service I’ve ever had! I’m never coming back here again!”
    (You promise?)
  • This story likewise has the submitter use the narration to voice their massive exasperation with this teenage Chronic Pet Killer.
    Submitter: “Ma’am, I can’t give you a refund for fish that you killed by taking them out of water.”
    Teenage Girl: “Seriously, y’all should have some kind of sign or something that says you can’t do that.”
    IT’S A FISH. FISHIES GO SWIMMY IN WATER. FISHIES DIE IF THEY NO HAVE SWIMMY IN WATER. I DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH CLEARER IT CAN GET.
• Fluffy Tamer: Deconstructed.
• Forgetful Jones: This customer arrives at a bookstore to pick up a book… only to forget which book it was. Then she remembers… only to realize she forgot her groceries.
  I seriously had to check that she wasn’t buying a book about how to improve your memory…
• For Inconvenience, Press "1": As imitated through a drive-thru intercom.
• For the Evulz:
  • This asshole dumps an ashtray on the ground for the submitter to clean up just because he can.
  • This hotel guest destroys a $400 toaster and giggles the whole time… until he's asked to pay for it.
• Foul Waterfowl: This customer has to resort to Tae Kwon Do to fend off an accosting goose.
• Framing the Guilty Party: A hotel worker evicts a guest for using slurs against both him and other guests, then calls the cops on her when she slaps him in response. The cop who shows up refuses to do anything unless a third party who witnessed the slap comes forward, at which point one of the guests she'd used a homophobic slur against lies and says that he saw the whole thing.
• Free-Range Children: 8 years old, walking without a guard from the cashier to arcade? Felony Misdemeanor. Same kid, walking without a guard from the arcade to the cashier in the first place? Okay.
• French Maid Outfit: "Are you wearing a maid’s outfit?" "I can bet money that it’s not the outfit you are mentally picturing right now, sir."
• Freudian Slip:
  • That's not a textbook.
  • "It's For My Longmower".
  • "I think I'm a necrophiliac."
  • "Just make sure you drink lots of women".
  • "Is it just me or did it sound like she was asking for?.."
  • The Naughtyphone.
  • "March of the Penises".
  • "I’ll have two boxes of cockporn, please."
• Friendly Local Chinatown: Defied. This tourist doesn't seem to understand that there are no "Chinatowns" in China itself.
• Friend to All Children: This store.
• Friend to All Living Things: This guy.
• Frivolous Lawsuit: Almost every lawsuit threatened in any story here, really.
  • This guy wants to sue a town, not the town government, but the town itself and everyone in it. By the look of things, he appeared to be under the impression that "Boise Idaho" (without a comma) was a company and not a town.
  • This guy, every year, goes to a family's haunted house, comes out bruised, and sues them for it, never winning from a lack of evidence but wasting a lot of their money nonetheless. He eventually gets his when they install security cameras and catch him injuring himself - his case is immediately thrown out with that evidence, and the family promptly counter-sues him for three times what he wanted from them, making back nearly every penny they had lost fighting his lawsuits.
  • This elderly lady blatantly pretends to have slipped on something wet and threatens to contact her lawyer - after basically proving she made it up, by trying to "recreate" the incident by making movements she could not possibly have done if she were actually injured. Because of this and the presence of security cameras, the manager gives her the store's information in the hopes that she goes through with the lawsuit so he can then get her put in jail over it.
  • This elderly woman tried to scam a department store by faking a slip-and-fall accident. The CCTV footage immediately disqualifies her claims.
  • You'd think this person was the viewpoint character in Weird Al's "I'll Sue Ya" song given how flagrantly they seem to threaten lawsuits against anyone they think is wronging them, to the point of threatening to sue the law firm they are calling so they can sue someone they were in a car accident with just because they only file disability claims.
• From the Mouths of Babes:
  • Anecdotes featuring children repeating things they shouldn't are very common, for example swear words or insulting remarks about the establishment.
  • This kid responds very bluntly to his mom's transphobic comments.
  • This girl's favorite number is 69, to the embarrassment of the adults.
  • This girl takes a Literal-Minded approach to the question "where did you come from?"
  • "I did it, Daddy! I told the lady I was five and not six like I am! Do I get an ice cream now?" (The tourist attraction that family was at gives free admission to five-year-olds and younger, but starts charging admission once the kid turns six.)
  • "I'm four. What's your excuse?"
  • What seems like a regular case of a young Picky Eater refusing to eat veggies in a restaurant turns awkward when the girl insists that her brother told her that broccoli is "very bad for little girls" and proceeded to smoke some "broccoli" himself.
• Full-Frontal Assault: A cashier at a video game store got attacked by an angry nude customer who wielded a Guitar Hero 3 guitar.

G

• The Gadfly: A husband and wife, forced to sit in a timeshare presentation, proceed to troll the presenter.
• Gag Penis: Yeah, not falling for it.
• Geeky Turn-On: This guy. And this couple.
• Genre Savvy: To their credit, some of the customers are able to realize and/or acknowledge when they're having a ditz moment.
  • At least one mentioned the site.
  • Coworkers can be genre savvy too!
  • Also, many employees become this. Instead of thinking nobody could possibly be that stupid, they make allowances for the fact that yes, people really are.
  • This person manages to skip the entire argument part by figuring out that, by "drink", the customer means "dipping sauce", and vice versa.
  • This customer and this one recognized and submitted their own ditz moments.
  • This customer picked up on a fellow customer's Stealth Insult because they saw it in an earlier entry on Not Always Right itself... But reading the site didn't stop him from acting like someone who belonged on it, as the first customer lampshades.
  • Upon being denied a refund, this woman recognizes that she's getting upset and extracts herself from the situation before she can explode. The dumbfounded employee notes that she's the first customer who's just left rather than throwing a tantrum.
  • This grocery store customer, having not worked in retail for years, realized that she became one of those customers when she failed to notice two signs with specific instructions on them.
  • Stories where a customer attempts to scam a store by, for instance, paying for a small purchase with a ten-dollar bill and then claiming they gave the cashier a twenty instead and are being short-changed, were absurdly common for a period in November 2013. Enough that in almost every one of them the employees are already familiar enough with the scam that they never fall for it.
  • This guy admits to the nurse checking him in that his reason for being at the clinic is "something stupidity related".
  • This employee, after witnessing a customer who complains about the number of items she herself picked out and about how slow the transaction is going when she is only putting one item at a time on the counter, immediately knows she's going to complain about the total price, and so automatically applies the senior discount to it just to keep her from complaining further (which she does, anyway).
  • When this police officer ends up being called to the animal shelter the submitter works at, his reaction to learning that the "vicious rabid animal" he was sent after is neither rabid nor vicious is "that's what I thought".
  • The submitter got confused about the purpose of a scrub brush for their new pet bearded dragon (it was for the tank, not the lizard) and ended up asking the employee. They even mention the site by name at the end.
• George Jetson Job Security: Entitled customers will often try to have this invoked on employees if their (often impossible) demands aren’t met. Most of the time it fails.
• Get Out!: Many stories involve the employees or manager asking an unruly customer to leave (nicely at first). All too often, the unruly customer in question requires the threat of force (or, in some cases, actual force) before they leave the premises.
• The Girl Who Fits This Slipper: How this security guard ultimately resolves the situation of the submitter's wedding ring being stolen by a young girl.
• Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak: This little girl in a ballerina outfit loves toy dinosaurs.
• Giving Up on Logic: Read long enough, and there will be a story where some poor employee is resigned to doing this just to be done with dealing with a trouble customer.
• Glad I Thought of It:
  • As seen here.
  • This service desk caller, who is too busy explaining how vital their malfunctioning tablet is to them to listen to the poster telling them (six times) that restarting it will solve the problem, suddenly has a bright idea — how about restarting it?
    Caller: How come you didn’t think of that? Maybe I should be doing your job!
• Global Ignorance: Any story tagged with Geography is an example. Examples range from New Mexico not being part of the United States, to trying to ask for local directions from San Diego to San Antonio.
• The Glasses Gotta Go: Sort of - this customer thinks the glasses should stay on because the submitter is too attractive without them.
• Godwin's Law: For this lady, a store refusing to apply coupons for one brand onto her purchase of an entirely different brand means they and everyone currently shopping there are Nazis.
• Gold Digger: This person apparently believes all women should be gold diggers.
• Good Is Not Nice: This customer is always grumpy, often downright rude ... and is a Kindhearted Cat Lover who donates generously to charity and looks out for the submitter. But she's not happy about it.
• Grail in the Garbage: This customer goes to buy a high-end gaming laptop with money from a tin that his grandfather kept under his bed (which the customer inherited from him after he passed away). The cashier, in shock, points out that one of the bills is a $1000 note, which was discontinued in 1969 and is a valuable collector's item now. The cashier tries to point out that it's worth far more than the stated value, but the customer angrily insists on using it to pay for his laptop. The cashier then proceeds to exchange it for a bunch of their own $100 bills, and then resells it to a collector for $4000.
• Grammar Correction Gag: It's difficult to make an intelligent literary argument when one can't even spell the word "money".
• Grammar Nazi:
  • This customer is either fishing for any excuse for failing to comprehend the cashier, or is completely and utterly incapable of parsing a sentence that isn't constructed in a certain way.
  • This customer considers a misspelt sign "offensive to those of us who can actually spell!”
• Greed: The primary motivator of a lot of these customers, who will turn into liars, cheats, and bullies for the chance of a (usually pretty minor) discount.
• Greek Chorus: Sometimes show up as customers or coworkers.
• Gretzky Has the Ball: "Do you have a New York Yankees football?" (This may be coincidentally accurate, as there were four different New York football teams between 1926 and 1951 named the Yankees or Yanks.)
• Grievous Bottley Harm: How this martial arts practitioner takes out a robber.
• Groin Attack:
  • Even dogs are getting in on the act...
  • “This isn’t the first time this has happened. Last time, she kicked someone where it hurts a lot, ’cause he fell over crying and stuff.”
  • This one doubles as a Moment of Awesome for the submitter, who takes the broken neck of their violin and sends it right into the crotch of the man who broke it, incapacitating him long enough for the cops to arrive and arrest him.
  • This customer managed to shoot himself in the crotch with a loaded gun.
• Gruesome Grandparent: A previous incident is related in this story, in which a woman had been micro-dosing her grandchild with whisky to keep them sleepy and overdid it, meaning that when she handed them over to a daycare the baby was drunk. Her subsequent denial and the lawsuit against the daycare that followed formed part of the reason why the daycare no longer admits children while they're asleep.
• Grumpy Old Man: Numerous, but particularly this guy, who, unfortunately for the employee, carries a cane, and this guy, who will complain about everything about modern times and people.

H

• Had the Silly Thing in Reverse:
  • This computer user managed to do this with a mouse.
  • This one managed it with the entire computer tower.
  • Apparently you can do this with an iPhone as well.
• Hair-Trigger Temper:
  • This customer seems pleasant enough when she asks for something, but the moment even one thing is off with the transaction...
  • This guy at a store register suddenly and abruptly throws his merchandise down and storms out of the store looking angry as a hornet the minute the cashier finishes helping a slightly cranky elderly woman. What makes the situation especially bizarre is that up to that point, the man had been acting perfectly amicable and patient as the cashier helped the elderly woman and had even told the cashier to go ahead and finish helping her before helping him. Even the site's commentators were stumped by the man's behavior.
  • This guy at a fried-chicken restaurant's drive-through orders a two-piece chicken combo, but asks for no sides, so the employee puts the order in as two pieces of chicken. The minute the guy sees the two piece of chicken orders show up on the screen, he blows his stack and speeds out of there before the poor employee can even explain why the order appeared like that.
  • This customer responds to being politely asked to not shout profanity in a library by dropping a racist Cluster F-Bomb, and threatening to shoot and stab the submitter, for complying with library policy.
  • A bride-to-be enters a bakery with her mother to pick up the wedding cake. The bride sees a cake on the front counter and proceeds to flip her lid, saying that the cake looks nothing like how she wanted, and then destroys the cake. It turns out the reason why the cake on the counter didn't look anything like how she wanted was that it wasn't even her wedding cake, it was a different couple's wedding cake. She ends up spending her wedding night behind bars.
  • This customer at an arts & crafts store realizes she can't find her purse and completely loses her marbles, attacking other customers whom she thinks stole her purse, flipping carts, and knocking merchandise off the shelves and destroying them, which forces the employees to have to evacuate the other customers for their safety. In the end, it turned out that the woman had actually accidentally left her purse in her car, and she ends up arrested for attacking other customers and destroying the merchandise (as well as banned from all other arts & crafts stores in the region).
• Handicapped Badass: I'm playing. What's your excuse again? A convention attendee who is dragged to a DDR tournament initially refuses to play… until the registration tender shows he has a prosthetic leg and is playing as well.
• Hands Go Down: This new student is introducing himself as having originally lived in Nigeria. When the teacher asks the class if they have any questions for him, several hands go up. The new student offhandedly mentions that he's never seen a lion out of a Zoo before; cue all the hands going back down.
• Hands-Off Parenting: This mother seems to have this approach, seeing that she chased off the babysitter for punishing her son when he was throwing rocks. She ends up going to court later on because her son threw a rock at a neighbor's kid.
• Hanlon's Razor: Most of the examples are pretty clear, but some are really difficult to decide whether the Jerkass customer is trying to cheat the cashier, is a real-life Troll doing it for shits and giggles, or if the customer is just plain stupid.
  • This example lends credence to the "Customer is a troll" theory. He's complaining that the dirt the landscaping company dropped off is "too dirty". That's right, his dirt is too dirty.
  • And then there's this exchange...
    Tech Support: Really, you want me to talk you through opening the [laptop] box?
    Customer: Yes.
    Tech Support: Is this a prank call?
    Customer: No.
• Harsh Noise: This woman despises the sound of vacuum cleaners. ^note It's not unusual for people with sensory processing disorders and autistic people. Vacuums are loud, repetitive, buzzing, and can badly shock people with exaggerated startle responses (a trait of PTSD). Other common culprits for this Hell Is That Noise effect - actually referred to in neurodivergent circles as "sensory hell" - are hand dryers, fire alarms, checkout machines, etc.
• Hates Reading: This customer hasn't read a book since high school because he's "too busy to read nerdy little books" and is only visiting a bookstore to get a book for his nephew in hopes it will endear him to his girlfriend. He's so behind the written word that he doesn't know about the Bible.
  Submitter: “I suddenly believe that you haven’t read a book since high school.”
  Customer: *Smiling like this is a flex* “Yes, boiiiiii!”
• Hates Small Talk: This guy hates small talk so much he uses nonverbal communication to try and communicate with the submitter, causing the submitter to think he was deaf.
• Haunted Technology:
  • Strangely, credit cards don't share a common vampiric weakness and can be freely moved over a body of water.
  • A straighter example would be this woman's possessed modem.
• Having a Gay Old Time: "I'll blow my load!" means something different these days...
• Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: "Are you paying together?" "No! We are definitely not together! I'm not gay!"
• Head Desk: This poor tech-support guy.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • This guy, who goes irate over needing an ID to sell used games, steals from the store, but later returns all the stolen merchandise, apologizes for his behavior, and becomes a regular customer.
  • "That’s not okay. I’m very sorry. Buddies?"
• Heel Realization:
  • One lady who claims a black employee stole her necklace. She later calls back to apologize upon discovering she simply misplaced it.
  • These men realize just how gross them flirting with the (underaged) waitresses is when one of them claims that not only does her dad have the same name as the group's ringleader, but that she's also the same age as his daughters.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": This husband is constantly amused by windows having an "inside mount".
• Henpecked Husband:
  • Um...my wife told me to?
  • This guy is continually berated by his wife for unpacking the groceries wrongly at the checkout. When she sends him to replace the cheese, because he got the wrong kind, the next customer in line suggests that he's not coming back.
• Here We Go Again!: Deja Vu In Aisle 3
• Heteronormative Crusader:
  • This guy inverts this trope and combines it with Conspiracy Theorist. Apparently, the terrorists are intent on destroying the United States because of the gay people there. So what does the guy think the US should do? Have everyone become gay so they stop giving birth to the terrorists, of course!
  • Very disturbingly inverted with this woman, who wants her three-year-old son to be gay and is considering facilitating this by showing him pornography. She even manages to make her repeated use of the phrase "I'm very open-minded" sound like a perfect inversion of this trope - that she absolutely must have a gay son and won't accept any other outcome.
  • This customer is opposed to sporks because they're a blend of "the masculine fork and the feminine spoon" in an attempt to force a blurred-gender agenda on society.
  • This mother demands that someone else serve her because she seems to think that if her son is served by someone who's gay, it'll make him gay. Then, when she sees a female worker be brought lunch by her girlfriend, she screams at them and when her son reacts, she slaps him.
• Hiccup Hijinks: This customer deliberately complains about a non-problem in order to give an employee a scare—because said employee has the hiccups. The employee isn't particularly happy about it, but it does seem to work since the hiccups are gone after the customer leaves.
• Hide Your Lesbians: Taken up to eleven here. This woman seems to think gay men are simply some "stupid liberal conspiracy".
• Hipster: Righteous Indie-nation
• Historical Character Confusion: No, I mean Machiavelli. They don't. Unfortunately, the museum guide never even figures out who they are talking about!
• Historical Longevity Joke: This snarky customer says that the old woman in front of him at the checkout line looks "old enough to have been on the Mayflower".
• Hitler Ate Sugar: Parodied. Skittles are EVIL?
• Hobbes Was Right: It’s a shame that some people will not act civilly unless they’re given a friendly reminder that there are consequences for acting like a turd.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: A rare real-life example here. And it's hilarious to boot.
  • And this one. An old principle, BTW... but the backfire seems original.
  • A woman who kept hitting a customer with her shopping cart because she thought the customer was a drunk ends up slamming her cart onto a shelf, causing a lot of merchandise to drop on the floor.
  • Had this hotheaded passenger calmed down and not swore at and insulted the crew and passengers on the plane, the police wouldn't have been called to meet him outside the plane - nor would they have arrested him after running a check on the passenger's name and finding out he was a wanted criminal. And all of this fuss was because the crew no longer had the type of sandwich he wanted.
  • A bookstore manager calls a math teacher to tell her the check she used to pay for the books she bought was insufficient. But the manager learns the teacher earlier returned the books to the bookstore and got a cash refund. However, because the books were never actually paid for in the first place due to the bounced check, the teacher technically committed check fraud and stole money. Despite many attempts to ask the teacher to return the money to settle this issue, the teacher stubbornly refuses to listen or understand, believing the bookstore was trying to rob her and threatening to sue them. In the end, the teacher was found guilty in court and not only had to pay back the money she stole, but also the fine and court fees as well with her reputation ruined.
  • This customer ends up being caught for many counts of identity theft and credit card fraud because, in the process of trying to get a store's manager to let him look at their batch report, he got loud and angry enough at them for refusing (since said batch report also had many other customers' full credit card numbers on it) that they called the cops on him - who found him yelling at another manager elsewhere in the mall for probably the same reason. If he had been anything less than your typical screaming NAR customer, he would still be on the loose, possibly with another stolen identity.
  • This drunk patron told the bar staff he was cheating on their a $1 pitcher of beer promo without going to the toilet by revealing how he cheated.
  • This customer insults the religion of the mechanic working on their car and demands not to be serviced by that mechanic. The owner of the garage obligingly cancels the oil change... in the middle of the procedure, forcing the customer to hire a tow truck to take their now inoperable car to a different garage.
  • This amazing tale of a man who calls the police on a store that won't refund a product that he bought from an entirely different business. As the man smugly expects the manager to beg him to call the police off, the manager wearily explains to him that if the only way he'll believe that you can't return products to the wrong store is if the police tell him, then so be it. The man immediately turns pale, stammers "You... you a**-hole! I have unpaid tickets! I can’t talk to the police!", and flees.
  • This woman demanded the submitter changed the name of her jewelry store's Facebook page as it has the same name as her own which the woman seems to believe only she has that kind of the name and the submitter "stole" her name despite the fact said name is actually a Hindu name and has been around for a long time. When the submitter refuses, tries, and fails to explain to the woman and later block her on Facebook for harassment, the entitled woman began posting fake reviews and calling the submitter a liar, thief, and her jewelry ugly. Her antics instead made the store more popular as everyone found the woman's rant hilarious and buy jewelry from the submitter.
  • This businessman won't let the server get a word in edgeways when he demands six of the restaurant's best whiskeys, which bites him when the bill comes around because the addition of those drinks pushes it well into the thousands of dollars.
  • This mother attempts to make her tantruming child blame the cashier rather than her because he's not allowed any chocolate. This promptly backfires as the cashier gives the child permission to get chocolate, going so far as to purchase it with their own money.
  • This customer on a buy/sell website sends a rude e-mail demanding an off-site refund on a handbag for what ultimately prove to be spurious reasons, and threatening to file a chargeback (reversing the credit card debt due to breach of contract). When she carries out the threat — despite the seller agreeing to a refund — the seller appeals and wins. When she returns the handbag anyway, the seller checks the website policy, and discovers that, following a failed chargeback, they couldn't give a regular refund even if they wanted to.
  • These restaurant customers regularly book a table for 6:00pm, arrive at 7:30 and kick up a fuss when they're told they've missed their reservation, so the restaurant started booking them at 7:30 in the first place. This works until a new hostess makes the mistake of telling them their booking is for 7:30 (the time they arrived at), and they insist that it was 6:00. So she calmly says she's moved it to six, they've missed it, and their next available table is at nine.
• Holier Than Thou: A common problem when some bigoted, elitist, or sexist, or any combination, uses religious scripture to justify their intolerance. They pointedly do not take it well when contrary scripture is used against them, even from superiors from their local denomination. Especially the trope namer, the passage from the book of Exodus.
• Homemade Flamethrower: Two stories have a customer purchase a squirt gun, lighter fluid, and a barbecue starter/matches, respectively, both times to deal with a wasp infestation.
  • In "Lieutenant Ripley Goes Shopping", the narrator tells them the store's out of bug spray, so the customer decides to whip up a flamethrower in desperation.
  • In "Terminate this Purchase", the customer's too cheap to hire an exterminator.
• Hopeless with Tech: A disturbing amount of customers seem to have no idea how to use technology.
  • This man, for instance, doesn't know how to operate the forward and backward arrows on Internet Explorer.
  • This man can't figure out how to connect his computer to an external hard drive and figures the only way to do so is to connect the hard drive to the inside of the computer. In order to do this, he cuts his tower open with a hacksaw.
  • When this woman is told to defrag her computer to "clean it up," she takes that to mean put it in her dishwasher.
  • This customer tries to hand cash to a call centre over the phone… by stuffing the cash into her phone's case, somehow convinced that would somehow transmit the money to the caller.
  • It takes fifteen minutes to get this genius to learn where his space bar is.
  • This woman seems to think that putting her phone in any old rice will fix her phone – her phone that isn't water-damaged, but has a cracked screen.
  • An entire family of them in this story. When the games they were playing on their computer asked them to "insert [virtual] coins," they cut coin slots into their computer.
  • The customer in this story was asked to open his computer. Though the submitter doesn't have to deal with him, they overhear their coworker reaming him over the phone for using a blowtorch to do so.
  • Some customers can't tell the difference between a printer/scanner and a toaster.
    • …or between a hard disk drive and a toaster.
    • …or between a computer's hard drive and a surge protector. And somehow, this guy had this setup for months and is convinced that it worked for him at some point before.
    • –or between a power adapter and a mouse.
  • Speaking of toasters, this customer has to call tech support about one, and they get it to work… by getting her to plug it in.
  • The submitter's boyfriend in this Not Always Working crosspost "Despair-Quits" and hangs up on a customer when they spell out "D-O-T-C-O-M" in a web address instead of "dot-C-O-M".
  • It takes a special kind of bonehead to not be able to tell the back of an iPhone from the front.
  • This person fails to understand that you have to be in range of WiFi for it to work.
  • Hoo boy… This lady starts off by holding her mouse off the ground while using it. Then, when she tries putting a floppy disk in the wrong way, she literally punches it in.
  • This caller doesn't connect her DVD player to her TV, thinking that because they're right next to each other, they "might be able to talk to each other."
    Submitter: “No, ma’am. That’s not how that works.”
    Caller: “Is it because the TV is Korean, and the DVD player is Japanese?”
  • This customer never learned that you could close tabs.
  • This guy can't get his computer to find the printer.
    Caller: “I dun tried everythin’! I even turned the monitor to face it and yelled, ‘LOOKIE!’“
  • This customer wants the submitter to get their data off their phone… which is at the bottom of a lake.
  • This guy thinks it's "too complicated"… when the submitter tells him to push a single button.
  • This guy can't tell his browser from Microsoft Word.
  • A handful of customers don't realize that you can pick up and reposition the mouse when you run out of room to move it. Special mention has to go to this guy, who somehow used computers for ten years without realizing it.
  • On the subject of dragging mice, this woman somehow thought that she could drag files from one computer to another by dragging it with the mouse on one computer, unplugging the mouse, then plugging it into the second computer.
  • This genius tried to get online using a modem… without a computer.
  • This guy might just top them all. Either they are a prank caller or are very confused. They can't tell the difference between Facebook and the Internet as a whole, don't know how to turn off their computer, and don't know what a mouse is.
  • This story is a three-for-one from the mid-'90s.
    • The first user thinks she can use her mouse on the floor with her foot "like a sewing machine pedal."
    • The second destroys a CD drive because he thought it was a cup holder.
    • The third routinely erases his work because he takes the floppy discs they were on and pins them to the wall with a strong magnet.
      The 1990s were fun.
  • Also from "the Windows 95 era," this caller is told to "right-click on the desktop." She writes "CLICK" on her actual desk's top.
    • This guy makes a similar mistake, writing "CLICK" on a note and then putting it on the computer.
  • This customer is unable to tell that her computer is turned off.
  • This user and her boss somehow got it into their heads that having Wi-Fi meant that the user could use her laptop in another city without connecting it to the laptop dock in the office.
  • When this customer is told to bring in the "box" portion of the computer, he brings in the box the computer had come in, with chains on it "so that the programs wouldn’t fall out."
  • “I have this thing… a mouse. Can that have anything to do with my problems?”
  • This woman was told that a computer would help her, but somehow thought that it would do it all by itself, without doing or clicking on anything.
  • “So, why are you trying to run a console game on a Macintosh with an emulated version of Windows on it?”
  • “Yeah, you know? If you tickle the download box with the mouse it goes faster. I thought you would know that, being a tech support guy and all.”
  • This woman thought her computer's mouse was an accelerator pedal.
  • When this guy is told to come up with "six characters" for his password…
    Customer: “You know, you people are ridiculous! How many characters do you think I can remember?! I’m not five years old anymore! All I remember is Pluto, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck!”
• Hospitality for Heroes: Several cases of an awesome customer stepping in to deal with an abrasive or rude one getting assorted freebies or discounts from the store they're in.
• Human Aliens: Meet Qinjax, age 270. Or 45 in Earth years, where he's named Andrew.
• Humans Are Bastards: Not that the alternative is better.
• Humans Are Flawed: For all the horrible customers, there's also an entire section of customers who are awesome, whether by putting the bad customers in their place, doing something extra nice for the employee, simply being incredibly entertaining, or something else entirely.
• Humanity Is Insane: You really have to wonder how some of the customers manage to survive despite being almost completely disconnected from reality.
• Humiliation Conga:
  • This high schooler's attempts to coerce (read: bully) his way into a free lunch at a local restaurant in order to impress his girlfriend fall apart when the owner and employees refuse to cave into his demands, and the jock's attempts to save face in front of his (increasingly embarrassed) date just make him look worse until it's revealed that he didn't even bring any money with him at all and he has to call his dad over to come bail him out, all while he gets berated by the other patrons at the restaurant (as well as his father when he gets there). And even after that, the kid refuses to admit defeat and posts an aggressively negative review about the restaurant that not only ends up getting himself further humiliated but ends up running off a bunch of his father's clients when they learn about it and gets himself severely grounded by his father as a result.
  • The woman in this story throws a shit-fit over losing out on five bucks due to an expired coupon. The cook demands that she either pay a generous tip and apologize to her family and the other customers for her tantrum or have the police called on her and get ticketed for disorderly conduct. She bolts and her husband quite deliberately leaves her driver's license behind as he departs. When she returns the next day to collect it, the owner passive-aggressively mocks her, and the cook reiterates the threat and forces her to comply. One of the comments directly refers to what happened as a Humiliation Conga.
• Hurricane of Excuses:
  • This story.
  • This bizarre example is this trope crossed with Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!. In one conversation, the customer claims to be a lawyer, an assistant attorney general, a board member of the chain, and the owner's nephew.
    Customer: Do you have any idea who I am?!
    Submitter: Do you?
• Hurricane of Puns: seen here.
• Husky Russkie: This guy, though he intentionally plays up his Russian accent to scare the bejeezus out of a creepy guy who keeps calling a local pizzeria to make disturbing sexual comments.
• Hypocrite: Prevalent enough to warrant their own page.
• Hypocrite Has a Point: This customer actually tries to invert it. Even if "Customer" honestly believes Donald Trump is the most racist, sexist, and evil human being to walk the Earth, this does not excuse him hurling racial slurs and making death threats for being asked, politely, to not shout obscenities in a library, or leave quietly, by the white library staff member.
  I’m the son of a black panther, you f*** honky! I’ve been shot twice, stabbed twice, and I’ll be more than happy to do the same to you if you don’t f*** off and leave me alone!
• Hypocritical Humor: This mother criticizes a daycare worker for having a tattoo on her foot. The woman then leans over to reveal a tramp stamp. "I’m an adult! Don’t you judge me!"
  • This Christian lady accuses the non-Christian clerk of stealing profits from the store, only to then be caught attempting to shoplift.
  • “You should learn to f*** speak to people more politely, b***!”
  • This customer tries to be a Third-Person Person and a Grammar Nazi at the same time. You can imagine how effective it is.
  • This skateboarder refuses to let a specific employee touch his board solely because she's female, then threatens to sue them for discrimination when they kick him out for insulting the employees. The coworker who forced him out — who is black like the customer — lampshades it with a "good luck with that, mate."
  • A customer castigates another customer for ordering at a fast-food restaurant because "All the food here is crap!"... then they order something too.
  • “You Mexicans are all the same, never bothering to think that maybe there are more types of Asians than just Chinese people.” For extra irony, the waiter who the customer was complaining about was from Puerto Rico, and the manager he was addressing was from Peru.
  • The mother of one of the most polite customers ever featured on the website tries to tell him that his manners are terrible because he's being polite to a cashier.
  • This one customer complains that she's in a big hurry, and has somewhere she needs to be, wishing the customer in front of her would just hurry up. When it's her turn in line, she then spends the next ten minutes counting out her entire purchase in loose change. And the "somewhere she needs to be in a big hurry"? The lamppost just outside so she can talk on her cellphone.
  • "I have a feeling wearing the wrong socks wasn't the reason she was fired."
  • This guy goes off on a spiel about how his family has owned every pharmacy in town for a century, and how his family has more money than the entire mall he's in, because they don't accept checks anymore. When he shuts up long enough to try using a credit card, it is promptly declined.
  • This customer complains about a store being understaffed due to the snow, noting he's glad the slow moving isn't making him late for work. When the worker asks the customer why they're not at work, the response is, "Duh, the snow! Maybe you’ve noticed it? Are you blind or just stupid?!"
  • This guy thinks "2 can dine for $9.99" on a coupon somehow means taking off ten dollars from the price, rather than paying only ten dollars instead of the actual value. The store he's trying this at in the story is the second one to explain this is not the case, and he still walks off muttering about how they're "too dumb" to honor the coupon.
  • "Well, I’m just going to take my money elsewhere. Somewhere they will appreciate my business. Such at [Big Box Store notorious for its terrible customer service]."
  • This customer, in the same breath that she claims the submitter is being lazy for following the laundromat's policy, admits that she doesn't want to do her own laundry, she wants someone else to do it for her. Even better is she spends an hour trying to get him to do it for her, even though she claimed both that she needed the whole load done by then and that her own washer and dryer at home could have done so.
  • This customer turns out to be a few dollars short for what turns out to be tobacco and cigarettes, but then she immediately flies off the handle at the submitter offering to help her pay for it because he's buying cigarettes.
  • A customer at a convenience store spots an employee closing the sliding door to the ice cream freezer after another customer left it open for the umpteenth time and remarks that it annoys them and must annoy the employee when people leave the freezer door open to potentially ruin the ice cream inside. Guess what the customer does after getting their ice cream?

I–J

• I Always Wanted to Say That: "Why would anyone bother having different kinds of coffee?"
  • "I missed the only time in my life when I could have asked someone if they called that a knife."
  • "Don't call me Shirley! *laughs* I've waited for years to make that joke!"
  • "FUS RO DAH!" Funnily enough, he actually does manage to hurl the would-be thief about a half meter away.
• I Am a Humanitarian: I would like the human plate.
  • I want a woman, the cheap kind!
• I Am Not Shazaminvoked: Someone does this with Madagascar, of all things. invoked
• I Am Not Spock:invoked "No, I look for movie Forrest Gump where he gets big."
• I Am Spartacus:
  • Invoked by the manager of an electronics store in this story, once she learned why a particular customer wanted to exchange some goods recently bought at another of their stores.
  • When this customer waiting in line insults another customer for paying in cash, everyone in line ahead of him puts away their cards and pays in cash.
• I Am Very British: Defied.
• I Am Not Pretty: In this story, a woman comes in with her husband looking for a dress to wear at a military ball, but is convinced that she needs to lose more weight because she's just had a baby, even though she already has a great figure. The submitter convinces her to try on a mermaid cut halter dress, and when she puts it on, she looks (in the submitter's exact words) "drop-dead 50s-goddess gorgeous."
  Customer: I don’t kn—
  Husband: (knocks over chair jumping up) THIS ONE! WE’LL TAKE THIS ONE! (under his breath) ...and after the ball, we can make a sibling for the baby.
• I Ate WHAT?!: In this story, a customer at a buffet brunch place has been regularly consuming what she believes to be "breakfast soup". It's actually a mixture of the mushroom gravy their burgers (made from a mixture of ground beef and pork sausage) are served in, the large amount of hot grease released by said burgers, and the bread their tray was lined with — which was there to soak up the grease, not to be eaten. Upon learning this, she turns bright red and doesn't come back for another six months — and when she does, she doesn't have any more "breakfast soup". Amusingly, many of the commenters think it sounds absolutely delicious, albeit a Nutritional Nightmare.
• I Call It "Vera":
  • Bertha the shotgun.
  • Boris the Russian accent.
• I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin!:
  • "Yeah, I have mites on my, uh... tomato plants."
  • "It's as though you people put crack in it! So do you put crack in it?"
  • "The other day I saw him smoking his broccoli and when I asked if I could he looked at me and said that it's very bad for little girls like me."
  • This one combines this with Freudian Slip.
  • This person misplaces a box containing their medication and then offers the employee and a coworker ketamine. ^note  Ketamine is used as an antidepressant, but can also be used as a horse analgesic as stated by the submitter.
• I Don't Pay You to Think: "When Crazy Requests Reach the Stratosphere" - "You’re not paid to think, so just put a new satellite up."
• I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: This customer brings his vintage gun in for an appraisal and refuses to listen to a legal requirement that he has to bring it in unloaded. He eventually gets agitated and waves his gun around, and winds up shooting himself… in the balls. Naturally he blames the clerk for his injury.
  Manager: “Well… at least he won’t be reproducing!”
• I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: This girl. It was worth a try...
  • Works like a charm for this woman. But not on the employee.
  • This girl attempts one. It quickly goes downhill from there.
  • This girl tries one too. It doesn't work, because the cashier is gay. Even if he hadn't been, her dad saw the whole thing.
  • This girl also tries it on a gay guy, then freaks out once he explains because she thinks "gay = pervert", and she doesn't want a pervert looking at her boobs. She seems completely incapable of understanding that he's not interested in her boobs.
• I Know Kung-Faux: "I don't know karate, but I do know 'crazy' and I'm not afraid to use it."
• I Know Mortal Kombat: This tourist.
• I Love the Dead: OH GOD NO!
• I Need a Freaking Drink:
  • "Who's buying the first round?" Said after finally closing the store, nearly half an hour past the stated closing time.
  • "I drank a lot after that shift." This after, in the submitter's words, having to basically explain every single technological advance related to the Internet, twice, to people who have absolutely no understanding of what the Internet is.
  • This guy's roommate apparently needed this in the middle of the night. Too bad the "drink" he found in the medicine cabinet was a friend's contact lenses!
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: Many examples. Some people don't even have any sort of excuse and just run away in embarrassment.
• I Never Said It Was Poison:
  • This customer is asked to have his bag inspected after a camera was stolen. He immediately flies off the handle at the security guard for daring to accuse him of stealing a camera — forgetting that the guard only ever referred to it as a "stolen item".
  • Among other contradictory excuses, this doctor claims that the dogs he may or may not have never attacked anybody. The caller hadn't mentioned anything about dogs.
  • This customer called his credit card company to dispute charges made on his card, stating that he was a "good Christian husband" who would never have gone to a Las Vegas strip club. There was nothing on the statement to indicate either the type of business or the business location ^note though the poster could tell from their computer system that, yep, these charges were from a Vegas strip club. When the poster asked the customer how he knew the charges were for a Las Vegas strip club, the man stammered briefly and hung up.
• I Reject Your Reality:
  • This bizarre woman. Despite the bookshop worker having confirmation, including camera footage, that the woman did not leave her wallet at the counter but kept it in her bag, she refused to accept that as proof and insisted she left her wallet at the bookshop counter.
    Submitter: "It's quite clear on the camera."
    Woman: "Oh, I don't care what's on the camera."
    Submitter: "…"
  • This woman thinks that throwing away the signs saying that the customer service desk is closed means that the desk will automatically become open.
  • This man doesn't see fries listed on the condensed menu of a restaurant in a mall's food court and comes to the conclusion that the restaurant must not have fries, even after the cashier states repeatedly that they not only do have fries but mentions in the narration that said menu does, in fact, have fries listed on it in a few places.
  • This customer thinks the company he's calling has always had a fifty dollar free shipping offer for over eighty years despite the submitter pointing out the company has never had such an offer and the company has only been around for twenty years, which the customer refuses to believe and kept saying "I'm right, you're wrong!" to justify his delusions.
  • This woman insists that her dying smoke detector is a cricket infestation in her house...even after the smoke detector is fixed.
  • This motel owner tries to find out where a female customer took a taxi to. Never mind why he wants to know that. Giving out this information is illegal per the Privacy Act, but the man refuses to believe such a law exists.
  • This woman is so sure the couple she's approached are siblings that when they kiss to prove otherwise, she cries incest.
  • This woman, after being caught shoplifting, claims that since she "didn't consent to being recorded on security cameras", she can't be arrested for shoplifting. She even called the police on the OP, who promptly arrested her for attempted theft.
  • According to this lady, if it isn't fried chicken, it isn't chicken. How does that even work?
  • This man is continually being scammed out of his money because he refuses to believe that he is not in fact communicating and sending money to his girlfriend Rita Ora. By the time the bulk of the story takes place he's been doing it for three years; the bank ends up closing his account when even the head of the fraud department can't convince him that his money is being stolen.
  • This woman insists that a level crossing is closed to everyone except her.
    Submitter: “No, the trains will continue on this line as normal. The crossing will be closed to pedestrians and cars. You had a letter about it a few weeks ago.”
    Woman: “I put that in the bin because it doesn’t apply to me.”
  • This crank takes the usual "mistakes other customer for employee" song-and-dance a step further by claiming the "employee" is trying to get out of helping him by hiding their uniform under their jacket. He then escalates the confrontation to the point of violence and winds up getting arrested. What's worse is that his dialogue implies this isn't the first time he's mistaken customers for workers and refused to accept it.
  • This customer cuts in line, then acts as though she's always been there, to the point she starts screaming and has to be removed by security. Oh, and this is the second time she's pulled this stunt.
  • This customer tries to argue that the submitter was late as part of an attempted 30 Minutes, or It's Free! scam. When the submitter shows her the timer on her phone saying otherwise, she grabs the phone and smashes it.
    Customer: “I don’t see no f*** time. All I see is your destroyed property on my porch! Now, give me my f*** pizzas!”
  • This customer is convinced that she got her items from the "side room" at the store when really, she's been stealing from the staff room and won't be told otherwise.
  • This woman is insistent she knows her rights better than anyone else and (loudly) complains when people tell her otherwise. She insists that sales on cardigans should apply to sweaters (they're the same thing!) and that she should be allowed to cut in line (the rules of lines aren't laws!). This comes back to bite her big time when she tries to use her son's card to pay for her groceries as she says she ought to be able to. Never mind that her name isn't on the card! Never mind that the store's calling the police! Never mind that the police are agreeing with them! Never mind that her son changed his name and left her! She has a biological mother's right to use take out a card in her son's name, and if the the store, the police, and the judge say otherwise, then they're all wrong!
    The cops repeatedly reminded her that she had the right to remain silent and she repeatedly ignored them. She had no subtlety, saw nothing wrong with it, and just kept admitting her crimes at full volume. Because they weren’t crimes. Because she knew the law and knew her rights better than the cops themselves did. And she would personally tell the judge what the REAL laws were.
• I Resemble That Remark!: A lot. Here's one.
• I Take Offense to That Last One: Lampshaded here.
  Submitter: (to the problem-customer's daughter) ...I'm not saying that's for everyone but you don't want to wake up one day to find you're 50, miserable, bigoted, and rude.
  Problem Customer: I'm only 42!
  Submitter: I'm sure that's what your daughter will remember about today.
• I Want Grandkids: Get Thee To A Nursery! Maybe she will eventually meet this guy?
• I Want My Jetpack: Stealth cellphones.
• I Warned You: This customer bought eighty 80-pound bags of cement, and tried to put them in the bed of his pickup truck all at once. The clerk and the manager told him several times that his truck would get crushed under the weight, and when the customer said it'd be fine, the manager told him to do a thumbs-up to a camera just to prove he was certain about hauling 6,400 pounds of cement in his truck. When the rear end of the truck gives out from the weight, the customer is brushed off when he demands the store replace his truck, telling him that he gave consent to load his truck with the cement even after being warned that this is exactly how it would end up, and they had video with audio of him giving this consent to prove it.
• Idiot Ball: Some of these moments consist of otherwise intelligent customers having ditz moments. A few times, the customer has submitted their own ditz moment.
  • An example featuring both the employee and the customer holding the ball.
• Idle Rich:
  • "One of our customers is a real estate developer — known to have too much money, too much free time, and an attitude — who owns lots of commercial property." Near the end of the story, it's mentioned that the customer in question likes to stand around at his properties and watch them make him money.
  • Seems to be the case with this woman, who has a BSOD when she encounters the submitter - a pupil at her daughter's expensive school - working as a cashier to make extra money. (She later complains to the school, unsuccessfully, that people like the submitter shouldn't be mingling with "real students".)
    Schoolmate's Mother: I've never worked a day in my life, and look how I turned out.
    Schoolmate: Mom... that's not the flex you think it is.
• If I Can't Have You…: Seems to be the attitude of this customer towards the beverages her doctor's told her she can no longer drink, destroying an aisle full of cola products while ranting about not being able to drink it. Thankfully security leads her out before she can reach the whiskey.
• I'll Kill You!: Said by this egomaniac customer. Mercifully, security stops her before anything can come of it.
• I'll Pretend I Didn't Hear That: This call center worker hangs up on a caller who is racist and abusive, despite having specific rules against doing so. A supervisor peeks into their cubicle, revealing he'd been monitoring the call... and pointedly laments how awkward it is when calls "accidentally" drop like that.
• I'll Take That as a Compliment: The attitude of the staff to being told they are all too attractive.
• The Illuminati: Apparently they make canola oil now…
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!: ...before anyone else will!
• The Immodest Orgasm: That went on for over thirty minutes!
• Immune to Drugs: This patient. Combined with low pain tolerance, this causes problems for the hospital.
• Implausible Deniability:
  • "Nope."
  • This man tries to return a library book that has clearly been chewed by a dog, insisting that it was like that when he checked it out (despite the librarian pointing out that they wouldn't check out a book in that state) and it couldn't have happened in his house since he doesn't own a dog. The book in question? A puppy-training manual.
  • This man insists that his son never wore the shoes that he is trying to return in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, namely that the shoes are absolutely caked with mud and the son vocally talking about all the places he has worn the shoes.
  • This woman leaves her two daughters (one of whom is 12, the other a baby) in a hot car while she goes shopping. Desperate for some fresh air, the older daughter tries to roll the window down and accidentally knocks it into gear, causing it to roll into the side of another car. The mother repeatedly insists the other car must have run into hers, despite the fact that it would have to have been moving sideways to hit it that way.
• Impossible Pickle Jar: In this story, multiple people try in vain to open a jar of peanuts either with their bare hands or tools from a workbench, only succeeding in opening it when they use a vise grip. Afterwards, one of the individuals writes to the company congratulating them on "the level of security under which you place your Dry Roasted Peanuts".
• Impossible Task: There is actually an entire category, "Impossible Demands", for things like this. For just a few among many ridiculous requests...:
  • This customer at a shoe store asks for fancy white heels that also have to be hiking sandals, completely waterproof, super comfortable, and have excellent arch support with no backstraps. The manager laughs her out of the store.
  • When these women walk into a Popeye's when they meant to enter a KFC, they seem to fully expect the cashier to just magically turn the Popeye's into a KFC right there on the spot when they realize their mistake instead of just...you know, turning around and going to a KFC.
• Incompetence, Inc.: More a staple of Not Always Working but this small supermarket chain is a notable NAR example. They wind up having a mismatch between the circulars and what the computer system says, which leads to an aggravating encounter . It turns out this is because the circulars were written for a new computer system… that was announced six months ago and hasn't been installed at that location.
• In-Joke: “Yo, b***! I told you not to pay! We had a deal!”
• Incompatible Orientation: Doesn't matter to some people.
• Inflationary Dialogue: A fence built on magic beans.
• Innocent Bigot: This child thinks the Asian slur they picked up from Racist Grandma is just the store's name and is confused that it upset the shopkeeper. Once he explains that it's a bad word, they apologize.
• Innocent Innuendo:
  • Why context is important.
  • I want a woman, the cheap kind!
• Innocently Insensitive: This submitter encounters a particularly abrasive (and racist) customer who mistakes him for an employee. An actual employee commiserates with the submitter by remarking "a wild Karen appears."^note The word "Karen" is censored, but it's easy enough to guess. The submitter, unaware that a "Karen" is a nickname for a particularly domineering Obnoxious Entitled Housewife, assumes that the customer is a regular whose name really is Karen, and when trying to help her, refers to her as such, prompting the customer to go bananas.
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • "...Cause you want to be a mother so bad that you had to take my sweet boy!"
    "If I took him, why would I bring him back?"
    "Stop distracting me!"
  • "Well, I'm older than you and I probably make way more than you anyway, so I’m right." Note that she's disputing an expiration date, which is clearly marked on the bottle.
  • "You just get married so you can have pre-marital sex and babies out of wedlock! You should wait until you at least have a job!" Apparently the job the employee was clearly working at while the customer was yelling at her doesn't count.
    • That's also ignoring the fact that pre-marital sex and having babies out of wedlock, by definition, require you to not be married in the first place. As the employee's coworker said, "I don't think she thought about what she just said at all."
  • In this story, a customer pays for their movie ticket with pre-counted change held inside a roll of electric tape. Naturally, it takes much longer than necessary for the cashier to count out the change - and then the other customer has the gall to try and file a complaint over how long it took when that is entirely their fault. Which, of course, the complaining customer cannot possibly wrap his mind around, as when he is told by a manager that the cashier could have denied them service at any time over this, he reacts by glaring at that cashier as though they did.
  • This customer starts castigating a cashier at a Christian bookstore for said store being open on Sundays. After a bit of back-and-forth, the cashier asks her how she would buy the things she herself is trying to buy on a Sunday if the store wasn't open. Unlike the last time this sort of exchange happened, though, the customer is only briefly stunned by this question before she responds, "It doesn’t matter! You should be closed on Sundays! Now do your job and ring me up!"
  • One client was behind in her payments, and she offered to give them some of the paintings she's made instead. When suggested that she sell some paintings for money to pay, the woman said she couldn't because it would result in her having to break up a marriage. According to her, she would have to sleep with a man to get him to buy a painting, and then his wife would find out and divorce him, and it would be all her fault!
  • This charming customer openly expresses his concerns about the staff of a game store "encouraging" a girl who is mute (due to a throat injury), and insists that they should make her leave...because he believes she's mentally impaired. However, what officially puts his complaints into this territory ^note The girl points out that it's common for people to assume that she's mentally handicapped because of her inability to speak is that he seems convinced that the girl will make other customers impaired, as though it was a contagious disease of some sort. In the end, the mute girl got the last laugh.
  • This hotel guest asks for directions, only to completely lose her shit at whoever gives them for telling her what to do. This even applies to written directions printed from the Internet.
  • This guy says he doesn't want a drink with his order, since his wife is getting coffee from the other restaurant they share a building with. Not two minutes later, he complains about not getting a drink with his order.
  • This customer thinks that Regular Soda + Diet Sweetener = Diet Soda.
  • This woman thinks drinking water is unhealthy and will kill you.
    The water’s for [my handicapped son]. I don’t drink water. That stuff will kill you.
  • Somehow, this woman jumps to the conclusion that her local cosmetics store cannot be trusted and immediately severs all ties with them after seeing a drunk man peeing on a bus stop that bore one of the company's ads and assumed he was making an Excrement Statement about the company.
  • As noted under "Miss Conception," the teenage girl who insists she can't be pregnant because she's a lesbian... who has a boyfriend... with whom she's sexually active... but she can't be pregnant because she's a lesbian and lesbians can't get pregnant!
  • Somebody paid full price (of four dollars) for some ornaments that I was unsuccessfully haggling over? "This is why department stores are going out of business!"
  • This woman wanted to sell some games, but one of them happened to be in the console at the time her family wanted to leave. Rather than turn the console on and eject the disk, they brought the console itself in so the store people could get the disk from it.
  • This customer receives a free car wash voucher for their next visit to a car dealership and somehow comes to the conclusion that the only reason they would do so is specifically that an employee peed in his car as they were cleaning it and the dealership was trying to cover it up by giving him the voucher.
  • A customer tries to prove they didn't spill coffee on the floor... by deliberately spilling coffee on the floor.
  • A woman doesn't want to spend $20 to see a movie at a theater, so she buys a bootlegged copy of it for $15 dollars from a corner shop rather than waiting for it to come out on home video or digital. However, half of the bootlegged copy was blocked by someone sitting in front of the bootlegger, so the woman went to another place and bought a different bootlegged copy from a different store for twenty bucks, but that one was bad, too, so now she is trying to see if the local library has a good copy yet.
    Librarian: [Patron], forgive me for being skeptical, but did you just hear yourself? You bought two bad bootleg copies for fifteen dollars more than you would have spent at the theater.
    Patron: Yeah, I just hate spending so much for the theater.
    Librarian: ...?
  • "I shouldn’t have to pay for it because you don’t have any employees that you need to pay. Besides all my friends will see it and I can give them your info. Of course I should get a ‘finders fee’ every time you sell one–" said by a stranger to the submitter crocheting a wedding veil at a hospital, before being warded off by the submitter's husband.
  • This girl demands the submitter pay her child support...because he didn't call her (since the submitter didn't like her due to her bad attitude and helping her friends steal from the store he worked at) and ended hooking up with her ex who got her pregnant. Somehow this is all his fault despite the baby isn't his and therefore not his problem.
  • A local journalist develops a theory that a chicken laid an egg with a starburst-shaped pattern on it because "the chicken was scared of the eclipse, and she transferred the distress onto the egg somehow".
  • This client rejects a photo of two men working because they think it's a picture of a gay couple. Why? One of them is wearing a polo shirt.
  • This woman uses the "put your phone in dry rice" trick. The phone isn't water-damaged, it has a cracked screen that she expects to spontaneously fix itself.
  • This caller seems to be under the assumption that if you lose two fingers, you lose the ability to dial 911.
  • This woman believes that if you don't call attention to calories contained within snack food, they don't exist.
  • This guest is insistent that a hotel employee stole something of hers – even though she can't find anything missing, and she doesn't even know what the item is. All she knows is that her psychic has told her an employee stole it.
  • This customer, upon seeing the eponymous Wendy's mascot for apparently the first time, immediately comes to the conclusion that, rather than a female mascot for a non-McDonald's fast food chain, she's a transgender Ronald McDonald, resulting in an hour-long transphobic tirade that forces the restaurant to call the police because he's harassing customers.
  • This guy thinks using a fork makes it hygienic to eat from a store's trash.
  • This man thinks it's perfectly acceptable to taste test food sauces in a store using a huge hunting knife to open the bottles, and is insistent that he's done nothing wrong even as he's being escorted out.
  • This customer tries to get a deal based on a coupon for another store that happens to be printed on the back of the first store's coupons.
  • This guy tries to get a discount based on a price-match, but is told that the item he's trying to get it for isn't eligible. His response?
    “That doesn’t apply to me, because I don’t speak English!”
  • Your dog gets bathed after rolling around in poo, only to roll around in poo again? Clearly it's grounds for a refund!
  • In this story, the submitter tells a customer that the ice she's looking for is next to the menswear section. For some reason, this makes the customer think the submitter's mistaking them for a man.
  • This customer seems to think that the submitter is "forcing me to buy a balloon for my kids even though I don’t want to" by buying a balloon herself.
    Customer: “I mean, you can’t just strut around looking all snobby and important with that balloon, showing it off like, ‘Look what I’m getting for my kids’! It makes me look like an a**hole!”
  • When this energy company sends customers free energy-efficient light bulbs as part of a promotion, one customer calls them to say they're "onto them." Apparently he thinks that by sending them bulbs that generate less heat, the company's trying to make customers use their heaters more, and thus generate more energy.
  • This customer apparently thinks the warnings on cigarette packets are exclusionary, since he insists on getting the ones that say "Smoking may harm others" rather than the ones that warn of health issues happening to the smoker.
  • This customer tries to get deodorant and a tampon at a university athletic goods store and has an interesting way of trying to justify this.
    Submitter: “This is the Outdoor Center. We provide outdoor recreational equipment for students.”
    Customer: “Well I’m a student, I’m outside, and I need deodorant and a tampon!”
  • Among other entitled entitled demands, this angry caller demands that the cable company refund him his ~$100 bar bill because he had to catch the baseball game there instead of at home.
  • This motorist thinks that a random gas station should compensate him for a big traffic jam slowing him down. And to make matters worse, he's a lawyer!
  • This family's unruly kids trash a hotel room while their parents get drunk, then get surprised when the damage gets added to their bill.
    Guest: “But we thought the clean-up would be included in the price. That’s why we did it at a hotel!”
    Parents… don’t throw huge children’s birthday parties in hotel rooms.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • Eating popcorn? Psh. This customer prefers the term utilize.
  • It's one hundred and thirty-six! Not one-three-six!
  • Similarly, it's eighty-one thousand, eight hundred and eighteen. Not eight-one-eight eighteen or eight-one-eight-one-eight.
  • As well, this woman insists that not only is the Welsh town Machynlleth properly pronounced Mobblegarnith, but that the Welsh language is "nothing more than silly lies".
  • Then we have this woman, who enters a craft store and wants to buy blueberries. No, they're not a food. They're long. You knit with them. Neither the OP nor anyone in the comments has been able to figure out what exactly she meant, and she storms out in a huff rather than clarify the request in any way.
  • This fast food customer firmly believes that a plain cheeseburger doesn't have any burger on it. In other words, what she's trying to order is basically a cheese sandwich. On the bright side, when the OP (another customer) points out the flaw in her logic, she quickly realizes that "I'm an idiot."
• Insult Backfire:
  • "You’re a Pooh butt! You’re a Winnie the Pooh butt!"
  • This transphobe tells the trans submitter that they'll "never be a man," which prompts a laughing fit from the submitter as they, or rather, she reveals she's male-to-female.
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures:
  • "So are you Chinese or Puerto Rican? It's hard to tell."
  • Combined with Is That Cute Kid Yours? and Racial Face Blindness here.
  • This customer at a Chinese restaurant orders chicken teriyaki (Japanese), then, when told they don't have that, orders butter chicken (Indian). When told they don't do that either, she yells that an "Asian restaurant" should serve "Asian food", and repeats her demand for teriyaki, accusing the server of being a "lazy-a** teenager". Her rants go unheeded, however, and after twenty minutes trying to tell everyone who comes in that the restaurant is awful, she gives up and leaves, attempting to slam the door, which knocks her on her backside.
• The Internet Is for Porn: ...and pedophiles.
• Inverted Trope: Most of the stories are about customers doing stupid things. Occasionally, however, it'll be the employees who goof up. Like this one, when a man with a limp comes in and asks for something "for support." The employee takes him toward the knee braces, when he asks how they help support the testicles. She politely points him toward the jock straps. ^note It's still partially the customer's fault for not being specific in the first place.
• Ironic Echo:
  • This religious customer gives a trans waiter an anti-trans pamphlet instead of a tip, saying "Considering your life choices, I think it’s something that will save you more than any money ever could." The waiter later sees the customer working at a Christian charity which discriminates against the LGBTQ community and says the same line while giving them a pamphlet for a trans charity instead of a donation.
  • This customer complains that more self-checkout lanes are being added, saying "Whatever happened to friendly human interaction?" When the same customer loses their temper with the bagger immediately afterward, the customer behind them throws those words back in the first customer's face.
• Irony:
  • This customer tries to get a return on a stolen game. The game? Thief.
  • This customer's dog helped himself to a treat at a pet store without the owner noticing (said owner, fortunately, was honest and promptly returned to the store to pay for it once they saw what the dog had done). The dog's name? Bandit.
  • This customer refuses to get off her cell phone while checking out of a store... while conversing with the friend on the other end about how she finds such activity rude.
  • The South Park story gets ironic when you consider how the film the mom took her kids to is about how Kyle's mom started a moral crusade over a movie while having a Never My Fault attitude.
  • This customer is attempting to return a book that has very obviously been damaged by chewing. The book in question was a puppy training manual.
  • This woman attempts to sneak a three-year-old child into a museum by hiding him in a very large backpack and ends up getting in trouble with the police when she panics after being caught and claims the child isn't hers. It's noted afterward that admission to museum is free for kids three and under, so the woman went through all of this trouble for nothing.
• Is It Something You Eat?: Here.
  • "But I don't want tax on my sandwich!"
  • "Not a snack?"
  • "abbreviation?"
  • Another example involving wi-fi er, "wee fee".
• Is That Cute Kid Yours?: More along the lines of "why the hell are you having kids?", there are cases where a customer sees another person with a child and berates them for having children at a young age. In nearly every case, the customer is so wrong.
  • Like here. A woman accuses a 15-year-old babysitter of having a child after seeing the babysitter and the three-year-old neighbor being watched in the park. Never mind that it would have been impossible for them to be parent and child, given the ages. Also, not the same nationality.
  • Luckily, the younger sister of this sibling pair points out the age problem and puts the nosy customer in their place.
  • Another kid shaming attempt here, but an employee intervenes and allows the accused to set the whole record straight. Amusingly, the employee was only expecting something along the lines of "none of your business".
  • Here too. Turns out, the kids are hers, but she's very well off.
  • This customer somehow assumed a guy was a teenage mother.
• Is This Thing Still On?: It is.
  • The ultra-rare somewhat nice version.
• It's All About Me: So many customers in these stories seem to take "the customer is always right" to mean "my satisfaction comes first, everybody else here can go to hell" – enough in fact to warrant their own page.
• It Amused Me: The reason this hotel guest destroyed a $400 toaster.
  Submitter: Why would you put a paper bowl through the toaster?! The sign says bread and English muffins only!”
  Guest: "I don't know." *giggles*
• It Seemed Trivial: A flower food maker gets a client complaint according to which their product is too acidic. The maker excludes both a manufacturing mistake on their side and a dosage mistake on the client's side. It can't be the water either, because this happens in a country where everyone gets the same ridiculously clean water on tap, and both companies are using it to dilute the product. Four weeks' worth of tests later, both sides are stumped as to what the problem is. Until the client's representative casually mentions the hydrochloric acid they're adding to the water to prevent bacterial growth.
• It's for a Book: This woman probably really is writing a book, but it seems to be a weird one.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: To the point where "popular" is "I've heard about this". invoked
• It Tastes Like Feet: The complimentary coffee in this store, according to the OP, who works there. Doesn't stop people coming in for it though, because hey, free coffee!
• It Will Never Catch On: “This smartphone thing is just a fad, you mark my words!”
• Jar Potty: This boy really needed to go to the bathroom while out shopping and his mother let him pee inside a plastic cup. While this normally wouldn't be an issue, the problem was that she left the cup behind a mirror in one of the fitting rooms. Gross...
• Jedi Mind Trick: This isn't the resort you're looking for.
  • Apparently it's common.
• Jerkass: Enough of a staple of Not Always Right to warrant its own page!
• Jerkass Realization: There are a few instances where the customer realizes that they've been a complete jerk to others and make up for it.
  • This customer humiliates a server in front of a crowd of people because she's never seen a $2 bill before. He returns later to apologize.
  • This caller, after berating a medical office worker for following procedure, calls back to apologize for her behavior and say that she understood why the procedure was like that.
  • This hotel guest felt so bad about flipping out at an employee that the guest told the employee's boss about the situation, resulting in a raise and a complimentary penthouse stay for the employee.
  • This woman, who was convinced that a coworker who saved her kid's life was attempting to kidnap him. The next day, she comes back and apologizes, thanks him, and gives a glowing review to his boss.
  • This customer chews out a woman who parked in a handicapped space, assuming that the woman was perfectly fine and just taking advantage of the privilege. Once the woman rattles off a list of disorders that she has, the customer later apologizes for her behavior and even offers further help.
  • This man, after realizing that he was mistaken about a fast-food promotion and acted quite out of line towards an employee and manager for it, comes back and offers to buy a meal for them.
  • This kid acts hostile towards a store's employee and decides to steal something in revenge. After the employee calls him, he realizes the error of his ways and returns the item, and becomes a more polite regular of the store.
  • This twentysomething man cuts off another person in a parking lot, parking in a handicapped space, despite his car having no such privilege. Once he sees that the person he cut off is a 96-year-old-woman, he helps her into the store.
  • A customer who flips out at an employee returns a few days later to apologize for her behavior.
  • This customer insults their driver over being a male with long hair, but after the driver explains he donates his hair every year to Locks of Love, the customer apologizes (since he had lost his son to cancer).
  • An elderly man bawls out a cashier over not honoring a sale that only takes place on Monday and Tuesday on a Wednesday (thinking it was still good on Wednesdays) and hauls them out to show them that he's right. When it turns out he's not, the embarrassed man admits to reading the sign incorrectly and is calm and friendly for the rest of the transaction.
  • A man acting like an Entitled Bastard in a restaurant drive-thru over a new trainee multitasking leaves feeling ashamed of himself (and later came in to apologize for his behavior per the word of the submitter in the comments) after the employee serving him indirectly calls him out on his behavior.
  • This person thinks a deaf employee is being lazy and physically attacks her. The customer even goes so far as to try and yank out her hearing aid. Fortunately the customer realized what they did.
  • A man flips his lid and shouts at the submitter when he comes back to get his truck from car service and discovers that the truck's floor mats had been moved from the floorboard of the truck to the back for safety reasons and storms out. The next day, he comes back to apologize for his behavior over such a small thing and gives the submitter a large coffee shop gift card.
  • This woman gets impatient at a restaurant's drive-thru and yells at the cashier over the speaker. She then pulls up to the window and sees that the cashier was doing everything, from taking both drive-thru and counter orders to packing up the food, all by themselves (the cashier's co-worker had flaked out on them to chat with her friends instead of helping them). The woman is mortified and immediately apologizes for the way she acted before.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: This rather strange old woman seems to balance constant grouchiness with kindness. She donates to a children's charity… in hopes that the money will make the next generation turn out better with "all the TikTok and whatnot." She complains that the submitter looks too glum and is too weak… and buys her a meal. She complains about a cat coming up to her and of the cost of vet bills and cat supplies… and adopts it and buys it the best cat food.
• Joke and Receive:
  • This customer forgets what he's looking for. An employee jokingly asks if he's looking for memory aids, which turns out to be correct.
  • A customer pays for a $70 purchase with 70 single-dollar bills; the cashier jokingly asks if the customer is a stripper, and is surprised by the "yes" answer.
• "Just Joking" Justification: Absolutely skewered here via Ironic Echo. Sadly, the customer (and said customer's friends) didn't seem to get it.
• Just Plane Wrong: This customer reacts with dread when he learns his flight from London to Berlin will be in a propeller plane rather than a jet, because "if the engine stops working, the ‘plane will fall from the sky!", as if propeller engines are powered by magic and immediately rob whatever they're powering of all forward momentum the very instant they go out.^note For the record, even if propeller engines are inherently more susceptible to engine failures than jets, passenger planes are designed to glide safely in the event of engine failure so as to reach their destination, or the closest and safest alternative, without risking the safety of the passengers. And furthermore, if the aircraft has multiple engines, then even if one engine fails, the other engine(s) can keep the plane aloft until it reaches the nearest airport.

K-L

• Karmic Jackpot: When doing kind deeds have rewards:
  • This guy, who is having a bad day and has lost his job, chases out someone who was being verbally abusive to an employee. Karma kicks in for him almost immediately when the person behind him pays for both their drinks and tells him they have a job opening for a computer technician, which he gladly takes.
  • This university shop worker covers for a customer's remaining payment. It turns out the customer had some connections in high places, and the worker is treated to an in-person viewing of Leonardo DiCaprio.
  • This employee fixes a customer's laptop very quickly and charges nothing for it. The customer returns later with a case of beer as thanks.
  • At an airport on a stormy day, a customer tries to help move things along by directing all the fliers checking in to the self-check kiosks, so the agents can work on re-booking people whose flights got canceled. When their own flight gets delayed by the foul weather, one of the agents gives them a free lounge pass as thanks for their help.
  • After handling a caller who was not only abusive but trying to fraudulently avoid paying car insurance for her teenage son, this agent finds out their boss was secretly monitoring their calls for a potential raise, and staying professional and calm for the whole call gets them approved for the highest rate.
  • After helping an elderly customer take her groceries to the car and making small talk about their financial goals, this shop worker gets a $20 tip from the customer, and then finds out that she went to the store manager and told them to give the worker extra hours so they can afford their goals.
  • In this story, the then-teenaged submitter and their brother are regulars at a toy store's weekly Pokémon card tournament, and soon enough they start showing up early to help set up for the tournament alongside another employee (who couldn't care less about Pokémon). Soon enough the employee just quits showing up to help the kids set up, leaving them to run the whole tournament by themselves. Eventually, after three weeks(!) have passed, the store's staff realize that the submitter and their brother were running everything, but they are so impressed with how good a job they have been doing that they forget about the slacker employee^*Nobody ever seems to find out what happened to him, whether he quietly quit his job or spent the morning in the break room while the submitter and their brother ran everything and just hire the submitter to run the Pokémon tournaments full-time!
    To this day, I still have it in my resume that my first job was as a Pokémon Master. The strange thing is that not a SINGLE employer has ever questioned it.
  • While helping a friend shop for clothes, this sharp-dressed submitter is mistaken for a salesman by another customer. After helping her find an actual employee to answer the question, the store manager appears, compliments the submitter's tact and courtesy in handling the situation, and asks if they want a job (they do, and they start the next week).
  • A two-for-one case in this story. The store's owner shows compassion to a local homeless man, instructing the employees to always give him two sandwiches and a drink and let him pay what he can, even if it's just a few coins; the OP, a cashier, takes this to heart and treats the man with kindness. One night when the OP is working alone, shortly after the homeless man has come in for his regular meal, the store is attacked by an armed robber; the homeless man, who was sitting nearby to eat his food, hears the commotion, runs to a nearby pub and tells them to call the police, and then immediately rushes into the store to subdue the robber, quite possibly saving the life of the cashier, who had already been knocked unconscious. The homeless man then gets a Karmic Jackpot of his own as his story makes the news and he receives multiple job offers, allowing him to get off the street and get his life back together.
• Karmic Nod: After impulsively slapping a teenage hostess's behind and getting whacked in the throat with her clipboard hard enough to draw blood, this guy immediately admits he deserved it and tips her a hundred dollars as an apology, as well as continuing to apologize for the rest of the evening.
• Killer Rabbit: "When was your last tetanus shot?" "Let me see... honey, when was I bit by that duck?"
• The Killjoy: This bizarre customer takes issue with a cashier being too happy as they work.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: The most aggressive cat in the shelter gets adopted by one, who renames him Creampuff. Most of the shelter workers are convinced the adoption will fail and the cat's rehabilitation progress will be ruined. As OP learns, however, this is very much not the case and he is now a ball of cuddles.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: A lot of customers show up thinking they know best. None of them can be reasoned with. All of them are wrong.
  • One prime example is the husband of this couple, who demands a 75-inch, 40k resolution television. As the sales clerk tries to explain that there's no such thing as a 40k television, the husband insists that he's an engineer who does his reading and knows what he's talking about. When his wife finally gets a word in edgewise, she reminds him that he's a structural engineer, who doesn't so much read as make up numbers to one-up his colleagues, and she's constantly having to tell him which way around the remote control works.
  • This customer is trying to buy wine, but all his knowledge about wine comes from a YouTube video that gave him incomplete information that he wildly misinterpreted. He demands French wine without elaboration, not knowing there are many kinds of French wine, purely because he "heard it was the best"; he doesn't know wine is made from grapes; he rejects the wine the submitter suggests because he thinks "corked" refers to a cork being used at all rather than a foul-tasting chemical produced by a bad cork contaminating the wine; and he doesn't even know that wine is alcoholic.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: This lady gives up screaming about the price of Christmas storage items when the cashier grabs a nearby sign to show her it DOES say they're excluded from the post-Christmas sale. Apparently she expected the cashiers not to have the option of proving her wrong, as she's specifically described as surprised when the cashier steps away from the register to get the sign.
• The Klutz: This customer, who drops the phone and remote repeatedly until the call drops.
• Lack of Empathy: A young couple putting items on their wedding registry, when a Code Adam is announced, don't care that a child is missing and are only concerned that it's interrupting their shopping. The woman declares that it's the parents' fault for "not paying attention to their little brats" and the man threatens to take their business elsewhere if the worker helping them goes to look for the child. For those who don't know why it's called a Code Adam: it was named after an American child named Adam Walsh who went missing from a Sears department store in 1981, and the only part of him ever found was his decapitated head.
• Lady Looks Like a Dude: Invoked by name here, by a rather disheveled woman.
• Lame Comeback: One that's not even in response to an insult, made by someone who seems to consider everything at the store "stupid".
  Cashier: “Have a nice day!”
  Customer: “Well... you... DON’T have a nice day!”
• Land of Faerie: They have natural lilac hair with blue tips, big grey eyes, and slight Irish accents. They come from Canada.
• Language Equals Thought: "No, I want a JACKET..." The seller is from Washington and considers a "jacket" a specific style of outerwear. The customer is from Arizona, and any item of outerwear is a "jacket". She wants a winter coat. The seller later quizzes their coworkers and finds that none of them distinguish between styles of outerwear.
• Large Ham: Some of the aforementioned Cloud Cuckoolanders.
  • This guy does a good job of it.
  • THE LARGE MOUNTAIN JEW!
  • STAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANK!
  • How this customer copes with his Jerkass roommate forcing him to buy pet food for his cat at 4 in the morning after a terrible shift, just so he can go clubbing.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Now has its own page.
• Later-Installment Weirdness:
  • The addition of non-dialogue stories can be seen as a minor example.
  • After avoiding crossposting for a very long time, late 2020 onward has seen an increase in stories crossposted from various "bad customer" subreddits.
• Lethally Stupid:
  • This mother lets her young son play around unsupervised with dangerous chemicals at a university lab, on the grounds that her husband is a chemist so he's used to doing such things. Of course, when the sink explodes, her first reaction is to yell, "Your wretched lab could have killed my son!"
  • This person demands a refund after the pet fish they bought only a week earlier died, even going so far as to accuse the pet store of poisoning it. It turns out that the reason the fish died was that the owner took it out of its tank... because they thought it was drowning.
  • The client in this story calls a technician round to his house to fix his network, despite the fact that he's in quarantine. He can't understand why the tech has a problem with this — after all, he's feeling fine, and look, he's wearing a mask! And yes, the tech got infected as a result — an asymptomatic case, as it turned out, although had they not overheard the client casually mention on the phone that he was quarantining, they could have ended up passing it on to goodness only knows how many people.
  • In another pet fish horror story, a teenager's Silver Dollars (the fish, not the currency) all die less than twenty-four hours after she purchases them because she took them out of their tank to "play with them". There is much internal screaming from the submitter until an elementary schooler in line behind the teen reams the teen out for somehow not realizing that fish need to stay in water to survive.
  • This aquarium worker apparently regularly has to deal with parents dangling their babies over an open shark tank, who tend to react with disbelief and/or anger when told not to. One dad apparently thinks that, if he drops the kid, the minimum wage worker will simply just jump in with the sharks to retrieve them.
  • Similarly, this grandmother is mad that the submitter – a lifeguard – stopped her grandson from jumping off the high-dive as he's not a strong enough swimmer. When the lifeguard points out that if her grandson jumped, he would drown, she retorts that that's what the lifeguard's there for and calls the submitter lazy.
  • This tourist thought a bird was thirsty, and thought the appropriate reaction was to dunk it in seawater.
  • A relatively minor example, but still…
    Submitter: “Sir, it’s only been a week. If your TV stopped working, then our warranty should cover the defect.”
    Customer: “I’m pretty sure my idiot son playing with a compound bow indoors isn’t considered a defect — at least not for the TV.”
  • This customer was told that the best place for a hamster was in an aquarium – she took that to mean one full of water. The poor hamster's dead within an hour of being sold.
  • “You know how much fun it is to drive a bulldozer when you’re sober? IMAGINE THAT WHILE YOU’RE DRUNK!”
• Let Me Get This Straight...: Somewhat common on here. A customer has a crazy, if not impossible, request. The store associate repeats it back to the customer, just to make sure that he/she hears correctly, and often rephrasing it to highlight the implausibility of it. The (often Jerkass) customer will probably respond in one of several ways: "Well? Get going! I'm not waiting here all day!", "Argh, you're just being lazy/intentionally unhelpful!" or, best of all, "Exactly! God, is that so hard to understand?"
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again:
  • After a customer realizes they're holding the Idiot Ball, they may apologize and then say this. One example featuring a customer who lost track of what day it was.
  • Said by the submitter in this story after discovering that the dead mouse they called an exterminator for was really a cat toy.
• Life Imitates Art:invoked A physically deformed, sweet-natured person who does fine wood carvings.
• Lifesaving Misfortune: This story is what happens when the "Why is my large and complicated order taking so long, I have important places to be!" customer's "important place" is the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. One week later, the customer is back to thank the worker for the delay with his wife and daughter in tow.
  • This owner of a London recording studio was forced to cancel his flight to the US for Christmas because the night before the scheduled flight, a clueless manager locked up for the night while several people were still inside, ultimately requiring the intervention of the Fire Brigade to liberate them, and the owner had to stay in England to deal with the mess that resulted (including a very peeved Fire Brigade). The flight the owner was supposed to be on was the ill-fated Pan Am 103, which was brought down over Scotland by a terrorist bombing.
• Like Is, Like, a Comma: Um, like, literally!
• Like Mother, Unlike Daughter:
  • The mother and daughter of this story could not be more different. The mother nearly has an aneurysm when she learns that the OP, who is working as a cashier at a grocery store, is attending the same expensive prep school as her daughter, even when OP doesn't reveal the real reason (they come from a poor family and want to help ease the burden, instead saying they think working would become a more open-minded person). Said daughter, on the other hand, is shown to be much more down to Earth and understanding, even cheerfully greeting OP upon realizing its them. Their dynamic is summed up perfectly with this exchange following OP's fake excuse for working.
    Mother: Nonsense! I’ve never worked a day in my life, and look how I turned out.
    Daughter: Mom… that’s not the flex that you think it is.
  • This story about a woman who takes pleasure in finding something to complain about every time she enters the store, and her daughter, who is mortified by this, and takes steps to ensure she doesn't have anything to complain about by secretly pre-ordering every variety of oatmeal before her mother comes in, finds out which variety isn't on the shelf, and insists she can only have that one. After the mother has had the wind taken out of her sails, the daughter donates the other boxes to charity.
• Literal Metaphor:
  • "Would you like to see my bird?"
  • "[The intercom]'s just making duck noises."
  • This guy, after blowing up when the clerk says they can't check the situation unless they have a name, repeatedly says "You have no idea who you're dealing with!" As the clerk points out, they really don't, which is the problem.
• Literal-Minded:
  • That's not what the computer manual meant when it told you to plug in your mouse. For the sake of poor "Mickey," let's hope this was just a crank call.
  • "Flip off the power switch"
  • Python needed to run script.
  • Here's a tip for ya... Fortunately, she does understand the real meaning of the word.
  • Software can convert photographs, but it can't make the people in the photograph convert their religious beliefs.
  • "Employees must wash hands."
  • This kid. He knocks over a display of soup cans, throws one at another customer, then smashes a glass bottle - all because his mother told him to "make someone else miserable for once".
  • “You want me to right-click?”
  • A Lethally Stupid example with this story. A woman is told that a hamster could live in an aquarium (as in, a dry aquarium), she takes that to mean that hamsters could live in an aquarium filled with water.
  • Apparently "bald eagles" are all old eagles.
  • This child's mother had just been teaching him, "If you don’t have anything nice to say, then you say nothing at all." Apparently, rather than understanding that this meant "don't say anything", he interpreted this to mean he was supposed to literally say "Nothing at all!" to anyone he couldn't say anything nice about.
  • This woman's sister told her that if she "kicked up a fuss," she'd get a discount. She took that to mean that she could get a discount by literally kicking everything in the restaurant.
• Little Girls Kick Shins: In this story, a little girl kicks the shin of a horrible customer while saying "You! Are! Not! A! Nice! Man!"
• Logical Fallacies: A fair chunk of the entries on the site are of customers who, when confronted with the fact that they might be wrong about something, choose to stubbornly hold on to their mistaken belief in the face of all evidence and logic otherwise. This leads them to some breathtakingly inaccurate conclusions.
  • This customer. Also, a fairly Egregious Begging the Question here.
  • Apparently Japan losing WW2 means their food isn't safe to eat.
  • And this one, although some might argue that this should be made a law...
  • If you never wore it, how do you know it doesn't fit right?
• Locked Door: Inverted here The guest didn't know that their door was unlocked because the locks use regular physical keys rather than cards.
• "London, England" Syndrome:
  • "I would like a ticket to Paris, USA."(Perhaps an inversion of this trope, as the customer assumed this just happens because Americans are stupid, and ends up looking like a fool because of it.)
    • This Canadian manages to fall afoul of a similar situation since it's not immediately clear to the cashier whether the customer is talking about the Canadian province of Ontario, or a city named Ontario.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Attempted by this woman. The daycare had a rule that parents must sign out their kids by 4 PM or face additional charges. The woman signed her daughter out on time but left her there while she ran other errands for another 45 minutes. Luckily, the daycare didn't put up with her crap and charged her anyway.
  • This man, too. The restaurant had a policy that if the customer didn't get a receipt, their meal was free. What does he do? Shove the money into the drive-thru attendant's hands and immediately speeds to the next window. The drive-through guy didn't have time to even offer a receipt, but that matters not. The speeder argues this point and sadly gets away with it. Drive-thru guy wises up, though, and offers a receipt before taking the money next time the speeder rolls around.
  • This man wants a bunch of free ice cream samples in a cup. It's not a cup of ice cream, you see, because it's all free samples! The employee didn't put up with his crap, though.
  • This grocery store customer attempts this with coffee beans, which were priced by weight. As a single coffee bean's weight is minuscule (and therefore technically costs nothing), she bags numerous beans individually in an attempt to circumvent the pricing. Unfortunately for her, she didn't anticipate the automatic checkout to catch her tactic — it stops because she didn't combine them. The manager then weighs all the beans and bags she tried to make off with and forces her to pay the massive price for them because, according to them, they couldn't take back food that was handled.
  • The customer does have a point about a retail store's return policy.
  • This woman attempts this with taxes by trying just about every combination of filing possible in order to maximize her return.
  • This customer picks off one ingredient every time he orders a burger so that he has another burger at the end of the week.
  • This lady walks into a movie theater with half a bottle of wine and attempts to invoke this trope.
  • This guy attempts to make up his own loophole after being told that, by city mandate, he must wear a mask while in the building. First, he declares that he's a concealed-carry owner and "knows the Constitution", then tries to invoke the "thirty-ninth amendment", which doesn't even exist.^* The story takes place in Colorado according to the tags. The US Constitution has just twenty-seven amendments (and, if all the current proposals were passed, would still only have thirty-three). As for Colorado's state constitution, its process works differently; the 39th amendment would be the 39th one proposed, which didn't actually pass, and, obviously, had nothing to do with mask-wearing anyway. Repeating his boast about "knowing the Constitution" fails to impress anybody, and after being threatened with police action, he backs down and puts a mask on.
  • This group of drug users change up who books the motel rooms where they partake, so the motel staff can't tell it's the same group and doesn't have their names to ban them all.
  • This drunk tries to get around drunk driving charges by going out for more beer by riding a horse into the store. The submitter never found out if he got arrested or not, but at the very least, he didn't get his extra beer, and he was last seen having a discussion with a police officer.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: This guy prank-calls a video store asking for porno. Turns out they have an entire section. He turns into a polite repeat customer.
• Love Overrides the Law: Subverted. In this story, a guy thinks he shouldn't have to pay for the damage he and his girlfriend did to a hotel room due to this trope.

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