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WMG / Not Always Right

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Some stories are submitted by customers.
Some people who post on the website as employees or bystanders are actually the customers who are looking back and feeling embarrassed so they post their experiences as if they were not the ones who did it but were instead simply witnesses.

Some customers show up in the comments sections to defend themselves.

There are enough instances of commenters defending the often indefensible behavior of the customer in a Not Always Right story to make one suspect they have a very personal reason to side with the customer.

One of the customers in this entry was trolling the other one.

It just seems unlikely that two people have never encountered a non-working escalator in their lives. I say either Customer #1 brought up escalators going flat when the electricity's out to see if their gullible friend Customer #2 would buy it, or Customer #1 does genuinely believe this and #2 decided to play along.

Many of the stories are made up
A lot of the stories seem to follow the same pattern, usually involving the Laser-Guided Karma path that doesn't often occur in real life. Also, there is usually a badass customer in line that takes out the antagonizer. The victim/employee ends up dating said badass.
  • Also, it seems like everyone, even children, can make an improbably long "The Reason You Suck" Speech on the spot.
    • Unless it's when someone is confronted by bigotry in which case Fridge Brilliance kicks in. Part of the reason they are able to think up a good "Reason You Suck" Speech is because they've likely been through this before.
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  • While many stories are likely to be at least exaggerated or removed from context, crazy stuff like that does happen in real life, as well. And when you have hundreds of thousands of posters from all over the world, unusual events can come up rather often.
  • For a while there was a suspicious glut of stories where the Laser-Guided Karma came in the form of a police officer who just happened to be behind the abusive (or scamming) customer in line. Those seemed to stop appearing when commenters on their facebook community started questioning how plausible it was that this would keep happening so often.
  • Given the nature of anonymity and the site, there probably are a lot of made up stories on there, or at least stories that have been skewed to suit the author's preferred outcome. However, it's not out of the realms of the impossible that many if not most are true:
    • The formula of the stories can be explained, in part, but the fact that most business / retail transactions in general tend to follow the same formula anyway (customer approaches business, transaction occurs, customer leaves), meaning there's not going to be a huge room for variation to begin with.
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    • The unusual stories stick in the memory more. The people who submit to the site probably have to deal with any number of rude, irritating or deceitful customers on a given day, but most of them don't make the site because they're not very interesting or are easily forgotten. The idiot who tried to steal with a cop standing right behind him or the nice customer who stood up for you when some jackass was screaming at you, conversely, sticks out a bit more.
    • The whole point of the site, in part, is to chronicle those things that wouldn't normally happen to people, or that are unusual or distinctive or unlikely. Hence, a large number of seemingly unlikely things are going to be recorded simply because a lot of people are submitting them; on average, they're still unlikely, but if you collect together a whole lot of unlikely things in one place they start to seem more common.
    • This story seems to be rather similar to an urban legend of a young lady spitting in the face of a parent who believed in never teaching their children manners. Perhaps the site has become partly "rewrite urban legends"-themed?
      • One story in particular was obviously fake, to the point where you wonder why they even bothered. The mixed-race daughter of an Arab woman and a white man is in a restaurant when the waitress starts presuming she's adopted. She's not even remotely malicious about it, just ignorant. When the daughter says that the woman's her biological mother, she suddenly flips out for no reason, screams racial obscenities, and says that she's being kidnapped and tries to "rescue" her. And then when the father arrives she asks why they didn't just tell her he was white and none of it would have happened? How on earth could anyone be fooled by such rubbish? Yes, idiots like the waitress do unfortunately exist, but if she was racist to such a degree why didn't she have any problems with her being adopted? Why is she a-okay with an interracial relationship, but not with an Arab woman having a white child?
  • There are probably a lot of stories on there that start with a real customer encounter and then proceed to tell how the employee wishes it had played out.
  • Given the formulas, it's possible that a single event would end up creating multiple different accounts as well, especially if we're hearing about it second- or third- or nth- hand, after it's been telephone-effect'd into an Urban Legend.

The encounter with this Trump supporter is highly embellished, if not outright fabricated.
  • A man in a MAGA hat being a Jerkass is plausible. A man in a MAGA hat who not only behaves like a Jerkass, but calls math and science "liberal voodoo" and claims he doesn't need it because he has Jesus strains credulity. Not to mention that the entire encounter is set up to make the employee look as intelligent as possible, while the customer is made out to be a cartoonish buffoon.

The manager in this Not Always Working post knew the submitter had the day off all along
  • The manager needed extra help for the day, and rather than just flat out ask an employee to come in on their day off, he or she decided it'd be more effective to scare them into coming in by insisting they were already supposed to be there. The submitter was either chosen at random, or just seemed easy enough to intimidate.

The commenters who claim "I'm sure this story has been made up" are the jerk customers from the stories


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