The website Not Always Right has some entertaining stories, but they have some recurring themes that ping my BS meter (e.g., there seem to be a hell of a lot of people who say “that wasn’t so hard now, was it?”). One of these is the person being mistaken for a store employee, explaining they don’t work there, and then the customer, instead of saying “I’m sorry” like any normal person, accusing the narrator of lying and not wanting to do their job because they’re lazy. Then the manager tells the customer the person doesn’t work there but the customer refuses to believe it and insists the “employee” be fired.
Now I know there are some mush-for-brains antagonistic people in this world, but this scenario just doesn’t ring true to me – perhaps especially because the pertinent details seem nearly identical in a fair number of stories. I’ve certainly never seen such a thing, but I wonder if anyone here has.
It rings perfectly true to me. The stories are all different, with different dialog and different situations.
What would be the point of making them up? It’s not like the site is desperate for content.
I’ve certainly had seen and heard of bizarre customer interactions; my daughter has them all the time. People just don’t listen and think that threats and bullying will get what they want.
Okay.
There are some differences, but too much of the dialog is the same. It’s almost as if someone said “Here’s the template with the prescribed statements. Make up some details so it appears different from the last one.” I find it hard to believe that there are so many people who say “this lazy bitch just doesn’t want to do her job.”
I agree it doesn’t seem to make sense.
That I find quite believable. It’s the number of people saying almost exactly the same thing that raises my suspicions.
Have you ever worked in retail?
I love reading NAR, but I hope to god it’s almost all made up because I don’t think I could stomach knowing I share oxygen with so many idiots.
Though sometimes I wonder how the customer’s description of a given anecdote would go down. I often suspect the writer of engaging in some selective reporting to make themselves look better.
I’ve been a big fan and avid reader of the site since someone on here (probably Annie-Xmas) linked to it years ago. I agree the topic you mention crops up more than you might expect but personally I don’t find it unbelievable. If anything, it could be that readers of the site submit fake stories (I doubt the owners of the site bother, and if they did it wouldn’t really be in their interests to just rehash old content) and there is essentially no way of the editors spotting this, but even if that’s the case, who cares? Occasionally I read a piece on there and think one or more of “so what”/“I don’t get it”/“you come across as a teen who cares too much about uninteresting stuff” but I just move on - I think the good content on there more than outweighs the indifferent or repetitive.
Maybe the site doesn’t make up the stories, but people submit fake stories, seeing if they will get selected.
Never been to the site the OP was talking about, but I always feel this way when I peruse some of the funny pins on Pinterest.
The things that get me the most are the iphone/text conversations. Especially the “I wasn’t that drunk” text conversations It’s absurdly easy to photoshop these things, yet I see comments all the time that lead to me believe people think these stories are real.
In fact. most published social media things ping my BS-o-meter. Tumblr conversations and Instagram posts and the like. I really believe that 90% of the time people just think of a story or an “aww” moment in their heads and pretend it’s real. And stupid people believe it because they don’t think.
More on-point to what the OP was talking about is the famous post of “I like to dress as a Target employee on black friday and boss people around.” As a former longtime employee of Target I cannot tell you all the reasons why this wouldn’t work IRL, yet people insist on passing this stupid meme around and reacting as if it’s a thing that’s possible.
So I’m with you OP, if the story is too good to be true…it probably is.
It’s not the idiocy; it’s the aggressive idiocy.
A common theme of so many of the stories seems to be “Person has a fixed idea and is completely not open to new information.” Which, I guess I can believe (and explains a lot about [political jab redacted]), but it makes me wonder how such people survive to adulthood, let alone function in society.
They could be true. They do have an urban-mythiness sound to them but there are a lot of stupid obnoxious people in the world. I once witnessed a woman at take out restaurant say hi to another customer waiting in line. The other customer indicated she didn’t recognize her. The woman began to insist the other customer worked at some nearby place and completely ignored their repeated denials. I don’t know who was right but one of them was acting somewhat nutty.
Not Always Right sounds believable; there are millions of customer-employee interactions every day and some go badly. The stories aren’t too far-fetched either.
Of all the arguments for/against this site’s authenticity (and I am neutral at this point), this one carries the least weight.
People make shit up all the time, for little or no reason at all. Only the gullible would doubt that.
Not only do people make up shit, but others believe the shit that’s made up, and make up more shit. That’s my theory of everything, BTW.
Sites like this tend to attract more-of-the-samey-ness - like Clients From Hell, there’s a tendency for readers who hit on a story that resonates with their own experience to contribute a similar one of their own.
I imagine some embellishment often goes into the retelling too - but that’s normal even if it’s just people retelling episodes of their life around the dinner table.
I saw my fair share of whackadoodles while working in food service so I wouldn’t say they are made up, but a lot of them sound like greatly exaggerated accounts of things that have actually happened. Like, maybe someone insisted you were an employee but I doubt they had a mental breakdown over it
They have a lot of companion sites, like Not Always Working (lots of incompetent nurses, apparently), Not Always Romantic, Not Always Friendly, Not Always Learning and Not Always Hopeless (sometimes glurgey, but I like to read it.) I don’t do NAF or NARo. I read a couple on those sites and they were beyond stupid or TMI, so I stick to NAW, NAL, NAH, and NARi.
NAR and NAW are long-time favorites but I absolutely agree that many of the stories are old jokes, repeats of earlier submissions, or sheer inventions.
Occasionally a story on Not Always Right sounds fake to me, but it’s not the ones cited by the OP. I can believe that people can be that bullheaded. The ones that I don’t believe are when the employee has just the right snappy comeback for someone, or comes up with the perfect way to respond. Some of them are clearly the things the employee wishes that he had said or done in the moment, but didn’t actually do.
Why wouldn’t it work? Anytime I walk into a store wearing a solid color polo shirt, someone inevitably thinks I work there and starts to ask me where the training bras are or something like that. Doesn’t matter that I don’t wear a name tag, or that my red shirt isn’t the same as the staff red shirt. A lot of times, even when I tell them I don’t work there, their next question is, “Can you tell me where to find someone who works here?”
I’m reasonably sure that if I walked into a big box store on Black Friday wearing the right colored polo shirt and a pair of khakis, I could convince shoppers that training bras are located right next to the motor oil.
I frequently get the same feeling as the OP, but I think it’s more about the submitters “enhancing” the dialog to heighten the conflict. I can easily see a customer come in, demand an item the store doesn’t carry and then treat the employee like an idiot. Flat out saying “Well, you’re obviously stupid,” rings a little false. An overweight woman being treated with disdain by staff at a clothing store? Nothing particularly unbelievable about that. Explicitly telling her “These clothes are only for pretty girls like me!” is pushing it. Also, like SpoilerVirgin, I see a lot of interactions that read much more like “This is what I wish I had said,” rather than “This is what I said.” Also also, I’ve never in my life heard an actual person, in all seriousness use the sentence “This is an outrage!”
Worked both retail and food service.