what’s the strangest customer feedback you’ve heard?

by Alison Green on July 11, 2024

This week’s “ask the readers” question comes courtesy of this reader:

I was talking to one of my friends the other day and the topic of hilarious customer comments/complaints came up. I had one that I’ve carried with me for about a decade now and I wanted to share it:

“The worst paper in all of human history. Quite like cheap construction paper, but with unpredictable reactions to wet and dry media. Extremely fragile. Breaks into rubbish at the slightest application of compressed charcoal, an eraser, or water. Could dig a hole to China in minutes if the earth was made of this material. Unusable for nearly all art media. ZERO similarity to last production run.”

It makes me laugh every time I read it and I was wondering just how many other people out there have something like this.

Let’s discuss funny customer complaints/reviews/feedback in the comments!

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{ 1,512 comments }

{ 1,512 comments… read them below }

  1. Nanni dislikes Ea-nasir*

    So good it’s echoed down the millennia:

    Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message: ​ When you came, you said to me as follows : “I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.” You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: “If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!” ​ What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe(?) you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and Šumi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Shamash. ​ How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full. ​ Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.

    1. Caramel & Cheddar*

      Thank you for posting this, I’ve never actually read the source material despite seeing people jokingly refer to this guy all over the place.

        1. 1LFTW*

          Same, and I’ve been on the Internet for decades. I’m glad to have finally made the acquaintance of Nanni and Ea-Nasir.

      2. Jennifer Snow*

        The one that stuck in my head from working online customer service was the guy who called to complain that his protein powder didn’t have a scoop in it. I asked if he could use the scoop from his previous purchase. No. So I suggested he just measure it with a measuring cup since the packaging listed the amount in grams and *quick math* it was just over a third of a cup. His response? “I dunno I guess I’ll see if I can find a YouTube video or something.”

    2. Cubicles & Chimeras*

      A true classic. And Ea-nasir kept his complaints! He’s like those companies who use their terrible Google Reviews as framed art in their bathrooms.

      1. So Nerd*

        So these tablets were generally unfired clay; they were meant to be reused (they could be soaked to make the clay soft again). Any clay tablets that are preserved, it’s usually because there was a fire in the building where they were kept.

        So… does Nanni have an alibi?

        1. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

          He could have formed a mob with everyone else who’d been cheated…

        2. Cubicles & Chimeras*

          They were, but he just had them kept in a pile with other complaints. That to me reads keeping your hate mail to laugh at later.

            1. Reluctant Mezzo*

              Beats having a pash note corrected for grammar and spelling (cf UP THE DOWN STAIR CASE).

    3. Falling Diphthong*

      Lordy, it’s like all the complaints about how The Youth these days are unserious.

    4. Siege*

      I was looking for new office decor a few weeks ago and got a sticker that says “Well-behaved copper ingot merchants rarely make history.” I framed it. I’m still hoping someone will ask about it despite the fact we’re basically fully remote.

      1. WantonSeedStitch*

        NICE. I love the XKCD parody of “My Favorite Things”:

        Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,
        Bright copper kettles leave flakes on my mittens?
        Hey, this is stone with a copper veneer!
        I’ve been bamboozled by Ea-Nasir!

        3. Pterodactyls are under-cited in the psychological literature*

          I remember that one! I burst out laughing and my daughter came running upstairs to ask what was funny so she got an impromptu history lesson.

    5. Zoe Karvounopsina*

      And poor Ea-Nasir doesn’t seem to have been that bad! Here’s this guy, complaining that Ea-Nasir’s holding out, just because he’s owed money…

      (In all seriousness, Ea-Nasir was a copper merchant in an era when quality copper was declining, and we know that most of his contracts were government. His complaints, which he kept, were from the small number of private merchants he sold to.)

      1. ecnaseener*

        Yes, it’s such a good illustration of how little we can know for sure even with primary sources. Was Ea-Nasir a grifter? Or were his customers trashing him unfairly to try to get refunds? Or something in between?

        1. Miette*

          It’s like reading Glassdoor reviews…you have to take the rants AND the raves with a grain of salt…

    6. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      Now is when I really wish we had a like button. The original and still one of the best.

    9. not nice, don't care*

      My black copper marans rooster is named Ea-nasir (Enos for short). Complaints about him are more noise related than copper quality though.

    10. Miette*

      OMG I was clicking through hoping someone would mention everyone’s (least) favorite purveyor of sh*tty copper…

    12. Julia K*

      Ea-Nasir is without a doubt the worst copper merchant I’ve ever heard of.

      But I HAVE heard of him.

  2. Sally*

    As a teenager I worked in a deli. I once received a complaint directed at me personally – a customer thought I “didn’t explain the sausages” to him sufficiently when he asked.

    1. Nerds!*

      How on earth does one not explain sausages sufficiently? They are sausages, what more do you need to know?

      1. zinzarin*

        There are so many kinds of sausages. Seriously. I’m not saying the customer’s feedback was right, but sausage is a category, and the category is both wide and deep.

        If OP had said “they’re sausages; what more do you need to know,” the customer’s feedback would probably be appropriate.

        2. AngryOctopus*

          OP does say “not sufficiently” which makes me believe that they explained what they knew, and the customer just decided that wasn’t enough.

        3. Vaca*

          A million years ago a foodie friend of mine went to a deli in Astoria. It was Greek owned and had a vast assortment of feta. He went up to the counter and asked, “can you tell me about these? How are they different, which one should I put on my Greek salad, which one should I eat by itself?” The man shrugged irritably and answered, “Is Feta.” Then he walked away.

          2. Cheese-a-holic*

            Im in Australia and people of Greek decent seem to value the Dodoni brand feta, marvelling at is superiority and authentic taste, but then also complaining that eye watering price compared to the cheaper Australian, Danish and Bulgarian feta varieties.

        4. Macropodidae*

          There’s a small local meat shop near me…it’s not exactly a butcher, more like a local meat farm started a little store, then expanded a bit into doing other stuff, including making their own sausages.

          They offer “Sausage Roulette”. You say how many you want and they just choose for you. It’s super fun! You have to cut them up though, so one person (my Dad) isn’t stuck with an entire jalapeno cheddar one. It’s like wine tasting, only with sausage.

          1. Susan Calvin*

            If I got a jalapeno cheddar sausage randomly assigned to me you’d have to physically fight me to get to share it, that sounds *amazing*

      2. Irina*

        I might want to know if there’s nutmeg in a sausage before I eat it, because I’m somewhat allergic to that. But I’ll ask, not expect the waitperson to “explain” unasked.

        1. Ro*

          Is nutmeg commonly in sausages? I assume so if this is something you need to check for but I had never thought about it.

        2. Leeky Cauldron*

          My friend has a fructose intolerance and can’t consume too much of the allium family, but it seems most restaurants wont list garlic or onion in their dishes cause I suppose pretty much everything has garlic and/or onion it it

          1. Suzie*

            I also have an allium intolerance. Restaurants are very difficult because they don’t list it on the menu but if you ASK, they tell you you can’t eat anything on the menu because of possible cross contamination… but it’s not an allergy. I’m fine if you chop up my peppers on the same chopping board as an onion, it just can’t be an INGREDIENT. But they always have to check because it’s in so many prepared sauces etc.

            I now try to just go to pubs and have fish and chips or a burger every time.

      3. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

        Maybe it’s a philosophical question… but WHY does the sausage exist?

        1. Macropodidae*

          Because it’s delicious?

          Historically, it was the true nose-to-tail (use all the edible parts, including the intestines as the casing) solution to feeding your loved ones. Plus it could be preserved via drying or curing.

        3. Ineffable Bastard*

          They exist as a reference to the ouroboros and the concept of self, where the pig’s tripes are filled with their own other parts, in a long, convoluted, interlinked performance of the ephemeral art of food.

          Also they are a means of using pretty much all parts of an animal (fat, skin, blood, etc), and can be dried/cured/smoked, which means that they can be eaten in the months one is not slaughtering animals. They are also kinda portable, because of their shape and dryness, not needing refrigeration or a brine barrel to carry on trips, while still being filling and caloric.

      4. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        Are you serious? There are so. many. sausages. Links. Patties. Loose. Cured. Uncured. How are they seasoned? What meats are in them? What are they good for? I probably have four or five types of sausage in my fridge or freezer right now (andouille, lamb merguez, salami, breakfast patties, and bratwurst for the grill).

      5. Artemesia*

        Paulina market here in Chicago has at least 35 types of sausage at any one time and they are dramatically different. Some are cooked and need only reheating; others are raw and need to be well cooked to be safe. There are summer sausages that can be thrown in the backpack for a hike without concern for refrigeration. They are made with different kinds of meat; some have cheese in them — I love their lamb sausages and they have at least six kinds of brats. when I shopped there years ago I needed someone who could explain the differences to me. Now of course I have my favorites.

        1. Sevenrider*

          I love Paulina Meat Market!!! I don’t live in Chicago anymore but I really miss those kinds of places found in Chicago.

      7. Abroad again*

        Oh man, don’t say that to the Germans. I didn’t know there were so many kinds before moving here. And they’re different than the American ones, to boot!

      8. Seeking Second Childhood*

        “Sausages are where the butcher hides his mistakes.”
        – Matilda Bone, by Karen Cushman

    2. Trout 'Waver*

      This is especially funny to me because “how sausage is made” is an expression for something that people don’t want explained.

      1. Dragon_Dreamer*

        And then there’s scrapple, “everything they won’t put into the sausage.” ;)

          1. One Potato Two Potato Three Potato Four*

            I live in eastern PA though not a native Pennsylvanian and I love scrapple. Especially with a fried egg or two.

          1. Dragon_Dreamer*

            More like a pork loaf of *everything* left over after the sausage is made. Mostly the head, heart, and liver. Sometimes eaten with maple syrup. Sometimes ketchup.

            Sometimes both.

            I once talked to a friend from California who’d tried it while drunk at midnight the week before. Halfway through, he was sober. A week later, he told me about it.

            So I told him what he’d actually eaten, because no one else would tell him. THEN he threw up. ;)

            1. Boof*

              We admire cultures that use “every part of the animal” in some comments, and lament foods that use “every part of the animal” in others… XD
              … not that I’m usually a fan of highly processed meats, admittedly!

            2. Give it a try. . .*

              We also eat it with apple butter–if you are in eastern PA and can get it, Bauman’s apple butter on scrapple is the top of the line for our family.

          3. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

            Thank you for that explanation, Mr Dibbler. I trust your throat remains uncut!

            The other explanatory description is “emulsified high-fat offal tube”, à la Yes, Prime Minister.

            1. Chuffing along like Mr. Pancks*

              I firmly believe that the greatest gain Britons will ever see from Brexit is the freedom to once more label the aforementioned meats of questionable provenance as “sausage.”

        3. College Career Counselor*

          Was coming here to say this! That’s almost exactly how I describe scrapple to someone who has never heard of it.

        4. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

          I always say that scrapple is everything they sweep up off the charnel house floor.

          1. Jasmine*

            I had scrapple once. Tasted good but would have tasted better if my friend hadn’t told me what it was.

        5. Cherry Sours*

          Hey, do you think Spam doesn’t use the same parts? The manufacturer of Scrapple simply believes in putting the truth out there.

          I once had a post on a different group entitled “Spam or Scrapple? The Great Debate”

      2. Gritter*

        “Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them being made”

        Often attribute to Otto Von Bismark, I don’t think he ever said it, but it’s a useful phrase non the less.

      3. Hashtag Destigmatize Therapy*

        IMO this is why veggie sausage works so well. It doesn’t feel as weird as other imitation meats because the ingredients were “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” all along anyway.

        1. Christine*

          I didn’t much like animal sausage when I ate meat, and I don’t much like vegan sausage now. My husband loves the stuff, though, so loads of Field Roast is on the shopping list.

        2. Managercanuck*

          Oh, we had veggie sausage in England that was just like eating stuffing. It was soooo good!

    3. Irish Teacher.*

      When I worked retail, I once had a teenage girl come in looking for a specific type of bacon her Home Economics teacher had asked them to get for a cookery lesson, except she couldn’t remember what it was that the teacher had asked for and seemed to expect us to be able to tell her.

      She wasn’t blaming us though, to be fair. More like “um, do you have anything that fits this description of what my teacher wants us to get.”

    4. WantonSeedStitch*

      “Hot sausages, two for a dollar, made of genuine pig, why not buy one for the lady?”

      “Don’t you mean pork, sir?” said Carrot warily, eyeing the glistening tubes.

      “Manner of speaking, manner of speaking,” said Throat quickly. “Certainly your actual pig products. Genuine pig.”
      -Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett

          1. Reluctant Mezzo*

            And then there’s rat onna stick, with or without ketchup. Plus fine mica for the discerning troll.

    7. Morte*

      I would think folks would complain more about the opposite, too much info about what was in a sausage XD

  3. Anon for this*

    Because I’ve shared this before, I’m going anon for this. My favorite customer response happened 10 years ago, and to be fair they were 100% correct that our tech was behind the times a bit due to our delay in getting off of Java:

    “…will you guys be supporting Chrome at all? That’s all I ever use any more…explorer is all but gone — and firefox is so passe.”

    I have the screenshot saved as “Passe” in my files.

    1. Warrior Princess Xena*

      I don’t follow which browsers are “in” but I do seem to recall Firefox being relegated to the second-tier class when I was much younger. It seems to have had a resurgence since.

      1. Clisby*

        And rightfully so. Not because of its amazing features, but because, at least in my experience, Firefox is much more reliable in just WORKING with online forms. Anytime I have trouble with a website while using Chrome, my go-to is to start up Firefox.

      2. Great Frogs of Literature*

        I’d say that Firefox is a little scrappier (reputation-wise) than other modern browsers, because it’s the only fully open-source mainstream option, but it’s very much a modern browser, and preferred by many people because it’s open-source. I always side-eye sites that tell you to use them with Chrome or Edge and not Firefox.

        1. Sharpie*

          I’ve been a Firefox user ever since Internet Explorer was the browser most used to download other browsers.

          It’s good, does what it needs to, doesn’t track you across the web, and it’s open source. Which for me is pretty important in a day when Google and Microsoft want to know every single thing you do on the net.

          1. Chonky*

            Absolutely! But I also remember the time when Firefox was more than a bit chonky. Used lots of space and ram when those were scarce and expensive. It was definitely an issue that kept folks off of it at the time. Almost a non issue now, of course.

            1. Worldwalker*

              I ought to try Firefox again. I got fed up with memory leaks and switched to Vivaldi.

              1. Cherry Sours*

                I like Firefox for most things, but am destined to use Chrome until I complete the last two years of my degree, it’s the only one that works well with our school computer platform.

          2. Mornington Crescent*

            Same! I’m the only person in our team to use Firefox, everyone else uses Chrome, but it’s very heartening that our head of website development also uses Firefox as his primary browser!

          3. Rocket Raccoon*

            I don’t think I’ve ever used a browser other than Firefox, except to cross-check problems with my internet. I am very, very tech unsavvy and all my IT work is done by my coder brother. He set up Firefox, so Firefox it shall be.

      3. fine-tipped pen aficionado*

        There was a moment (I want to say like 10 years ago but don’t quote me) where Firefox got slow and memory hungry and a large number of people switched to Chrome. Then a few years later Chrome got super memory hungry and had all the privacy issues so folks started switching back to Firefox which had solved its own speed/memory issues and was now pitching its privacy as a major selling point.

        All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.

      4. Vio*

        I used to love firefox but they made a massive change at one point (I think it was around version 50-something) that not only broke every extension (some of which were never updated) but also changed pretty much everything about it. For some reason (probably has something to do with being neurodivergent) I just couldn’t connect with the change and eventually discovered Pale Moon which was based on the version I was used to.

      5. jasmine*

        chrome is leagues behind firefox when it comes to user privacy. plus firefox has cooler extensions

    2. Dragon_Dreamer*

      Reminds me of the one I got when I did phone support for a brown shipping company in the early 2000s. He kept referring to “Intersh!t Exploder” and “Netscr@pe” (except replace the first e with a u.)

      The only annoying part is that he kept trying to get me to use those terms as well. He was mildly upset that I wasn’t playing along with his “joke.”

      1. Siege*

        I hate that nonsense. When I worked in fast food in the 90s we had a regular for a couple of weeks who always tried to mess with the drive-through order taker on lunch – things like ordering some perfectly reasonable thing and then “joking” at the speaker that he actually wanted six or whatever’s he also called Dr Pepper Dr Pecker, and it’s like, do you honestly, HONESTLY, think you are either funny or original? Do you think we appreciate you? Do you think you are a bright spot in my day?

        I now know why we make fast food jobs so terrible; as the person I am now, there are so many customers I would just absolutely send packing because I have no time for you to screw up my lunch rush. Except for the guy who drove around in the open top convertible with his shirt halfway undone and chest hair everywhere who called me “doll” and “babe”. Him, I’d light his stupid Miata on fire.

        2. Vio*

          I had it from the opposite side once. We went to a certain popular American burger place and I ordered chicken nuggets with fries. The woman insisted that they didn’t have chicken nuggets, they never sold chicken nuggets and never would. They only had MAC-nuggets and if I wanted them I had to ask for McNuggets and not nuggets. For some reason I was feeling particularly stubborn and just went to a different server and asked for nuggets which they delivered with no problems.

          1. Broadway Duchess*

            I unreasonably MAC-hate this person. It’s like when Starbucks was really committed to getting everyone on board with its ridiculous drink names and sizes. You’d order a small and they’d be like, “Small? Hmm, did you mean a tall?”

          2. Madre del becchino*

            I once worked for the *other* popular American burger chain and had to tell people at the drive-through that ‘no, we don’t have Big Macs here.’

            1. Siege*

              We would just say “we don’t have Big Macs. Do you want a Jumbo Jack?” If they didn’t, that was a them problem because the nearest McDonald’s was literally miles away. But typically they did, and we didn’t mess around trying to make them say the name of the actual burger.

          3. Parakeet*

            When I was about eight and ordering for myself at the rival popular American burger place, I ordered chicken nuggets, and they insisted that they didn’t carry any such thing. I knew that they carried the thing I was trying to order because I’d had them many times before. But I didn’t understand what they wanted me to say, and gave up and ordered something else. I guess that particular company’s nugget-like things are called chicken fingers or chicken tenders or something.

            To this day, I think the server was being a jerk to pull that with a little kid just learning to order for themselves. It’s hard for me to imagine that they truly didn’t know what I was referring to.

        3. Distracted Procrastinator*

          I had a coworker who would use the derogatory nickname for the city I live in every time he needed to name the city. Not once did he use the actual name.. It was so childish and dumb. it wasn’t offensive but it was annoying. Not shocking, but he was also condescending and as misogynistic as he thought he could get away with being (not a lot because my company keeps a lid on that crap.) Luckily dude got his butt fired for incompetence and I didn’t have to listen to his “jokes” anymore.

      2. ThatOtherClare*

        I will admit that I referred to Explorer as simply ‘Exploder’, no profanity. In fact, I now say ‘Exploder’ when referring to Edge (so long as it’s clear from context to what I am referring), because I still find it amusing.

    3. We're BtWBH*

      Where I used to work we referred to it as Internet Exploder because it was so crashy.

      1. Tasha*

        My husband calls the Ford Explorer the Exploder for their tendency to burst into flame

        1. Rocket Raccoon*

          Same. Also insists that FORD stands for Fix Or Repair Daily. In all fairness we had a bad run of luck with Ford that culminated in switching to Dodge.

          2. Cherry Sours*

            We’ve done well with our 4 Ford vehicles, no major issues. Well, except all 4 were totaled by other drivers. In one case, the driver was attempting to turn a corner, give the baby a pacifier and restrain an unleashed puppy.

          3. Jellyfish Catcher*

            I heard it as Found On the Road Dead.
            I had a terrible run with the one ford I ever bought; Never Again.

    4. Vertigo*

      That’s so funny! I mentioned to my boss once a few years ago that a tool we used for remote recording didn’t support Firefox and he replied with “Isn’t Firefox a bit….2014?”

      I had no idea how to respond to that besides “no, it’s still popular?”, but I guess there’s at least one other person who felt the same way he did.

  4. Fluffy Fish*

    Not me but a colleague. Their job involves posting on social media. It is gov so obviously people have feelings, but generally the posts are mild and not remotely controversial.

    I can even remember what the post was other than in was totally innocuous – think a long the lines of a post sharing a buildings operating hours.

    A guy responded and called them “a greasy-palmed shyster”

    1. Nerds!*

      Wait, we can accept bribes for posting operating hours? Hot damn, I’m gonna make sooo much money off this!

      2. blerg*

        Just remember to delay receipt of payment until AFTER you post. Then it’s not even a bribe, it’s a gratuity!

    2. Political Nonsense*

      My state auditor (elected position) posted on X about an innocuous debate on a regional food item and someone responded “Go audit something. Stop the political nonsense.”

      1. blerg*

        That’s funny. It shows how pretty much anything an elected official says while on the job can be considered political. Including “nice day, isn’t it?” or “I like hot dogs.”

        1. CheeseHead*

          My county government job has paid volunteer hours, but has restrictions on which organizations you can volunteer for. My request was turned down since it was “too political”.

          I had asked to volunteer for the city to staff the upcoming election. Which I guess is, by definition, political.

    3. Zipperhead*

      I once worked on the social media team for a university, and we got so many oddly infuriated complaints about inoffensive posts we made. We announced a therapy dog day at the library during finals week — a dozen therapy dogs available for pets and hugs from students — and people posted in a rage about pampered weakling college kids wanting to pet dogs! This is why America is so weak! Petting dogs! (gnash gnash gnash)

      Another time, we posted about a very large monetary gift for the university’s engineering college. So much rage! You’re not known as an engineering school, you’re known as a music school! Stop posting about engineering! (They also got mad when we posted anything about the college of music, of course.)

      We should’ve banned so many of our commenters, but the boss thought we were required to let trolls run wild on our page.

      1. Me, I think*

        “…the boss thought we were required to let trolls run wild on our page.”

        Yeah, no, it’s your page. The place I worked just removed the bad posts for the most part. The trolls can get their own page, it’s easy, and they can write whatever they want.

    4. FricketyFrack*

      Trade you! We have one frequent flyer on our gov facebook page, and he’s both a bigot (who says everyone else is racist against *him*, a white dude) and his relationship with reality is…complicated. A post on a city page about fireworks being illegal turned into him talking about drug cartels, human trafficking, and a proposed county tax increase to fund a new prison. He also routinely refers to himself as “the George Floyd of [city]” even though he’s never even been arrested afaik. Even the most boring, routine post gets lunacy.

      1. Fluffy Fish*

        we have one of those! he comments on pretty much every agency’s posts similar to that.

        my favorite part is he doesn’t live here. he lives a state over.

    5. Marz*

      I worked for a local government that posted an April fools joke video that involved Bigfoot. someone immediately commented about the waste of taxpayer dollars in buying a Bigfoot costume. and so they had to respond all jolly “whaaat that’s Bigfoot but if there were, say, it would’ve been borrowed for free.”

      i would find it absolutely exhausting being social media for government. give me a break, let people have some fun

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        There is always someone out there determined to ruin everybody’s good time.

    6. But maybe not*

      Please know that I was able to work “greasy-palmed shyster” into a conversation with my boss immediately following reading this.

    7. Lydia*

      This, and this alone, is why we are directed to turn off the Discussion on NextDoor posts.

      1. Fluffy Fish*

        we’re not allowed unfortunately. i would like to be able to on at least certain posts but our elected leaders does not want to restrict people’s free speech in any way.

        the workaround is social media sites have their own terms of service so if people violate them and say Facebook removes them? not a violation of free speech.

        1. Chick-n-Boots*

          Sadly, it won’t stop them (or their ilk) from complaining about their loss of free speech because they do not understand what the 1st Amendment means or how it applies.

  5. KHB*

    Not mine, but one of my colleagues’. We’re in the magazine world, and she handles letters to the editor. She wrote back to one letter writer to let him know that we were rejecting his submission. His reply: “Thanks. Good decision.”

  6. Judge Judy and Executioner*

    Many years ago I worked in a retail establishment known for plus-size clothes that rhymes with Borrid. Multiple customers complained that we didn’t have their size, and only had plus sizes.

    2. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

      YUP. Happened when I worked at Borrid, too. “You’re discriminating.”

    3. Hush42*

      I kind of understand this one, their clothes are super cute and I was a *tiny* bit disappointed that I couldn’t wear their clothes anymore when I lost weight. However, it would never occur to me to complain to an employee about it.

      1. I'm A Little Teapot*

        There have been times that I wished they carried smaller sizes, because they had the item of clothing that I wanted.

        1. Quill*

          There have been times that I wished they went one or two sizes smaller because there’s still a gap between what they carry and what is actually, instead of theoretically, available at the rest of the mall. This was back when I couldn’t find a size 10 or 12 anywhere.

      2. PhyllisB*

        I wish people wouldn’t get cute with store names. I can’t possibly imagine what store you are referring to (and I would like to know because I am plus size.) I can understand if you’re saying something extremely critical, but this is a very innocuous comment.

    4. AnotherOne*

      My mom worked at a different plus size store back in the day, which was always hilarious cuz she’s tiny. And they required employees always have on at least one item from the store.

      Customers would get annoyed sometimes when they’d walk into this store and see my sz 4 mom- which i totally get. But sometimes they’d make comments annoyed that someone not plus size worked at a plus size store.

      My mom would just go- yeah, I used to be larger but than I started working here.

      1. Elitist Semicolon*

        I’m not sure what she meant by that comment but it seems like it could be interpreted as insulting to the customers?

        1. I'm just here for the cats!!*

          I took it to mean that the job is physically demanding and so she lost weight because of all the activity. If you’ve never worked retail you don’t know how active it is.

        2. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

          nah, it’s just because you run around all day if you work retail. It can be pretty dramatic- I started wearing out shoes faster and definitely went down a couple of dress sizes.

      2. allathian*

        All the salespeople I’ve ever seen ay the plus size store I buy nearly everything from are also plus sized. I like it because they understand the issues of finding nice and well-fitting clothes that I face. They can also wear the clothes from the store. Last time I went in to buy some jeans, the cashier looked so good in an ankle-length summer dress that I immediately tried on the dress in my size and bought it.

        I also don’t object to another plus size woman estimating my size the way I would if a smaller woman did the same. Body shame is irrational.

    5. Nancy*

      In a way, that’s kind of a compliment. Your clothing must’ve looked like clothing that anyone could wear not just stuff meant for plus size people.

      1. The OG Sleepless*

        A sales person handled this with me very graciously once. I walked into a plus size store by accident because the clothes were really cute. I was immediately approached by a pleasant sales person who said, “Hi! Are you shopping for yourself today?”

        me: “…uh, yes?”

        Her: “OK! Just to let you know, our sizes do start at 16.”

        Me: Oh! OK. Now that I look around, I see that. But there would have been no reason to actually complain!

    6. WantonSeedStitch*

      I’ve complained at some times in my life that I was too busty for standard sizes and not large enough all over for plus sizes, but I never griped about the mere existence of plus-size stores!

      1. Aleae*

        I think we have the same problems! Any tips on how you solve this, professional clothing wise?

        2. Distracted Procrastinator*

          Get a good tailor or hire custom made. eShakti.com is a good place to start for that. You can order according to your measurements. (and customize skirt/pant length, sleeve length and style, and necklines on most styles.) Lots of cute professional styles priced around the same as Lands End or Ann Taylor.

          1. Sociology rocks!*

            Man this looks great. I need a mens version. But at least I can pass it along to some tall friends.

          2. WantonSeedStitch*

            Just as a warning, I’ve heard eShakti has gone severely downhill in terms of actually delivering what people order. Stuff is not arriving for MONTHS. I’ve heard a lot of outrage.

            1. AnnyFlavash*

              I’m so bummed to hear that! I have a couple of their dresses and I adore them. It’s so nice to have things that just freaking fit.

            2. Kitry*

              As a 6’1″ woman I use Shakti religiously. They can be VERY slow (months at times) but they do reliably deliver. This isn’t a new thing; they have struggled with slow shipping times on and of for years.

            3. Walk on the Left Side*

              Can confirm — ordered a dress on 05/09/2024 and they haven’t updated status since, and also did not respond to my attempts to contact customer service.

              Had to get a dress somewhere else for my event. Considering waiting to see if eShakti ever gets to my order, because it is kind of an awesome dress…I guess we’ll see. I was very, very disappointed as their website still specifically says delivery time is approximately 2-4 weeks.

            4. Sarah Mae*

              Yep. I am a loyal Eshakti customer and am still waiting for an order I placed in February. They did finally reply to my inquiry as to why it was taking so long but I had to email a couple times. When I checked last week, it looked like my order was almost ready to ship. *fingers crossed*

          3. Chick-n-Boots*

            Holy crap – I’ve never heard about this site and you just totally made my day. THANK YOU!!!!

        3. Anonymous Rex*

          With button downs, I either sew them shut or I slip a large safety pin in from behind and run it between the top two layers to pin it down, doing that between each button.

          Sewing pros: permanent, never worry about losing a pin, can use in washing machine without worry.
          Sewing cons: permanent, more holes needing to be made, tying them off is annoying if done by hand, machine sewing success is highly dependent on various factors.

          Safety pin pros: removable if you don’t want it to be a pull-over anymore, easy and fast with practice and can be done anywhere.
          Safety pin cons: pins will eventually bend and need replacing, can create larger holes, though technically can be thrown in the wash with the pins in it’s a gamble on thinner fabrics.

        4. WantonSeedStitch*

          Mostly stretchy knit dresses! And there’s a shirt from Riders by Lee Indigo (go to Amazon and search for that and “3/4 sleeve shirt”) that has a surprising amount of room in the bust and an extra button to prevent gapping.

      2. Annika Hansen*

        So if you are at the larger side of standard sizes like 12 or 14, you actually may be able to shop at that store. They go down to a 10 (but it is more like a 12 or 14 but with actual boob room). My best fitting dress is from that store. I have similar issues. If it fits across the bust, it too wide in the shoulders.

    7. Beebis*

      When I was 14 or so my friends and I accidentally wandered in there not realizing it was a plus size focused store for a minute. So we just turned around and left to go to another store.

    8. JSPA*

      And not even true? Some of their “0” sizes overlapped with other brands’ L, from what I remember?

  7. Elle*

    My first job in high school was a counselor at a nursery school summer camp. I was assigned to the two year olds. A mom complained to me that we weren’t teaching the kids to read. The kids couldn’t hold a paper cup without spilling it and she wanted them to read.

    1. ferrina*

      yeah….back when I worked at a nursery school, most of the parents were absolutely lovely, but there were a couple odd ones.

      One toddler (boy) had lovely, long hair. His mother loved his long hair and would always leave it down. Except since this kid also had a perpetually runny nose, and his hair constantly ended up sticking in the snot beneath his nose. I gave it about a week, then put his hair in a ponytail so we wouldn’t have to constantly clean snot out of his hair (just from under his nose). His mother was livid- she said I was trying to make her son look like a girl. I simply told her that it was an issue of hygiene and she was welcome to bring her son in with any hairstyle that kept the hair out of his face when he had a runny nose. She kept bringing him in with hair lose, and I kept putting it in a ponytail (only if it actually got snot on it, which unfortunately would happen usually within an hour), but she never tried to argue with me again. It also helped that he was learning by leaps and bounds in my classroom, so she couldn’t accuse me of doing a bad job.
      You could also tell the poor kid wasn’t interacted with much at home- not neglected, but not really talked with or had parents that were interested in him as an individual. I never saw his mom attempt to listen to him- she’d talk at him, but wouldn’t look at him while he responded (she’d usually turn her gaze to the adult and just keep talking). He was pretty confused when adults interacted with him, and he had slight speech delays that are common when young kids don’t actually get to practice conversations (on the flip side, I had one kid that had 4 older siblings that clearly practiced his talking with him all. the. time. and that kid was talking in full sentences before he was 2.)

      1. SarahKay*

        I remember a downstairs neighbour saying that her third child was talking way, way more quickly than the first two, and it was because the older two talked. Lots. To anyone, really, (they were very friendly chatterboxes) but child three was obviously the easiest target.

        1. Ghee Buttersnaps*

          That might explain the extreme loquaciousness of my family’s fourth (and final) sister.

        2. Jasmine*

          I spent time with a friend and her 10 yo son who chatted a lot. She said, He never stops talking but it’s because I talked to him constantly from the day he was born. The child was quite pleasant and rather entertaining!

          1. The OG Sleepless*

            My son spent a lot of time in speech therapy for pragmatics (he’s neurodiverse and had a hard time coming up with his own words for things). At age 24, he’s very chatty and has a vaguely stylized way of speaking, either from the neurodiversity itself or spending all that time talking to speech professionals.

      2. CommanderBanana*

        Haha yes, I nannied for a delightful toddler and I’m a big talker, so all we did was chat, and she could speak in full, clear sentences before she was two.

        Having a two year old who can speak clearly is a double-edged sword though, as they have no filter and will comment on everything and everyone they see.

        1. Ally McBeal*

          My cousin is an amazing SAHM so all three kids were highly verbal at an early age. I remember visiting them once when their oldest was about 4 and had to have a conversation with cousin & husband afterward because his favorite phrase was “um, actually…” and I was not going to be repeatedly (and incorrectly) mansplained to by a toddler! Fortunately neither of his younger siblings picked up that habit.

          1. AnneCordelia*

            Yeah, I still remember the time I was venting about something or other and my three-year-old looked at me and said “Well, Mom, you’re just going to have to deal with it.”

      3. Baby Yoda*

        I sold shoes in high school, and one mother refused to buy socks for her kids to try on shoes with. (there were no free footies back then). Then she got mad and told the manager I’d shoved their feet into the shoes. He took over the transaction then.

      4. SeaGirl*

        My sister is 18 months younger than me. My mother was beginning to wonder if she was developmentally delayed when suddenly, she started speaking in full sentences! Turns out having an older sibling talking for you means you skip the baby talk.

      5. Suzie*

        THANK YOU. My #3 is an early and verbose talker but I encountered this weird stereotype that younger siblings have speech delays because everyone ignores them. I was like… are you kidding?!?? #3 can find someone to chat to for every waking minute of her life, whereas poor #1 had to deal with me getting all talked out and lying on the sofa grunting.

    2. ImHereForTheUpdates*

      Some parents are something else. Not only are they 2 year olds but it’s summer camp!!!

      1. Chili*

        It is definitely a type of parent. I know people who were very attached to the idea that their kid needed to be reading by 3.5 years old. Eventually, the child did learn at least some reading skills by age 3.5 and the parents talked about it as if she had done so spontaneously instead of after serious effort on their part. This did not result in a kid who was academically ahead of their peers. At a slightly older age, kids picked up the same reading skills faster.

    3. Wolf*

      Yeah, some daycare parents are special. A friend of mine works in a daycare, and they had one set of parents insist that their kid eats his morning snack at 9.45am. The whole group eats at 9.30am. There was no reason given except “because we say so”. No medical or other reason for the kid not to eat with the group.

      Luckily, 3 year olds are terrible at reading the clock, but they do enjoy snack time with the group.

    4. Bast*

      I had a gig as a camp counselor for 5 & 6 year olds one summer as a teenager. There was a rule that if there was thunder and lightning, we could not be outside. Rain was “use your best judgment” so long as there was no thunder or lightning — so a light sprinkle may have been okay, playing in a torrential downpour was not. We had parents regularly complain about “not paying all this money to have our kids sit inside all day” when it was thundering outside, and the on the flip side, parents who complained about their kid getting a drop of water on them. There was no winning.

  8. Cease and D6*

    I teach undergraduates (whether or not they count as ‘customers’ is hotly debated, but let’s say they do for the purposes of this comment).
    You get lots of weird stuff in end-of-term evaluations. I’ve been called names, had my own name misspelled, compared to Velma from Scooby Doo, received excessive criticism of my fashion sense, the usual. You get used to that.
    But one year I had a student who said that I clearly had poor time-management skills because the my class overran by half an hour every week.
    Reader, the class did not overrun by half an hour. Not even once. The student just never checked what time the class was scheduled to end.

    1. Dr. Rebecca*

      mmmmHMM.

      Everything from comments that made it clear who they were, to “Dr. Rebecca is obviously unqualified to teach [subject in which I have a doctorate.]”

      1. anonny for this*

        to be fair, just because you know a lot about something doesn’t mean you can teach it.

        1. AnotherOne*

          my income law prof comes to mind. we were all assured he was brilliant. that we were so lucky to have him teaching us.

          he was terrible. it was likely a case of it made so much sense to him that he didn’t understand why it didn’t make as much sense to us. and i’ll admit- i do understand the basics of the material 10 yrs later w/o having ever worked in tax. so it got in there somehow.

          but no one looked forward to going to that class.

          1. MigraineMonth*

            I never really understood this until I tried to remotely teach basic computer skills to someone (e.g. “this is a window, this is how you double-click”). There was a lot of pantomiming, because I couldn’t figure out how to explain things in words they understood.

            “The rectangle. Uh, no, the other rectangle. Um.”

            (Just to up the difficulty level to “impossible”, the tutorial was for someone with a PC and external mouse, and she had a mac laptop with trackpad. Trying to teach someone to right-click when there is no right-click button…)

            1. Anonymous Rex*

              Years ago, I tried to root my phone. It was a locked Verizon phone that was notorious for being anti-rootable but someone had figured it out and posted the steps on the tech forum. I tried for weeks to do it to no avail. When I asked questions, I got virtual eyerolls and comments that I was “just like all the other housewives who want it handed to them and pretend they are good at tech.”

              I finally figured out the problem: The instructions were missing one step. One very crucial step. It was the kind of step that, if you did this all the time, you wouldn’t even think about it being a step. And even an experienced tech person who had never rooted a phone before or had never done it on this type of device would not have even known there was a step missing because it was so far outside their usual experience.

              It’s like teaching someone to drive who had never seen a car before getting frustrated when they can’t make the car go forward even though you told them how to take off the brake and put it into gear and press on the gas, only to discover you forgot to tell them how to start the engine. That was eye-opening and certainly helped me better assist others when I was doing tech support for people who barely understood what a mouse was.

              1. Chas*

                I recently had a similar issue when I was trying to figure out how to play a Windows game on my Steamdeck. All the forums I found discussing if it was possible to play the game on it just said “Yeah, it’s easy. Just run it through Proton” without giving any info on how you actually do that (Because it’s the sort of thing that once you’ve done it once you’ll be able to do it with every game, but the setting to do is well-hidden and not at all intuitive to find).

                Hmm, now I’m starting to understand why my mother would always ask me for help with tech stuff, instead of my brother-in-law who has a degree in computer sciences and lived in the same house as us!

                1. Brain Flogged*

                  “We know this is not your job, but we call you because you don’t treat us like idiots.” -> best “customer” review I ever received. I’m a developer, but I was constantly being called to the adjacent call center to things like excel formatting, setting auto-reply, etc. Why those people don’t call help desk, I wondered. That response humbled me down a few pegs.

              2. Ari Flynn*

                Let me guess: You had to turn on either “USB debugging” or “developer options”. They forgot to mention that because that’s the first thing techies do to their own stuff, the instant it lets you into the settings. (I paid for it, I should be able to break it whenever I want.)

                And Verizon is terrible about letting you unlock their phones – they flat out won’t do it at all unless the phone is 100% paid off AND has been active on their own network for 60 days. I was annoyed that they wouldn’t even just take my money and let me have the phone *I now owned* to use as I pleased.

            2. Stella*

              When I was tutoring, I made the Mac users go buy a mouse with two buttons because the right click works on the Mac. you just need a PC mouse.

          2. skeptic53*

            My medical school curriculum was in blocks. The statistics block was taught by statisticians employed by the school, who worked with research scientists. They were awful at teaching, and set an exam that was so hard only 6 out of 151 students passed it. And those 6 had worked as statisticians at some point in the past. The 145 who failed were all very bright, very driven, very competitive med students. The school had to throw the exam out. They didn’t have us repeat the course, so I was terrible at statistics forever…

          3. Chas*

            In my first year of Uni we once had a lecturer who was clearly only used to teaching the 3rd year + students, because his lectures were all way ahead of what we were expecting, and he also spoke at a gazillion words per minute (I suspect someone had said he needed to include some background and instead of cutting the advance stuff he just decided to speak faster to fit it all in) and didn’t have any sort of notes to hand out, so we were spending the hour’s lecture writing at breakneck speeds to try and get it all down on paper.

            Now I can’t even remember what subject he was supposed to be teaching us!

        2. Kesnit*

          Very much this.

          My Property professor in law school was a national expert in property law. The only reason any of us survived the class was that the TA was actually a good teacher. We would go to class and frantically take notes, trying to figure out what was going on. Then we would go to the TA’s office hours and things started to make sense. (As much sense as Property law ever does…) As the semester went on, the crowd around the TA would get bigger. (Office hours were held at a multi-media booth on one of the upper floors of the building, so there was plenty of room for people to sit on the floor and listen.)

        3. AnotherEmily*

          To be fair, these responses are ignoring the well-documented pattern where female-presenting professors regularly have their expertise denigrated and challenged by students in comparison to the student evaluations their male-presenting colleagues receive.

          1. HigherEd more like DireEd*

            this. my colleague was critiqued in a student eval because “the professor’s sleeves were too distracting.” she was wearing a normal long sleeved shirt.

          2. Star Trek Nutcase*

            Not in my experience. For over 12 years, I coordinated, compiled and tracked student evaluations for a department of 15 professors (4 F, 11 M) at a major research university. Personal comments as well as subject matter comments were comparable regarding professors’ sex. Teaching-related comments were more favorable for the females and also skewed to the younger professors overall. Of course, this is one small sample and student composition was pretty 50% F/M.

            Personally, I (65+F) don’t think every, even most, situations warrant a concern about impact of sex – neither do comments. I’ve experienced harassment & other crap at work & in my personal life, the “why” never mattered – how to stop it did. Admittedly, I also don’t agree with “hate” laws – I’m no more or less assaulted if the person hates my sex, race or religious views.

          3. Polite Pothead*

            Yeah, pretty uncool to see all these replies to someone who *just said* they’d been hit with this kind of feedback. So the idea is that what, the student who put down Dr. Rebecca’s experience and knowledge had a point?

            1. anonny for this*

              No, it was that ‘well I have a PhD in this’ is not a rebuttal to ‘they can’t teach this’.

        4. Ace in the Hole*

          Not to mention that just because you got a doctorate in something a few decades ago, it doesn’t mean you still have a good enough understanding of the basics to teach it.

          I went back to school to get a degree in my field… a handful of professors taught things that were just plain incorrect, 10+ years out of date, or were technically true but completely out of touch with any practical application in the field.

      2. AnonForThis*

        To be fair, being an expert in the subject matter doesn’t mean someone is qualified to teach it (source: 8 years of university classes).

        My favourite teacher evaluation was received by a colleague. To this day, decades later, he gets a haircut before exams every year, after once receiving the comment “professor should comb what little hair he has”, during the period he was compensating for a receding hairline with a scruffy pony tail.

        1. Ann Onymous*

          Yeah, I had a professor in grad school who was knowledgeable about the subject matter and did extremely cool, ground-breaking research, but wasn’t good at teaching, didn’t like teaching, and didn’t care to become better at teaching.

          1. FricketyFrack*

            Ughhh my World History professor my freshman year of college was like that. She actually liked her grad-level classes, as seen in the start difference in reviews on ratemyprofessor, but she visibly hated teaching undergrad and would just put her lecture on the overhead and read it verbatim, then post it online later. God forbid someone asked a question – she clearly hated that, too. But of course she had an attendance requirement, so we were forced to listen to her monotone for 3 hours a week.

          2. anotherfan*

            Not just academics. I was at a music camp one year when world-famous-niche-instrument genius was teaching a class and by the end of the week, pretty nearly everybody had bailed to another class. H
            e knew how to play all right. He had no idea how to show everybody else what he did and why he did it and how to do it yourself.

            1. 1LFTW*

              Kind of like my father trying to teach me to swing a baseball bat. He was a reasonably accomplished baseball player when he was in high school, has “a natural swing” whatever TF that means, and his feedback was always “No, no, no! Not like that, like THIS!”.

              Reader, I never learned how to swing a bat.

            2. Me, I think*

              Yeah, lots of experience with music workshops with well known professional musicians who stand up and demonstrate what they do, but don’t know how to break it down or explain it to us mere mortals.

          3. Worldwalker*

            I had one like that. I ended up switching sections to first period (I’m a night owl) with a TA.

            The tenured full professor was so far beyond the basic course that he was teaching, and such a poor teacher—he was accustomed to collaborative work with grad students, not teaching the basics to undergrads — that his section was useless. He was a brilliant scientist and researcher, but totally the wrong person to be teaching that class.

          4. Bananapants Circus with Dysfunctional Monkeys*

            Oh you met my International Relations prof?

            Absolutely amazing knowledge about the intricacies of IR, absolutely godawful at actually explaining them to anyone sub PhD level.

      3. Anonymous Demi ISFJ*

        My father has been teaching at the university level for longer than I’ve been alive and also teaches continuing education classes. He paces while he’s teaching. He found this gem in one of his continuing ed class evaluations: “Nail his shoes to the floor.” Once he stopped laughing, Dad said he’d just take off the nailed shoes and keep pacing!

      4. Pescadero*

        Eh… As someone who attended an R1 engineering college, and now works in the same R1 engineering college:

        Anyone with a PhD in subject is extremely knowledgeable and expert about that subject.
        That doesn’t mean they’re qualified to teach anyone, anything.

        I had a couple different professors as a student who were experts in their field, and couldn’t teach a lick.

      5. Dr. Rebecca*

        Jesus you guys, I wouldn’t have posted it here if it was an accurate critique…

        1. AnotherEmily*

          Apparently everyone has decided to conveniently forget the vast numbers of studies about the validity and usefulness of student evaluations, especially when gender or race might happen to be a factor…

          2. JHunz*

            Not everyone has read the vast number of studies, but everyone has had at least one bad teacher

            1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

              Let’s see, in the US that’s K-6 (7 teachers); 7-9, 7 classes/day (7*3 = 21 teachers); 10-12, 6 classes/day (6*3 = 18 teachers); 4 years undergrad, 4 classes per semester & 1 summerschool (4*4*2 + 4 = 36). 82 teachers minimum (not counting someone like me who changed major twice and uni once – for a total of 7.5 years to finish my BS). It would be a miracle if anyone didn’t have at least one bad teacher.
              But… the good teachers are worth their weight in gold!
              Thank you, Dr. Rebecca for your compassion and patience with your students.

        2. the frogs are okay*

          Not sure why you are getting such strange/negative replies. I assumed that based on the topic at hand that the student’s feedback wasn’t accurate or in good faith.

          2. AGD*

            Seconding – why is everyone assuming that you can’t possibly have considered the possibility of a subject-matter expert who can’t teach well? This is academia. EVERYONE knows someone like that.

        3. Texas Teacher*

          I’m guessing it’s just the direction the conversation took in this thread, not that they were doubting your teaching skills.

          1. dawbs*

            Yeah, this is the kind of birdwalking conversation that happens in the AAM comments.
            I’ve been on the giving and receiving end of educator feedback and it’s a wild ride.
            (I did get one recently that was “we can’t remember the special teacher’s name but the kids loved that she dressed up as Miss Frizzle”.
            Y’all, that’s just my wardrobe and hair, but, I’ll take it as a compliment. And the dress has pockets because Miss Frizzle wouldn’t wear a dress without effing pockets)

        4. FluterDale*

          I don’t think you can fully prepare a non-teacher for the absolute … whatever … that is teaching evaluations.

          I teach music, which is a subject most folks have some familiarity with. I know this, because every time I introduce myself to someone and it involves what I do, they say, “Oh, I played [whatever instrument] for [insert arbitrary number of years.]” The closer it is to 1 or 2, the more profoundly they understand my field, what I do, and what my day to day life is like.

          All this to say: everyone has had a teacher, so everyone knows in their bones exactly what it must be like to be a teacher. (I thought your eval was hilarious. One of mine last year complained that I didn’t teach X part of the subfield, but just focused on Y … because X is a totally different class, and if you read the state-mandated course description, this course focuses exclusively on Y …..)

    2. S*

      Early in my teaching career, I had the habit of going too fast and got a good number of complaints about it on the evals. I’ve since gotten better about this, but the best version of the complaint was “He writes on the board faster than Sonic on crack.”

      2. Quinalla*

        Haha, I definitely had a professor like this. And this was before smartphones, so not like you could snap a photo of the notes for some chance. He’d fill all 4 chalkboards and then start erasing and writing more and we’d be like NO WAIT!!!

    3. Midwest Manager too!*

      I work in higher ed. One of our instructors for a STEM course once received student feedback that said: “Attending lecture is like listening to an AI audio recording of the textbook.”

      1. Elitist Semicolon*

        I used a textbook written by a colleague for a course I taught and one of my students wrote on the eval that it was more effective as a doorstop.

          1. Elitist Semicolon*

            100% true, but that’s only because it was so useless as a textbook that literally anything would have been a better use.

      2. Loreli*

        I had a professor who, if you asked for more explanation, would repeat word for word what he just said, only at twice the volume. Smart dude, horrible teacher.

        Had another who would answer requests for help with “I don’t know why you don’t get this, it’s very easy”.

      3. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

        And now I know what I should have put on my student evaluation of a former professor. Lovely woman, very knowledgeable, but her lecture style was to recite the textbook verbatim in a very flat voice.

      4. KTB2*

        Oh, my god, that was my Statistics prof in my MBA program. He wrote the book, which he also taught from, and the class was basically just him reading what he wrote, or having an AI program read what he wrote with the occasional (and largely scripted, based on convos with the other cohort) aside taking a dig at his ex-wife.

        That class SUCKED.

      5. Lexi Vipond*

        The best review I ever overheard, I don’t even know who it was about – I was standing at one of the west end bus stops in the days when the Edinburgh book festival was still in Charlotte Square.

        “The way he read from the book, it was as if he didnae know he’d wrote it.”

    5. Writing Teacher*

      I once had a student eval say that I did a lot of Dad jokes. Given that I was in my 40’s at the time and male (though not a father), I’m not sure what they were expecting. :)

    6. WeirdChemist*

      From the inverse, I once got to write a student evaluation that read “The person who’s lab reports he’s cheating off of writes terrible lab reports” which made the prof I was TA-ing for laugh (and agree)

    7. Dr. Vibrissae*

      On my first evaluations in teaching the feedback was evenly divided between people who thought my delivery was calm, reassuring and good at explaining complex material, and those who though I should speed it up as my voice was soo soothing as to put them to sleep.

      WE are required to address every bit of negative feed back, but I’m still not sure how to address the fact that there seem to be two opposite camps on whether I’m a pleasure or an agonizing endurance test to listen to.

      1. Project Maniac-ger*

        I’m almost done with a masters and have had profs with soothing voices, but I consider it my fault when I get sleepy because I’ve trained myself to fall asleep to true crime podcasts when I travel… I bet some of those students also Pavlov’s dogged themselves into their situation.

      2. FluterDale*

        “I will work harder at being everyone’s cup of tea …”

        I love the spirit of the rule, but also … who thinks that’s feasible?

    8. UncleFrank*

      One of my favourite evals was when a student said (paraphrasing, but close) “This class was impossibly hard [Prof] goes way too fast, but it did get better when I started reading the textbook” Why yes, I’m sure class is easier if you’ve done the reading! So close to learning a valuable lesson here…

      1. WeirdChemist*

        I once had a classmate who, after a quiz, complained “what, so now he’s testing us on things he talks about in class??” Yes, that is generally how quizzes work!

          1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

            Not WeirdChemist, but my guess is that classmate meant, “material that only came up in class and isn’t in the written materials”.

            My sibling teaches some university courses, and nowadays they’re all recorded for later use (very helpful for revision, etc). But for privacy reasons the Q&A at the end is not recorded, only the lecture itself. So there is absolutely added value in showing up in person at least occasionally!

    9. Nesprin*

      I was told in one memorable student evaluation that I always looked like I was ready to kick puppies.

      This same student evaluation also mentioned how mean I was in accepting late homework, when the class policy and syllabus stated very very clearly, that no late homework will be accepted.

    10. Butterfly Counter*

      I had a student complain to me, then my department chair, the college dean, and finally the university president (cc-ing me on every email) that I was improperly scheduling an in-class exam. It was scheduled during our regular class time. (It was the first class after a mid-semester break and she wanted to relax, not study during the break.)

      I had a professor friend get an anonymous student evaluation that said, “She’s got a few extra pounds on her, but I like more cushion for the pushin’.” Yikes.

      1. S*

        One semester I had a few students complain that I was violating a “rule” against holding quizzes in the last week of class. Never did figure out where that rumor started.

    11. Elle Woods*

      I taught undergrads while attending grad school. One semester I had a student who said I was TOO prepared for class because I did things like have an outline of the day’s lecture on the board, post study guides after class, and distribute handouts (when needed). Maybe this student would’ve preferred me to wing it every day?

    12. In Pieces*

      I used to be an adjunct, teaching at the graduate level. Course feedback tended to follow a normal curve – for very few I was either The Worst or The Best. One memorable comment “I barely had a social life during this class!” Oops, sorry; didn’t meant to take up your time.

      1. Pescadero*

        I sort of get it…

        As an undergrad I had 4 credit hour classes I spent 4 hours a week on.

        As an undergrad I also had a 4 credit class I, and my 3 teammates, all averaged 40 hours per week (each) outside of class time.

        Sometimes the credit hours are not appropriate for the amount of effort necessary.

        1. Peekskill*

          A credit hour is how much time you spend attending the class each week, not how much time you spend on it outside of class. I agree that 40 hours for a 4-credit class is excessive, but 4 hours might be too little.

          1. 2e asteroid*

            The general rule I’ve always heard (obviously with significant variation) is that you ought to spend 2 hours outside class for every hour in class, so 4-credit hour classes should average about 12 hours/week of total time.

    13. Ann O'Nemity*

      I received a negative student evaluation because our class time of 8 am did not accommodate the fraternity’s late night parties. (This was a general ed course that had dozens of sections throughout the day, so maybe just choose a later class time so you can sleep in and sober up?)

      1. Evan Þ*

        Reminds me of my freshman-year calc class where I signed up for the 8 AM section. Class was in a large lecture hall. By week three, there were only about a dozen of us still there.

    14. LaurCha*

      When I was teaching art history, nearly all of my lectures were accompanied by a power point because, you know, ART, it’s VISUAL. I had a student evaluation complaint that “all she ever does is show slides.”

      Like, what was I supposed to do? Grab a TARDIS and take them to the Louvre every week?? Bring the Mona Lisa in for my Italian Renaissance lecture? Of COURSE there were slides.

      I remain baffled, all these years later.

      1. In the provinces*

        In the course of 39 years of teaching undergraduates, I have received many interesting student evaluations. One, when I had just started: “Prof is so cute I don’t know whether to listen to the lecture or rush to the stage and pinch his cheeks.” Then there was this, in the very last class I taught before retirement: “Prof spends most of his time in lecture cracking jokes like a comedian. Actually, he’s funnier than most comedians.”

    15. Union Rep*

      One of the hardest-fought sections in our contract says that student evaluations can’t be the sole or primary criterion for personnel decisions. This is why. 50% of people (not just students) don’t know what they want, and 98% of them don’t know what they need. Not to mention that what a lot of students actually want is “the same class but taught by a white man,” even if they don’t say it (or even know it).

        1. Your Former Password Resetter*

          *Waves at everything that happened in the last 500 years*

          Racism and sexism are alive and well. If you managed to dodge them, great! But you’d be an exception or a white man.

    16. Hyaline*

      A colleague got an eval in which the student “did her colors” for her, like “you wear a lot of black but it’s not your best color—it makes you washed out. You look much better in deep blues and emerald green…have you considered trying purple or berry?” It didn’t make it any less inappropriate to the context, but the student’s assessment was actually pretty accurate. We got a laugh out of it!

        1. UncleFrank*

          Honestly, I would really enjoy getting my colors done but would never pay for it so I would love this!

      2. Sociology rocks!*

        It’s definitely weird and not appropriate to the context, but I can appreciate the sentiment of a student who noticed and just couldn’t leave it unacknowledged, and figured of all the ways to mention it this was the safest.

        And I guess it means they actually paid attention to the professor

        1. Sociology rocks!*

          I posted then realized the reason this is sticking with me as not a horrible thing to do is cause as a trans guy who passes, I can no longer just compliment people on their outfits or when they wear a color that’s really good on them. It’s very disappointing to only be able to compliment people I know really well, brightening stranger’s day always feels good and is harder now

    17. kjinsea*

      Oh, I have a teaching one too! I teach a child development class at my university. It is literally billed as being about child development from birth to age 13. My mid-term feedback from one student was “The professor talks about children too much.” The person who reviews my midterm evals and I got a HUGE chuckle out of that one.

    18. Prudence Snooter*

      When I was an undergrad I once added “It doesn’t hurt that he’s easy on the eyes” to a college professor’s review. I cringe HARD at that memory. To make matters worse, I’m pretty sure I put information in there that made it not difficult to identify me.

    19. Sleeping Panther*

      When I was in grad school, serving as a teaching assistant for an undergrad literature course, I had two memorable student interactions:

      1. A student who wanted to dispute his score on a test and wasn’t satisfied with my scoring (which I had tried to be really generous with) told me that he “knew how to get around TAs like me.” It turned out that he did not, since the professor told him that not only did he agree with me, he actually would have given the student fewer points on that question than I did.
      2. A student whose essay I’d graded emailed the professor saying she felt “cheated and lied to” because she didn’t get an A on the essay. I’d given her an 85/100, a respectable effort and a solid B.

      1. Anonymous 5*

        years ago, a student who failed my course fair and square emailed me a LONG list of reasons why he was entitled to a higher grade, and demands for how I would go about giving it to him. The whole email was a work of, ahem, gumption. But perhaps the most impressive part was when he demanded that I recalculate the class average without the scores from another student who had testing accommodations on exams, as those accommodations would lead to the scores being outliers.

        Never mind that, ahem, that’s not how testing accommodations work: there was no curve in the course. But even if there had been, the only scores that were actual “outliers” were…the scores of the student who failed.

        1. Venus*

          When I was a TA, I had a college student who failed a big project and he came to argue why he should have got more marks on various questions. I flipped to the end of the report, asked him why his results were from the software used last year and not available this year, and pointed out that his answers were clearly copied off a report from the previous year and didn’t line up with the current year’s. At that point he stopped arguing and left.

          The professor was very kind and asked me if I felt justified in failing the student on the project, and thankfully he laughed and agreed when I showed him the software difference.

      2. Academic Anon*

        I had a student come to my office hours to dispute the grade that they got on their assignment. Once we went through the assignment, the student complained that most professors gave points for showing up to office hours. I wish that I was quick enough to say that I wasn’t that lonely. Only thought of it many hours later.

    20. FuzzBunny*

      Another college prof here. My favorites include:
      * Student took two quizzes, got B’s, didn’t complete any other work the entire semester. Complained to my department chair that I’d failed him even though he had clearly demonstrated he was a B-level student, and in his heart of hearts he just knew he would have continued to get B’s if he did the other assignments, and it’s not his fault he didn’t because he was prioritizing other classes.
      * Student was caught blatantly cheating on an exam. Got mad that I’d failed her, because “if Jesus can forgive all then so should you.” I was able to overhear the conversation when she complained to the chair – that was a fun one :)
      * “She’s too short to be an effective teacher.” I’m 5-foot-nothing, but how is that relevant?
      * “She spent too much time talking about kids.” The course is Child Development, wtf did you expect?

    21. Academic Anon*

      One of the people I knew in my undergrad gave the evaluation that the class was like all of the students assembled on the tarmac next to a plane and watch the professor take off in it. Needless to say, he and his fellow students learned nothing from the lectures.

    22. eternity*

      This reminds me of an eval comment someone posted on the internet that read “If I only had six months to live, I would want it to be spent in your class because it would feel like an eternity.”

    23. Texas Teacher*

      When I was in college, I had a history class in which the professor had us fill out Evals midterm, so he could address and improve valid criticisms. We had a weekly lab in that class, and the TA was a terrible lecturer, speaking very quietly with his back turned to the class the whole time.
      The week after the Evals were done, he (the TA) read some of the ones aloud that pertained to him. Most of them softpedaled the issue, but one person had written, “The only thing I’m fettyfrom the lab hour is an urge to skip.”
      We laughed, and the TA made a visible effort to improve for the remainder of the semester.

    24. talos*

      In 2020, I got an eval about how I was “relatable”. (This was as a grad adjunct teaching freshmen/sophomores).

      iirc, this is the same semester I had a student ask me if I was okay before I started class. Turns out 12 grad credits and 30 hours/week of work will take a lot out of you!

    25. Leaving academia*

      For the longest time, my favorite was the one that wrote “math” for every question. What is the instructor best at? Math. What is the instructor worst at? Math. Also, as a second year grad student, I must have made a lot of comments about my circle drawing abilities (trig), because one section commented how good they were and the other commented how bad they were. You don’t really get these types of comments on the online forms (or, not overwhelming numbers of comments about circles in a calc class). My grad department was only forced to switch in 2020, it was amazing.

      But now my favorite is the student who wrote multiple paragraphs about how terrible it was that I required them to use full sentences, and by providing a guide for how to write in my class and the proper format for their homework, I was insulting them because they had all taken [a list of courses that definitely weren’t prerequisite and really should be taken after the class I was teaching]

    26. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

      My grandmother studied at what is now Bridgewater State University in the late 1930s. She recalled one lecturer who was apparently fairly terrible, so on the end-of-term evaluation when asked what she’d gotten out of the class, she spent the remainder of the class elaborately decorating an ornate question mark. The details of this story are a bit fuzzy, but apparently the lecturer made a point of trying to find out who had the audacity…

  9. wondermint*

    Recently saw one where someone complained about their new laptop:

    “The 14″ screen is smaller than described.”

    Ma’am????

    1. Cease and D6*

      See, this one I do actually understand. Computer screens are sized based on the diagonal measurement, corner to corner. If you didn’t know that, bought a screen advertised as 14″, and then measured along one of the sides, it would be smaller than you’d expect.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        Yeah. It’s not your fault, and it is mentioned in the fine print somewhere, but it’s a case where the marketing material is, if not precisely dishonest, choosing to use potentially misleading terminology that casts their products in the best light.

    2. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      Back when ratios varied, if you thought you were buying a 14″@4:3 (11.2″ x 8.4″, so ~94 sq in) and received 14″@16:9 (12.2″ x 6.8625″, ~84 sq in), that’s 10% less area and the complaint would be perfectly valid.

      14″ could also be anywhere from 13.55″ to 14.45″, although everyone loves to round up to make the value look better…

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        It can be hard explaining ratios: when I tell people that our large pie is seventeen inches, I have to specify that means ACROSS, not the circumference of the thing.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Wow, really? I worked in a pizza place, and I never ran into that confusion. I would need a calculator to figure out the circumference of our 14″ pepperoni pizza, it just seems such a weird thing to measure. (I can more easily see a radius vs. diameter confusion.)

              1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

                I know there are limits to the approximation’s value, but I use 22/7 any time I need pi and that almost always gets the job done.

            2. MigraineMonth*

              Yes, and I would use a calculator to multiply 14 * 3.142. It was not something that came up often enough for me to have memorized.

              Though, embarrassingly, it was several days before I realized that I didn’t need to look up the price for each sandwich because they were *all* priced at $4.95.

  10. Fleur*

    I worked as a barista. One time, a customer ordered “iced coffee,” which she received. She returned to the counter and said “When I ordered iced coffee, I expected hot coffee with some ice. Can you warm this up?”
    Another time, we received an online review from an upset man. He said the employees were “emo white trash” because they forgot to put whipped cream on his latte.

    1. bagels r us*

      Not exactly the same, but the iced coffee reminded me of when I used to work at a bagel store and someone once asked me to microwave their bagel. I tried to explain that we had toasters, but they insisted I warn the bagel via microwave. The customer is not always right!

      2. Strawberry Snarkcake*

        My husband microwaves his bagels. I have considered contacting the authorities.

        2. Ali + Nino*

          Next thing you know you’re putting blueberry cream cheese on those things. stop the madness!

      3. I don’t know*

        I microwave my bagels sometimes. Toasters get em too crunchy! So I understand this one.

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          A short stint in the microwave also reverse minimal staleness temporarily–easily long enough to enjoy the last bagel in the bag.

        2. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

          Agreed — although I don’t normally microwave bagels — but other reheated bready things like last night’s dinner roll or breadsticks, I wrap a damp paper towel around it and pop it in the microwave for no more than 10 seconds and that actually softens and warms the bread enough to enjoy it.

        3. Steve for Work Purposes*

          Yeah and often it’s the best way to make GF bagels tasty – I’ve found it works better than toasting them. There’s this one brand of gluten-free sourdough bagels I love but the texture is way better if they’re microwaved rather than toasted.

      4. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        The customer is not always right, but in matters of personal taste? If they like their bagels microwaved (shudder) that’s what they like.

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          The customer is not always right. The customer has never been always right.

          The customer is never wrong. I.e. If the customer is wrong, you do not contradict their wrongness; the customer’s wrongness is to be humored.

          (Irony duly noted, but the wrong version of that axiom just does so much collateral damage to Service Workers as a captive audience that I make the exception).

          1. Petty_Boop*

            I had a manager who used to say, “the customer is always right, but seldom correct.”

      5. Liane*

        The full quote is, “The customer is always right in matters of taste.” So I guess somebody doesn’t like how toasted bagels taste?

        (Also, I have my doubts about whether even the full quote should be a customer service rule, given some of my customers’ food & condiment pairings.)

        1. Shiara*

          The “full quote” appears to be an Internet myth. See link to follow for what we know about the origins of the phrase.

          2. Vio*

            I think it’s more of a clarification than a ‘true source’. “In matters of taste” was implied but is frequently ignored and the phrase is used in an extremely different context to how it was meant.

        2. Vio*

          So long as they don’t ask you to try any of their weird choices I say let them enjoy having custard to pour on their curry.
          When I first heard of cheesecake I thought the idea was disgusting, although I initially assumed it was just a silly name like Toad In The Hole but upon discovering that it does in fact contain cheese I was convinced it would be awful. But I tried some and discovered that it’s actually one of the single best inventions in human history. So now I’m tempted to try any odd combinations I spot.

          The wasabi ice cream on the other hand was… interesting but not enjoyable.

          1. MagicEyes*

            I just found a recipe for microwave mug cheesecake. If it’s good, it could be life-changing. ;-)

        3. Worldwalker*

          No, good bagels absolutely do not.

          Bad bagels do, which is why their only use is as emergency lawnmower tires. But good bagels are soft and fluffy inside a delectable chewy skin and blast it now I want a bagel so bad!

        4. Worldwalker*

          As a person who puts ketchup on my lightly browned scrambled eggs, I have no standing to criticize other people’s food choices.

      6. Butterfly Counter*

        I love a microwaved bagel!

        I only zap them for a few seconds, enough that the cream cheese spreads easily. That way, they’re chewy, not crunchy.

      7. metadata minion*

        But this is exactly the situation “the customer is always right [in matters of taste]” was intended to cover! Microwaving a bagel is indeed a travesty, but if you are generally able to microwave things for customers and your customer wants a microwaved bagel, then by golly they get a microwaved bagel.

    3. Applesauced*

      Ok, but one time – about 20 years ago – I (from the northeast) was looking at colleges in the deep south and was served hot coffee next to a glass of ice when I ordered iced coffee at a diner in Georgia.

      1. sparkle emoji*

        Ordering iced coffee abroad can deliver that, or frappes. The way coffee culture varies country to country can be fascinating.

        1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

          Iced coffee in Germany in the 1980s. Room temperature coffee, sweetened with sugar, add 2 scoops of (high quality) vanilla ice cream, whipped cream on top. Served with a straw and a spoon.
          Absolutely fabulous!

          2. londonedit*

            One of my favourite cafes in Portugal does iced coffee in a long glass with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. It is indeed excellent.

          3. Susan Calvin*

            I am happy to inform you that this has survived until today! (although I’m ambivalent on if there is typically any additional sugar involved or if the vanilla ice cream does the job)

      1. biobotb*

        I received something similar once when I ordered iced tea (which was listed on their menu). But they didn’t fully brew the tea and then pour it over ice. They poured hot water over ice cubes, then stuck a tea bag in. No, tea doesn’t brew well in lukewarm water.

        1. Sapientia*

          I was in a similar situation once – they simply brought a cup of cold water and a tea bag. I first thought it might be a special kind of tea bag that works well with cold water, but that wasn’t the case. SMH, I still don’t understand why they would advertise cold tea when they don’t prepare it beforehand.

      2. MikeM_inMD*

        My mother-in-law attended a Methodist church in Baltimore in the 1970s. The church got a new pastor and he held a small meet-and-greet where his British wife served hot tea and coffee on a hot, humid summer day. My MIL asked if there was any iced tea. The pastor’s wife looked confused for a moment, but fetched up a couple of ice cubes. This confused and amused my MIL. In the 1990s, I worked in the UK for a couple of years and now fully understand the pastor’s wife’s confusion.

        1. Vio*

          Even now iced tea isn’t very popular in UK, though it has actually had some acceptance. Supposedly we don’t get the ‘kind of heat’ where it’s as refreshing, according to an American friend.

          1. londonedit*

            Yeah, you can get that Lipton stuff in bottles in the supermarket, but I don’t know anyone who drinks it! Pretty sure the vast majority of British people wouldn’t have a clue how to make iced tea (I don’t know – do you just put tea bags in water with ice?) Then again most Americans can’t make a proper cup of builder’s tea, so we’re equal.

            1. Lexi Vipond*

              I do occasionally, but I don’t really consider it a relation of tea – it’s just less overpoweringly sweet than a lot of juice in bottles if I’m feeling the need for something other than water.

            2. PaulaMomOfTwo*

              Iced tea is made simply by making tea. Once made, if you want it sweetened, add sugar, then you add ice.

    5. Keyboard Cowboy*

      My partner knows that for me, getting a fresh cup of coffee in the morning is my best-understood expression of love. It’s just great, it makes me feel nice. So the first time I asked him for an iced coffee, about a year into our relationship, he looked at me kind of confused, then went downstairs and dutifully made a hot americano plus 3 ice cubes. He brought it back and said “I tried, is this what you wanted?” He’s very sweet, but no :)

    6. BCat*

      Two similar instances: A negative Yelp comment about not liking the breakfast burrito from a customer who admitted they “didn’t usually like burritos” but “ordered the breakfast burrito” anyway. We had many, many other menu options. Another time at a different cafe, where we were more than happy to give a sample, a customer orders chili (as in, a stew named after a hot pepper) and complained about it being too spicy. As a heat-adverse person myself, totally understand a low tolerance, but scratch my head at ordering the *one* menu item that could be spicy without asking about spice level/asking for a sample.

      1. bmorepm*

        I’ve ordered a lot of chili in restaurants, and never eaten a spicy one. it’s definitely something that would normally be labeled as such.

        1. Worldwalker*

          I like live in the US South. Chili around here will set your eyebrows on fire.

          I can see someone from the Midwest not expecting that.

          (I make my own wimpy chili; I do not like smoldering eyebrows)

    7. Kara*

      I feel the first customer. I like my coffee warm or luke-warm. Ice hurts my teeth and hot is lava. I’ve found over time that the easiest way to get a cup close to my preferences is to order a hot with ice in it.

  11. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

    This isn’t really about product so much as my customer service skills. Within a few years of a racially motivated uprising in my city, a white customer complained that I, a white woman, would have treated him better if he were black. This was because I wouldn’t let him load furniture into his car before he paid for it. I stammered that I was sorry that he felt that way, but that no really, he couldn’t load the furniture into his car before paying.

    The customer I was actually waiting on at the time was absolutely aghast and asked me, “Did that man just accuse you of being racist against white people?” I replied, “I guess?” To which the complaining costumer overheard, since he was standing behind me (he refused to come around to the front of the customer; I’ve been robbed before, so this already raised my hackles) and then he complained to my manager about my behavior.

    This was the early 00’s and it was easily the most baffling retail encounter I had.

    1. dulcinea47*

      I love when they take their nonsense complaints to the manager. Go ahead, my manager also knows that’s ridiculous. I was once reported to mine for not having higher magnification lenses for the microfilm machines. Didn’t change the fact that we didn’t have them!

  12. D'oh!*

    Oh, the joys of working in a regional theater box office. I’ve forgotten most of them, as it’s been eons, but a couple come to mind:

    “Could I have a seat facing the stage?” and, during a production of Patsy Cline music produced in the 90’s: “Is Patsy going to be in the show?”

    1. Paint N Drip*

      We actually try to have ALL of the seats facing the stage, we find it improves the customer experience

      1. Rex Libris*

        On the other hand, I once saw a truly terrible production of Man of La Mancha that I think might have been improved by rear facing seats.

        1. Phony Genius*

          I believe a theatre critic once wrote a review akin to this. Something like “I had the misfortune of having a seat which faced the stage.”

          And the classic: “I did not like it, but perhaps this judgment is unfair. I saw it under adverse conditions — the curtain was up.” Attributed to Walter Winchell, Groucho Marx, and others.

    2. Elle*

      I volunteered to sell tickets day off at my kids HS musical production. The show is held in our HS auditorium. The complaints and requests were insane. Never again. I don’t know why people expect a HS auditorium and production to be like Broadway.

      1. ferrina*

        I’ll second this- most parents I’ve interacted with are lovely and know what they’re in for, but there are a few that expect a world-class production (usually starring Their Child).
        It’s one of the few situations where I’ll channel the full PTA Karen energy in self-defense.

      2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        The weekend after 9/11, my university had their family weekend and I was working in the office that planned it. We had the least amount of medium t-shirts because we ordered them based on what people indicated on the order form that they wanted. People who did not sign up for mediums started asking them. My boss started handing out mediums to whomever wanted them. Eventually, I asked, “But what if people who ordered mediums don’t get them?” My boss looked at me, dead serious, and said, “Resident, we’ve just been through a national tragedy. T-shirt sizes are not that important.”

        So, later, when I was being screamed at by people who ordered mediums and were peeved to be told we were all out, I firmly blamed my boss, who had decamped to have a few margaritas after a long morning.

        I gave grace to the people who were mad because 1) they ordered a specific size and then we ran out; 2) everyone was stressed because this was Friday and 9/11 had happened on Tuesday; and 3) A LOT of those people traveled in from out of town when travel was…highly precarious. (Obviously, no flights, but I imagine car rental places were a nightmare.)

        1. AnotherOne*

          My mom flew that weekend- it was my first year at college out of state and it was my birthday weekend.

          My parents and I had decided early on that they wouldn’t do parents weekend but instead would come up a random weekend. (It was a lot more cost effective cuz I went to school in the Boston area and most schools had their parent weekends on a handful of dates so hotels and flights got very expensive.)

          My mom loves me a lot and I have the proof because of the number of hours she spent in security lines flying right after 9/11 so she could spend maybe 48 hours with me.

          When people are like why are you so close to your parents, especially your mom- I’m like that. That right there.

    4. Robbie*

      I preach in my job. I have been told my voice is too high pitched, it is too low pitched, I speak to slowly and too quickly, and that if I just spoke like their current minister who was on vacation I could be heard just fine.

      their current preacher is a lovely man in his 60’s with a deep baritone. I am a 33-year old woman with a mid-range pitch. I will happily accept feedback to make my voice heard, but I won’t be changing my voice to match a man twice my age. this did not go over well.

      2. ferrina*

        I have a female relative who is a former pastor, and apparently a lot of people think that being a young, female clergy member is an invitation for commentary on EVERYTHING. She got comments on her voice, her clothes, her hair, her shoes….surprisingly little on the actual content of her sermons. It would usually be something like “We love how unique your style is! But have you tried [clothing/hairstyle/speaking mannerism that isn’t like her at all]?”

        Eventually she dyed her hair pink, and a year later quit the clergy. She now works in tech, which she says has less condescending people and less drama.

        1. RLC*

          My late mother in law was a pastor, I recall one commenter pointing out how the communion loaf dropped crumbs on the floor and made a mess, that she should have selected a different sort of bread which did not drop crumbs.

          1. Evan Þ*

            I heard that, a little before I joined my church, there was a tussle about a new recipe for our Communion bread.

            When I heard this, I shrugged and said “It tastes good to me now.”

            My friend replied, “That’s because you weren’t here to taste the old recipe.”

        3. Bossy*

          People think that being female in any stage of life is an invitation for their commentary on EVERYTHING.

          1. Star Trek Nutcase*

            Unfortunately, a significant number of those commenting on females are themselves female. When I was young & attended church, some of the older women were so disparaging but I never heard any man do so. In college both as student and staff, it was female students who made such verbal comments while both sexes would on evaluations. In my work & personal life, some of both sexes made comments – men more sex related, females more appearance related. But I would note some females (including me) also made both sex & appearance comments about men. I always thought it was naive to think such comments only flow one way or to think only those from men are wrong or worse.

      3. Marzipan Dragon*

        They probably know the woman who repeatedly complained that I answered the phone “too cheerfully.” I spoke with my supervisor and we had no idea what she was complaining about, I was just using a standard customer service voice. The woman wasn’t even a customer, she was calling in to bother her daughter who was an employee. If the switchboard had caller ID all those years ago I would have answered her calls in the most funereal voice possible.

        1. 1LFTW*

          You could have answered the phone like Lurch: “… You rang?”. What a missed opportunity.

        2. MigraineMonth*

          Repeated customer service complaints… from someone who isn’t a customer. I don’t understand people.

    5. MCL*

      Oh yeah, I was a college kid earning a couple of bucks ushering for (IIRC) a performance of Handel’s Messiah. I was on autopilot being polite and trying to keep traffic flowing and was chirping “Enjoy the show!” every so often as I handed out programs, at which point a grumpy dude informed me “It’s NOT A SHOW, it is a CONCERT.” Fun guy.

    6. Ally McBeal*

      Lord. I worked at a regional theatre box office in college and on one sold-out night I started a tally sheet of everyone who stood in the very long line just to ask if we were “really” sold out. As if the large “SOLD OUT TONIGHT” signs posted over every poster and hung over every box office window was just a silly marketing trick.

    8. Lexi Vipond*

      A lot of the concert venues round here have seats round three sides of a rectangle, with more seats or standing space in the middle and the stage as the fourth side – not the places that are mainly theatres putting on plays, though.

    9. Sophia Brooks*

      Is it terrible I have a nostalgia for Box Office? I was pretty good at it and I did walk-in assigned seats with no computer for children’s theatre. That is a skill that is no longer usable! I think the biggest complaint was that I could not magically make four or more seats together available in the good seats. Like, the seats were pre-reserved. I did my best to make sure people were bunched together, but sometimes the Tetris just couldn’t be done.

  13. Daughter of Ada and Grace*

    We were making significant changes and improvements to our website, including adding functionality that our users had been asking for. The feedback from one of those users can best be summed up as “How dare you give me exactly what I’ve been asking for!”

    1. House On The Rock*

      Years of working in user experience and interface design taught me that doing exactly what the customer asks for is a sure fire way to not give them what they want (although what they want is frequently very bad from a design perspective!).

      1. Daughter of Ada and Grace*

        I don’t remember the exact quote (it’s been a long time), but it was very all over the place: thanking us for implementing the (functional) changes that he’d been asking for (and they were useful and necessary changes), and then concluding with something like “I don’t like it”.

    2. MigraineMonth*

      I think the best assumption from the start is that users don’t actually want what they ask for. If they knew, they’d be web designers.

    3. FormerLibrarian*

      I used to do the website at my former job. Soooo many items of feedback that boiled down to “It changed and I don’t like it!”

      Most of the complaints were also from people who used the (academic library) website in one way and assumed everyone used it that way. The researchers who used physical books, for instance, were offended that the library catalog search screen wasn’t front-and-center. We had a federated search screen that searched the catalog *and* most of the databases because the vast, vast majority of library usage these days involves the article databases and not the physical books, but that wasn’t what these researchers used and they howled about making one click to get to the catalog search screen. (I gave them a link they could bookmark to spare them the extra click.)

      I can see that the emotions behind that were primarily distress at the rapid change from physical media to digital, and I can sympathize, but it is what it is.

      And then there was the professor whose error report was, and I quote, “Your website doesn’t work. Fix it!” and refused to comment further or help me troubleshoot because he didn’t have time for that. So he had to live with a broken site until one of his colleagues helped me. Turned out to be a setting in one browser set by his department’s IT group to allow them to access one database that department had purchased, that only showed up if you used that browser (not the most common on campus) in that building on a university-owned computer. I was able to put a setting into the HTML header as a fix until they stopped using that database.

      1. Wolf*

        >Soooo many items of feedback that boiled down to “It changed and I don’t like it!”

        Even if you change something they previously hated, they’ll suddenly have nostalgia for it.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          The funniest thing for me is that as a software developer who makes bug fixes I know how important patches are, but as a user I still hate it every time the software I’m using changes even a little. I’m generally the last person to adopt new technology, because I want to wait until they’ve worked out the major bugs/workflow issues.

  14. aebhel*

    I had a man come in, march up to the front desk, and demand to know what we were going to do about the bus stop out front. The sign was misleading and he couldn’t tell what route he was supposed to be on, and it was our responsibility to Do Something About It, didn’t we take any pride in our work at all????

    I work in a public library.

    2. NotActuallyALibrarian*

      Ah, libraries. I once had a member of the public come in to the library and ask where an event was. It was not in our library building, or even our borough. She got annoyed with me that the name of the nearest railway station to our building was misleading, then cross when I couldn’t tell her exactly which bus to catch to get to the other borough’s library.

    3. Magic Violins*

      I work in a college library and you’d be surprised (or maybe unsurprised) at how many students think we can adjust their class schedule.

      1. La Triviata*

        I know someone who works at a law school library and one student was appalled to discover they were going to have to do their research in BOOKS. (rather than exclusively online)

        1. LaurCha*

          I worked in a med school library in the 90s, so there were online catalogs, but only just barely. I had two kinds of people: olds who declared “I don’t do computers” and students who were shocked that they had to go pull the items off the shelves and use the copier all by their little selves.

      2. Academic Librarian, you say?*

        I once had a student ask where their room was. We had to break it to her that the library and a dorm had the same name (different people) and she would not be sleeping with the books. She didn’t complain much but was very, very disappointed. Me too, kiddo.

        Did I mention that the doom also hosted the mail room for several dorms, so at the beginning of each academic year, we also had to break it to new students that we didn’t have their mail, although we had plenty for them to read.

    4. Libby Mae*

      I was working as the admin at a public library and had recorded the greeting on our phone system. We had a lady write an entire letter to complain that my message said “liberry” and not “liBRary.” She may have had a mild point; I certainly didn’t emphasis the “r” in the word. But I didn’t change it, out of spite.

      1. Spitebrarian*

        I would have only pronounced it “liberry” as long as I worked there after that.

    5. Blue Spoon*

      Oh man, public library complaints. I’m eternally shocked at how many people blame me for their password problems. I understand that remembering usernames and passwords can be difficult and two-factor authentication can be a hassle or obstacle as much as it can be a help, but I’ve had patrons who act as if the very notion of passwords is an insult to them personally and that I should be able to get them to their email login be damned.

      1. Name Anxiety*

        A patron came in once and asked for help with his email (common), so being the librarian on the desk and no tech help that day I went over to the computer where he had the browser open to create a new account. I asked him if he needed to set up an email or if he already had one. He insisted that he already had one, but when I asked if it was Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail or anything else he could remember he said that I should know because he set it up here (the library). I told him that I couldn’t help him if he didn’t know what his email address was at all and he angrily stood up and literally shouted “Jane [name of part time library tech] would have known my email and password!” and stormed out. He never came back to our library because he would call in in advance to see if Jane was in, but since we didn’t give out that info he wouldn’t risk having to deal with me again

    6. not nice, don't care*

      Hopefully not a public library like the one my spouse works at. Patron complaints often involve hate crimes, verbal & physical assaults, and broken windows/furniture.

  15. Former Retail Lifer*

    I was a manager at an office supply store. A lady called in to complain: “I just bought a whole box of pencils and not a single one of them was sharpened.”

    First of all, wouldn’t it be weird if some were sharpened and some were not? Second of all, it’s standard that they come unsharpened. But also, did she really buy an entire box of pencils without having a sharpener at home?

    1. Clisby*

      It’s not uncommon for office supply stores to sell packs of sharpened pencils (maybe especially around back-to-school sales?) but yeah – you can clearly see that they’re (all) sharpened.

    2. Peanut Hamper*

      I bought a box of pencils from Amazon. They were presharpened but did not have erasers. The pictures all clearly showed pencils without erasers. The description clearly stated that they did not have erasers.

      So many complaints in the reviews that “these don’t have erasers!”

      People can be dim, sometimes.

      1. Boof*

        Honestly amazon is a little frustrating sometimes I feel like it’s easy to accidentally end up in a different – but very similar – product than intended if you start using the “consider ___ instead of the thing you got before but is out of stock!” link. I had to send back a second set of curtains I was trying to get like, at least 2x because the size and the rod type kept going wrong despite my best efforts to order the exact same thing I got before!

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Amazon is “a little” frustrating “sometimes”? I feel like it’s become almost unusable! Ten years ago, if I wanted to buy something like an extension cord, I could search Amazon and it would return a reasonable number of results, all of which were extension cords from reputable sellers and came with free shipping. I could just decide how many plugs I wanted and select the cheapest, and it would be delivered within a few days.

          Now there are ten thousand results, a lot of which aren’t actually extension cords that would work for my power source, and it’s so much harder to sort through them to find the best one. Every time I give up on finding a better one and go to checkout, I realize that the shipping cost is double what the item costs, or that the item ships in 6-11 weeks. Eventually I give up and walk to a store instead.

          Amazon got us all hooked because of the convenience, but if it doesn’t do something about its “marketplace” I don’t think it will keep us.

          1. Sociology rocks!*

            This is exactly why I vastly prefer to shop in store. I get the time immediately, and I have the vague clue it’s not completed and utter nonsense of a product

          2. Worldwalker*

            I’m part of Amazon Vine — they send us free stuff in exchange for reviewing it. (We get to choose from a list of stuff) Pay particular attention to reviews that say the reviewers got the item via Vine: we were selected because we’re good reviewers in the first place, and we don’t want to lose our Vine status, so we write good and accurate reviews so we don’t get booted. After a few months of this, I’d trust a Bine Voice’s review over others.

            Among the stupid reasons I’ve seen for poor reviews: people ordered the wrong size, and the mail lost/delayed the shipment. One I remember posted a picture of a crushed box that had clearly had something very heavy dropped on it in the back of the mail truck, and rated the item one star.

  16. EmF*

    “Thanks for calling (car company), how can I help you?”
    “Yeah, my new truck’s a lemon.”
    “… I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble with your truck. Can you tell me more about what’s going on?”
    “It’s the chrome.”
    (A slight pause here while I try to figure out what about the chrome could be rendering the truck undriveable.)
    “… the chrome?”
    “Yeah. It’s dangerous!”
    “… I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand. Can you elaborate?”
    “It’s too shiny.”
    “…”
    “It could blind someone!”

    1. Former Auto Gal*

      That is actually a real issue and there are government regulations in the US around it and there have been recalls. The sun reflects off the shiny accents into the driver’s eyes.

      1. Llellayena*

        I wonder how the Tesla truck that someone shined to mirror-bright is getting away with it then. I mean…making it damn near invisible is a definite improvement in appearance, but I’d think that would be dangerous for reflections…

        2. zinzarin*

          Regulations cover what comes out of a manufacturer’s factory, not a customer’s garage. While the customer is probably in violation of those same regulations or other laws, there’s no inspection process whereby the customer’s modification gets reviewed.

          I.e. they get away with it because nobody’s checking.

          1. Ally McBeal*

            Depends on local law enforcement. When I was in high school one of my buddies had a tricked-out yellow Mustang – he told me that he wanted his aftermarket undercarriage LEDs in yellow (no idea what they’re actually called but they’re mounted under the car so it looks like its undercarriage is glowing) but yellow LEDs were illegal in our area so he had to opt for blue. Granted we lived in a state that also mandated annual inspections so enforcement is probably more strict there than it is where I live now (which bizarrely has no inspection requirement).

          2. Meghan*

            Yesterday on the way home I saw a Mustang that had been customized and wrapped (I mean it had to be a wrap, right?!) in silver holographic print. The back bumper was black holographic. It was wild. And yes, hurt my eyes. Luckily I was stopped at a red light.

      2. Lady_Lessa*

        I wish that they would do something about the very bright headlights on pickup trucks and other vehicles what have them high(from road) enough to nearly blind a driver in a lower set car.

        1. KaciHall*

          combination of getting older (though I’m not even 40!) and brighter headlights mean I cannot drive at night anymore. This basically means I’m stuck home in my small town all winter because it’s dark before I get off work. My husband can drive us some places, but he HATES driving to the nearest city, so I have to drive if we’re going there.

        2. Ally McBeal*

          This is the sort of thing that’s only going to be fixed through grassroots outreach to federal-level elected officials. I have astigmatism and it really bothers me, but all the automakers insist the LED technology has improved sooooo much – they’re not going to reverse course unless a law gets passed.

      3. EmF*

        FWIW, this was in around 2005 – I’m not sure when the recalls were (I tried googling, and got a lot of Chrome extensions to assist blind users.) This particular customer, after I referred her to the dealership to see if they had any suggestions, turned out to have been someone who had very recently purchased the Extra Chrome package on a fully-loaded pickup and possibly suffering from sticker shock.

        That said – I didn’t know there had been recalls! That’s fascinating, and I’m glad to hear it.

      4. Another Jen*

        Yes! One of our cars has a reflective metal around the cupholders, and when the sun hits it a certain way, it’s blinding for the driver. I hate it so much!

  17. Peanut Hamper*

    I don’t know if this counts, but here goes.

    I used to work at Menard’s (it’s like a midwestern Lowe’s). Every single week people would come in and ask for something that they said was on sale in our ad, but which we didn’t even stock. I eventually learned that there was no point in trying to prove this to them, so this is the script I eventually settled on. It worked great.

    Me: “How can I help you today?”

    Customer (angrily): “I’m looking for that Dewalt drill that’s on sale and I can’t find it!”

    Me (pleasantly): “Hmm…are you sure it was Dewalt? We don’t carry that brand.”

    Customer (even more angrily): “Yes you do! It was in your ad!”

    Me (even more pleasantly): “Hmm….what color was that ad?”

    Customer (still angrily): “It was orange!”

    Me (still pleasantly): “Oh, our ad is green. The orange ad is from Home Depot. They’re across the street.”

    Me: (smiles pleasantly).

    Customer: (gets embarassed, stumbles off).

    Friends, I derived a great deal of satisfaction from these encounters.

    1. Cubicles & Chimeras*

      As a former Menards employee to another: Menards customers tend to be dim bulbs. So many customers not understanding the rebate stuff…

      2. Peanut Hamper*

        I had one who complained that it wasn’t really a rebate, just a store credit. I had to remind him that he was a contractor and was in here almost every day.

        It later occurred to me that he just wanted the cash to spend at the liquor store (which would also make the liquor a tax deduction!).

        1. Cubicles & Chimeras*

          I could fill a novel with some of the contractor bs I put up with. Not to mention our useless store manager. And the terrible practices of the company itself.

          The hate I developed working there and the horror when they tried to make me management track propelled me into getting the heck out of dodge which eventually landed me in my current career, so I’m thankful for that.

      3. Pescadero*

        As a Michigander… EVERYTHING about Menard’s is the worst.

        Worst management, worst employees, worst stocking levels, worst quality products… basically the equivalent of the Dollar Store for home improvement.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          But… I heard you can save big money at Menard’s. Are you saying the ads lied to me?

          1. dawbs*

            And we can all hear the jingle while reading your comment.

            (I do gripe about the rebates. I have one sitting on my desk and I don’t WANT to go use it.
            But they were, for a long time, the only place I could find my candy weakness [starburst jellybeans] year round. So Mr. Dawbs stopped there semi-frequently)

      4. Anonymel*

        For a long time, I didn’t understand how Menards didn’t get sued for saying “Save 11% everyday” or whatever. A rebate that MUST be spent in their store is NOT a savings and it used to p*ss me off every single time I heard it. We shopped there once for an expensive item because of the 11% savings, (as military we only get 10% at Lowe’s and Home Depot) and then at the register when she said “oh no you have to mail in to get the rebate and they’ll send you a check,” I was annoyed a little but when she added, “that you can use for your next purchase here,” we just stared at her and said ‘Oh NO, you can void this purchase. I do NOT do rebates. Nope.” Have never gone back. The ads are clearer NOW about saying “in the form of a rebate” or something but like 10 years ago, they weren’t that up front in the commercials.

    2. Fluffy Fish*

      eons ago i had a receptionist type position. the amount of people who called looking for something that had absolutely nothing to do with us AND expecting me to find the right number for them (i am not in fact a phone book) made me fear for our education system.

      Anyway, if they were NICE, I helped them find the correct number. If they were rude or nasty, I also helped them by placing them on hold while I searched for the right number. It took a very very very long time for me to find that number. In fact it took so long that usually they hung up.

      1. JanetM*

        When I first started working at the university, I would occasionally get calls from another university number asking for [Unusual Name]. I consistently apologized and assured the caller that the person she was looking for didn’t work in my department, but if she had a last name or a department, I could look her up in the phone book.

        The caller always hung up rather than providing any further information.

        One day, by pure chance, I was looking up someone *else* in the phone book and spotted [Unusual Name], who worked on the other side of campus and had a phone number that was, IIRC, the same as mine but with the last two digits transposed.

        The next time I got that call, I said, “I’m so sorry, but she works in Other Department, and her number is Number. Would you like me to transfer you?”

        She hung up.

        A few minutes later, I got a call from a male voice, who started the conversation with, “What the hell is your problem that you won’t let my secretary talk to [Unusual Name]?”

        I apologized and explained that the person he was looking for worked in a different department, and that her number was ABDC whereas mine was ABCD.

        He hung up.

        However, no one ever called me back looking for [Unusual Name].

        ————–

        Unrelated, but again, shortly after I started working at the university, someone called and asked if we had summer programs for preschoolers. I said that no, she needed the public library, and offered to look up the number.

        She asked, “If this isn’t the library, what is it?”

        I said, “This is the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences at University. We offer master’s degrees for people who want to become librarians.”

        She said, “You need a DEGREE to be a LIBRARIAN? That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!” And slammed down the phone.

      2. Lily C*

        When I was a receptionist, we had to put visitors’ names into the system that building security used, but there was about an hour’s delay before approved names would show up downstairs, so I’d pretty frequently get calls from the security desk when people showed up with short notice. One day I got a call about “Jane, who wants to see Kim in accounting.” We didn’t have a Kim in accounting, so I said no. Security officer said that Jane used to work in our office, and she’s sure that Kim still does. I said no again, we’ve had the same solo accountant for 20 years, and they’re not named Kim or have ever had an assistant. Security guard started getting upset, and I suggested maybe he’d called the wrong office. His response: “Isn’t this the British Consulate?” Nope, this is a law firm in an entirely different building. What part of “Good afternoon, [name of] Law Office” did you not catch, sir?

      3. Playing telephone*

        I once had someone call me and go on an extended rant about how their shelter was full and that they were calling me to take on some more intakes and if I wasn’t going to take them he didn’t know what they would do and several other places that were full and couldn’t help. The run on sentence gives you an idea of the speech and the speed.

        I said no. The unhappy silence at the other end was my revenge for him calling my home phone number at 2 a.m. mistaking it for a shelter and I also wasn’t going to accept people into my apartment. I then put him out of his misery and offered to get him the phone number for the actual shelter.

        Nothing quite matches the person that called my home phone number at 3 a.m. and listened to my answering machine to taunt someone else that they had found her drugs and taken them all. Guess that was obvious since you didn’t dial correctly or listen to the answering message.

    3. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      Something similar happened to me a long time ago, back in the days of answering machines. The “please leave a message” recording at my house was a parody of Ghostbusters, complete with music and background noises asking you to leave a message that we’d answer when the latest spook was in containment.

      …and then Circuit City misprinted their phone number in an ad.

      Y’all can guess where this is going, but it was amazing the number of people who listened all the way through and put in a phone order anyway. My favorite was the one who added “And I think your message is very unprofessional!”

      1. aceowl*

        This still happens SO often! I think the county lawyer’s office is similar to the library’s, because I get voicemails all the time for people looking for their lawyer. I’m a librarian. At the library. Which I say in my voicemail message. They don’t listen!

        1. Zephy*

          It’s been years since I’ve gotten a really-really-wrong number call, but a while back I had a lady call me to complain about her recycling pickup. Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s university financial aid office. I’m not sure you could have called a wronger number.

          1. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

            I called a wronger number once. Did you know that in my area UPS and a sex call line are one digit off? When I first heard a woman enthusiastically telling me she’d make me SO GLAD I called I first thought “Wow, they’ve really upped their customer service!”

            1. LCH*

              haha, i had a friend accidentally send executives at his work to a sex line instead of a conference call line once.

              1. AngryOctopus*

                My old boss dialed into our conference line but hit a 9 instead of an 8 the first time. It’s a sex line.

                Also, according to a colleague, the help line for EndNote and the “help” line for “naughty gentlemen” are very similar (transposed digits, IIRC). She was very startled to call the help line at like 8PM only to get the “help” line.

                1. Willem Dafriend*

                  My high school thought they put the school office phone number on our student IDs. Reader, it was a sex line. My family still jokes about that one. (I wonder why so many people have “transposed phone numbers got a sex line” stories.)

              3. Clisby*

                At one workplace, the monthly newsletter sent around by the communications department included a phone number for something pretty anodyne … only if you called it, you got a phone sex number. This spread around like wildfire, with people calling the number just to listen to the intro (at least that’s what they said). I don’t know whether anyone was disciplined for this mistake.

          2. Ally McBeal*

            In the year 2004 – literally 20 years ago, yikes – I got my first cellphone. I apparently took over the number from a woman who is an immigration attorney or similar. I do not speak Spanish. I still occasionally get calls from people looking for Sandra and it’s very hard to explain to them that the business card their aunt (or whoever) collected 25 years ago is incorrect.

          3. Cedrus Libani*

            On the plus side, the wronger the number, the faster you figure it out…

            I was the guilty party recently. Was trying to call a doctor’s office, got an automated phone system, which…promptly went into a sales pitch for a mobility scooter. Okay, I get it, it’s an advertisement; target rich environment and the doc’s got med school loans to pay. The end was something like “Press 1 to be connected to our sales team for the Scoot-o-matic XL, or stay on the line.” I did not press 1, but the human who picked up the line was also interested in selling me a scooter, and was not taking a polite “no thank you” for an answer. Finally, she got annoyed, and said “If you don’t want a scooter, why did you call?” Wait, what? Oh. Yeah, I transposed the last two digits of that phone number.

        2. Guacamole Bob*

          I worked at a tiny nonprofit and eventually just found the numbers for the large university near us and for the mental health unit of the local hospital so that I could give mistaken callers the correct number rather than argue with them about it (they were both like one digit off). Especially the hospital one – we had more than one confused and worried relative with limited English trying to track someone down so it was nice to be able to say “oh, you want 5700 not 5200”).

        3. Mike S*

          I work for a hospital on the administration side. After a series of voice mails one weekend, my message now says that if you’re calling about patient care, you’ve called the wrong number.

          1. Venus*

            I worked at a place where the last two numbers transposed were for the emergency line at the hospital. It was a business completely unrelated to health so it should have been obvious but stressed people are often distracted so after a few really worried messages were left overnight the owner changed the message to say that the number for the hospital was ….

        4. H3llifIknow*

          Our old landline was one digit off from a local pharmacy. I got at least one call a day from someone asking if their Rx was ready for pick up. And half the time when I’d say you have the wrong number, they’d hang up and clearly hit redial again! I’d get yelled at about not being willing to go check, not doing my job, etc.. I finally just started telling people, “Yep. Come and get it,” and let the Pharmacy deal with the fallout!

      2. Don'tle*

        Oh yes! I used to get so many misdirected calls for a warehouse store’s customer service line (I never did figure out why) that I finally changed my outgoing message to “This is a private home, you have *not* reached Clam’s Club” and people would still leave messages–sometimes angry–about rebates and returns. This came to a head around 2008 and was a big factor in giving up my landline.

        1. BubbleTea*

          My dad regularly gets calls from people trying to reach eBay. We have never figured out why.

        2. noncommittally anonymous*

          Likewise, there was a local event planning company that changed their phone number, but somehow hadn’t changed the number on the sign on their door. I’d get people calling from the parking lot INSISTING that this was the number for such-and-so because they could see the sign on the front door! And where the hell were the tents and chairs for their wedding?!?!

          They must’ve finally changed their sign, because the calls stopped after about a year.

      3. Christmas Carol*

        Reminds me of how a Sears in Colorado sponsored a Call Santa line one Chirstmas in the early 60s. The newspaper mis printed the phone #. The number they printed rang into the Missle Defense Command, but airmen played along. And that’s how NORAD started tracking Santa’s sleigh way back when.

      4. Bunch Harmon*

        Years ago, before Borders went out of business, I had to call customers when special orders came in. We had one regular with a voicemail message that said “This is Bill. I’ve made some changes in my life, and if you’re one of them I’ll call you back.” I always felt weird leaving a message after that!

      6. Turquoisecow*

        My husband has a longstanding hate for (now defunct) Pier One Imports as their number was similar to his home number when he was a kid. When he told them it was a wrong number they would argue with him, so finally he started saying that they did have that item in stock and they were open and whatever else they asked, and then letting them go to the store and find out otherwise. At least then it was a pleasant interaction.

        1. megaboo*

          Our new phone number when I was kid was a former restaurant. The restaurant changed their number, but they weren’t up-to-date in the Yellow Pages (Yes, I’m old). If people were nice, my dad gave the right number. If they were mean, he took their reservations.

          1. small towns*

            Ours was one digit off from the local newspaper.

            Every Sunday morning, multiple times, my mom would answer the phone, listen for a few seconds, and then say, “Funny, we haven’t gotten our paper this morning either. Have you thought about calling them directly?” and then hang up.

            The paper did finally get a new phone number, and my mom was so thrilled that she could finally sleep in on Sundays…

      7. Mad Harry Crewe*

        My neighbor growing up had a number that was one digit off of a local pizza place. They just started taking orders (and then hanging up and doing nothing with them) because people just got mad if you tried to explain that they had called a wrong number.

        1. nnn*

          I feel like someone with fraud skills could leverage that into some kind of credit card scam

          1. goddessoftransitory*

            I’ve definitely taken orders where my thought process included “Thank God I’m not a different kind of person.”

        2. Jay (no, the other one)*

          My home number when I was growing up was one digit off the local fish store. We never had bluefish.

        3. MAC*

          When I still had a landline, it was one digit different than the waste management company. I got SO MANY calls from people asking why their garbage hadn’t been picked up or what the holiday schedule was. What made it weird is my number ended in 0 and WM ended in 1, so it’s not like they were close on the keypad.
          ———-
          I also once got a call in my then-office that was one digit different than a Canadian potato chip company (I was and am in the US.) That made me jealous that my job wasn’t at a potato chip company!

      8. Cathie from Canada*

        Our phone number once was a number away from a contest line at a local radio station. So sometimes when we answered the phone, we would get someone screaming “Clint Eastwood” or some such. Then we would have to tell them they had dialed the wrong number. At least they always hung up fast because they thought they might still have a chance to enter the real contest.

        2. Worldwalker*

          My number in my first apartment was one digit off from a local radio station. That ran midnight pizza contests. In a college town.

          The telco changed it for free after I showed up in their office (this was back in the days of Ma Bell and actual offices) and gave them grief.

      9. In the provinces*

        Back in the day, before cell phones, our home phone number was one digit different from a newly opened, heavily advertised car wash. We got a lot of calls from people, clearly under the influence, at rather odd hours, asking if the car wash was open.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Okay, that’s unexpected to me. Of all the intoxicated shenanigans I’ve heard about, getting a car washed at 3am is not one of them. Maybe going through an automated car wash while high is fun?

          1. goddessoftransitory*

            Or you puked down the side of Dad’s Buick and need to get rid of the evidence…

      10. Not that other person you didn't like*

        When I was a teen, living in a small nowhere town, the local airport shuttle (the only local airport shuttle in the area mind you) had a number one number different than our home number, which made the misprint in the local business directory easy to make. We got so many calls for the shuttle service! Usually, we’d just say “their number is ###” and people were apologetic and nice. But there were a handful of really rude people who wouldn’t listen and were demanding and mean… and when I got one of those I’d just make up random shuttle times or other bogus information for them to enjoy.

        As a side note, 40 years later, the company still exists, is still the only shuttle in the area, and still has a number one number different than my old home number.

      11. Dina*

        My phone number in college (back in the landline days) was the old phone number for the local Boys and Girls Club. The number of times people would leave messages trying to register for basketball when our outgoing message specifically stated it WASN’T the Boys and Girls Club…

      12. saf*

        Years ago, the FTC Fair Credit Reporting Office had a number that if you transposed 2 numbers, became my cell number. The number of folks who listened to my “This is my personal cell phone and NOT the FTC. They can be reached at 202-xxx-xxxx” message and then left me highly personal information, including social security numbers, continues to astound me.

        They changed their number years ago, but every now and then, someone uses an old form with the old number, and the calls start again.

      13. Worldwalker*

        I once got a wrong number for a restaurant that left all the details of the reservations they wanted. Unfortunately, it was on the voicemail my cell phone, which I hadn’t had on me when they called, and since back then I never got inbound calls, I didn’t notice the missed call until after the weekend.

    4. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      The retail store I worked at, inexplicably, also received a daily newspaper, which I enjoyed since I got to do the daily crossword. But it was specially handy on Sundays because it had everyone else’s ad in it. So, I would get these exchanges:

      Customer: I’m looking for this item that was in your ad!
      Me: We don’t carry that.
      Customer: It was in your ad! It was next to this other item!
      Me: Hold here a minute. *goes to the breakroom, grabs all the ads* So, you mean you saw it in Old Time Pottery’s ad?
      Customer: …this isn’t Old Time Pottery?
      Me: Nope.
      Customer: Where is Old Time Pottery?
      Me: I don’t know- I don’t work there.

    5. Anon Today*

      Back when I worked in a call center for a cable services company, I had a older woman call in because her service was out. When I tried to look up her address, it was outside of our service area. She absolutely refused to believe that she had called the wrong company.

      1. Anon too*

        Yeah, that sounds very familiar. When I still worked in a call center we had a bunch of those too. In one case it was down to a weird corporate structure, I usually gave a short explanation, the correct number and everyone moved on happily.
        In one case though I could not get the customer of the phone even after I had explained the mix-up and provided correct information. Turns out that 1. she actually had already called the correct number and was unhappy with their answer 2. after further digging turns out she created the problem she complained about herself by 3. not believing the posted schedule for event worked as posted by event coordinator (they surely would make an exception for her, right?) and was apparently trying to find as many people as possible to complain to so she could get 4. her money back. I somewhat could understand the last point, because tickets weren’t cheap, but you know – maybe believe event coordinator when they say how there start times/days of availability work? And no, she did not get a refund in the end not matter how many further complaints she made.

    6. goddessoftransitory*

      “Gettest thou a cemetery full of savings at Menards!”

      (one internet to those who know where that quote’s from)

    7. Astraea*

      As a pharmacy student, I rotated at CVS. Had a very irate gentleman come in and start swearing at me because I could not find him in the system, despite trying to look up by name, DOB, etc.

      In the middle of his rant, he goes, “This is the worst Walgreens ever!”

      I stopped, pointed up at the giant CVS sign above us, then at the stanchion sign next to us, and said, “Sir, Walgreens is across the street.”

      He looked at the signage, swore one more time, and stormed out.

      The courtesy clerk at the exit thanked him for shopping at CVS.

      For the rest of that rotation, we joked about being the worst Walgreens store in the state.

    9. Who knew.*

      I work in a store that sells scented body care and candles.

      Apparently I, a mere store employee, am personally responsible for discontinuing people’s favorite fragrances/products. Or so I’m told a couple of times a week.

    10. MigraineMonth*

      I don’t understand why people would immediately get angry when told they dialed the wrong number. Do they assume that lazy employees at the company are trying to trick them in the way most likely to get them another call? Do they just fly off the handle at the word “wrong”? Why get pissed at the person most likely to be able to help them figure out what went wrong and advance toward their eventual goal?

    11. Blarg*

      Menards ownership is … wild. The podcast Bad Lawyer Pod just did an episode about them. And … wow.

    12. NotARealManager*

      I ran into more than one of these types of confusion when I was an L.L. Bean cashier and people brought in Land’s End coats to return.

    13. AnnyFlavash*

      in fairness, the “chrome” (-painted plastic) in our mid 2010s-Expedition does blind the driver pretty regularly when the sun hits it wrong. It’s annoying and dangerous.

      After years of trying to figure out a solution, I have just purchased some matte nail polish topcoat that I hope will make it less of a problem. We’ll see how it goes when I apply it this weekend.

    14. Kelsi*

      I used to work at Hancock Fabrics (I think they’re all gone now but they were a big chain once).

      The number of times people would INSIST they were at Joann’s….

      This was also when most retail stores still accepted personal checks, and looking at the “made out to” line was usually a good laugh. Many spellings of Joann, just the word “fabric”, my fav was the lady who asked “should I make it out to John Hancock?” and was not joking.

      Customers are wild.

  18. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    From the railway days – this was a complaint from a customer that I’ll paraphrase.

    ‘I’m going to write to my MP and sue you all. I clearly stated that I required a train free of allergens for me and my child when I brought the tickets and paid the ridiculous amount you charge! So why was there a DOG on the train AND someone eating peanuts?! All your staff did was suggest we move to another carriage but the train was full!’

    Hoo boy..

    2. Jess*

      To be fair, if this is from the UK, it’s not at all unreasonable to expect a curated travel experience at those ticket prices if your frame of reference is the European mainland

      1. Keymaster of Gozer (She/Her)*

        Funny thing was, when they sent us up to places like Glasgow or Inverness they’d book a flight because it was cheaper than sending us by train.

        While I was working for the railway!

        1. Artemesia*

          privatizing the breaking up the railways in the UK has lead to one of the worst systems every. Who would have guessed?

  19. DifferentAnonForThis*

    Oh man! We got a review saying the only downside to our museum was how liberal it was… except the museum in question had an entire gallery dedicated to hunting/fishing/trapping, because it was pioneer era Florida, and another devoted to industry and industrialization.

    I have some very conservative family members confirmed this feedback was ridiculous.

    1. the Viking Diva*

      Let me guess: you had something about women or African Americans in local history.

      1. Desk Dragon*

        Or had even a passing mention of pollution related to industrialization, or mentioned a population decline in any of the hunted/fished/trapped species…

        1. Rex Libris*

          My guess is this. It’s hard to do a museum in Florida without mentioning the Calusa, the Timucua, the Seminole, or some other native culture, at least in passing.

          1. DifferentAnonForThis*

            Eh, might as well be identifying, this is all public knowledge anyway since its Florida. There’s two whole Calusa galleries because it’s on Marco Island. Oh the horror of a history museum presenting history!

      3. anonphenom*

        I was told it was my fault that their grandsons “didn’t know that men could be scientists”.

        Yup. We have 5 display pictures of male scientists visible from where this complaint was made. The complaint was made TO a male scientist–who was clearly one, because he was wearing a lab coat. But the signs that highlight some underrepresented scientists specifically for an event are supremely damaging. But sure, tell me again how you’re failing to inspire your grandkids.

        Because we, in 4 hours per year, apparently do more to discourage Jimmy from studying science than grandpa can undo in encouraging and engaging with him daily.

    2. DifferentAnonForThis*

      We also got a series of increasingly deranged conservative memes messaged to us over a single Black History Month post…

    3. Not Mindy*

      Here’s a direct quote from a review of the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, NY. Maybe I’m naive to expect that a science and natural history museum would subscribe to the theories of Darwin!
      “We love natural history and science and enjoy learning about our world. Unfortunately, the displays in this museum in general included too much bias for us to enjoy. Usually we can tune out the references to “millions & billions of years ago” and other “life-from-nonlife” science fiction nonsense and simply enjoy the evidence presented, but we found we couldn’t do so here. So if you don’t ascribe to the Darwinian interpretation presented here, as we don’t, you won’t glean much. Can’t really recommend it in good conscience.”

      1. the Viking Diva*

        Our local natural history museum has a renowned exhibit about evolving life through geologic time. There are special creationist tours that go through the exhibit, carefully re-interpreting it with their own Bible-based explanations. It’s quite a mind-bender to follow a tour group for a bit.

        1. DifferentAnonForThis*

          That would be fascinating! Are those tours associated with the museum at all or are they private groups? I’d love to know how the leadership decided to allow them.

          1. the Viking Diva*

            It’s a public museum, anyone can come. The tours are privately organized. On homeschool tour groups I think they register the group as a school group so the children and adult teachers/helpers get into the museum free, as do all school groups here. For adult tours, people buy their ticket for the creation tour and separate buy a regular museum entry ticket on their own.

            It is probably a bit weird for the museum staff, but I don’t think there is (or could be) any question of “allowing” it as long as the tour is not disruptive to others. It wouldn’t be any different than if a geology club wanted to tour together, or a group of seniors or tourists from overseas. I always hope that a few of those kids are reading the exhibit labels on their own and some science will sneak in!

            1. DifferentAnonForThis*

              In theory, I suppose you couldn’t stop someone who wanted to host tours without asking, but in practice I don’t think it would be unreasonable to request that certain groups not tour your museum due to the optics. It’s really not the same as any other group touring; the tour guide is misrepresenting the museum’s stance on history and this misrepresentation implies that the museum endorses their opinions. In particular, I think there would be a very good argument for not allowing school tours that misrepresent the displayed history.

              (To be clear, I don’t know enough of the particulars to say whether the museum should allow the tours in question, but it is definitely within the power of the museum to refuse if they choose to. Unless by public you mean government operated, in which case a clever enough director could still probably deny the tour if they wanted to.)

              1. KeinName*

                Would you not rather have people in the museum than not have people in the museum?
                They might read the labels on displays, pick up a Broschüre, come back alone, …

                1. DifferentAnonForThis*

                  Yeah, based on below I misunderstood the context. My concern was along the lines of people seeing that the museum was associated with creationist tours and choosing not to go based on the belief that the museum supported that perspective.

                  Again, based on below that’s not at play!

              2. the Viking Diva*

                The museum has substantial public funding, as most museums in the US do (I verified that before I wrote it). It would be quickly embroiled in lawsuits from education and civil liberties groups alike– and the backlash about this would not in fact advance anyone’s opportunity to learn.

                At least in their promo materials, the tours do not misrepresent the museum’s stance at all. They very clearly state that they offer an alternate interpretation that aligns with the literal Biblical account of creation, and that contrasts with popular, secular views.

                People tell other people wrong stuff in a museum all the time. All the museum can do is put out the best available information and (this part is important!) explain how we know what we know.

                1. DifferentAnonForThis*

                  Ah, I think I misunderstood the set up of the tours pretty seriously. I’d still be interested to know how those tours got organized!

            2. MigraineMonth*

              I was visiting younger cousins and helping them with their homework (where to put commas in a sentence), when the 8-year-old kid said, “But that’s not true.”

              I reread the sentence (“Bacteria have existed for at least 3.5 billion years”) and told him I thought it was true.

              Him: “But the Earth is only six thousand years old.”

              Me: *panics*

              Him: “Oh, this was probably meant for kids going to public school, not [his Christian school].”

              Me: So he knows he’s getting taught different facts than everyone else, and just accepts this. That’s… interesting.

              1. supernon*

                I never cease to be disgusted that children are allowed to be intentionally stunted by religious extremists.

              2. JustaTech*

                When I was in high school a friend and I went to the Natural History museum at Harvard (highly recommend). We were having a great time until we got to the fossil section, which included date ranges on the displays.
                Friend “This is wrong, it can’t be from millions of years ago.”
                Me, dreading this entire interaction “Really, why not?”
                Friend “Because it says so in the Bible.”
                Me, desperately wanting this to end “Oh, is there a date in the front? I’ve never checked!” (Forced chipper tone.)
                Extremely long pause from Friend as we keep walking around the exhibit.
                Me “Ooh, look, the glass flowers!”

                She let the whole thing go, I never brought it up again and we’re still friends, but I am very circumspect when I talk about science stuff with her (and I never, ever talk religion).

              3. Jamie Starr*

                But he’s not being taught *different* facts; what he’s being taught isn’t factual.

        2. Anonymous Rex*

          One of my prized possessions is the editor’s copy of a large manuscript called Studies in Flood Geology, written by someone who claims to have an undergraduate degree in geology. I found it in a thrift store, it is absolutely bizarre, and I love it. Came in very handy when creationist groups came into our geological museum to loudly denounce everything.

      2. AngryOctopus*

        I volunteered at the science museum in town for a long time. The weirdest one I got was a woman who came up to me, gazed into my eyes without blinking, and asked “Where is your theology exhibit?”
        Unluckily for her I am Master of the Unblinking Gaze, so I just gazed back and said “We don’t have one” and then kept making eye contact until she left. I think she wanted me to get defensive or something? She was definitely not expecting to get back what she was giving.

        1. anonimuss*

          A mildly related thing that has always tickled me: there is a science podcast in the UK hosted by a physicist and a comedian. Each episode they will have guest scientists in a discipline that fits the theme, along with non-scientist guests – comedians, actors etc – who have an interest in science (Infinite Monkey Cage if you’re interested, it’s incredibly interesting. And the comedian does reign the scientists in when they get too far beyond normal person understanding!).

          One year on their Christmas special they had an extremely eminent American scientist, who is I think an atheist (or strong agnostic), along with guests who included some Christian clergy. When this groups were introduced as ‘in the religious corner, we have…’ the scientist got a bit grumpy and said ‘if I come to your church will I see science corner?’. Unfortunately for him, one of the clergy was the Dean of Westminster Abbey, who invited him to the Abbey to visit Scientist’s Corner, where he could see the graves of Newton, Darwin, Hawking

      3. Ally McBeal*

        I was raised in an area where Biblical Creationism is a very common belief. When I go back to visit, I like to visit the science/natural history museums to see if I can hear anyone complaining about the stated ages of the exhibits. It doesn’t happen often but it definitely does happen.

  20. KareninHR*

    My first job was working at a dry cleaner. One day I had the (mis)fortune of helping out a mystery shopper. In her feedback, she said that I was helpful, but my “enthusiasm seemed forced.” I’m not sure what more could be hoped for from a 16-year-old dry cleaner employee.

    2. Beka Cooper*

      Oooh, my mystery shopping experience when I was about the same age was at a chain pet store. We only carried freshwater fish and supplies. The mystery shopper asked me to show them a product for a saltwater tank, and I said we don’t have that. But apparently, I was supposed to try to suggest some other product instead, even though none of our products would be a substitute. I would have gotten a perfect score if it weren’t for that, and I think my managers still circled and called out the “mistake” on the printout on the bulletin board, encouraging us to do better next time. I’m still annoyed over 20 years later.

      1. Dry Cleaning Enthusiast*

        “Unfortunately we don’t carry saltwater aquarium products here. However, we carry a wide variety of delightful hamsters and hamster accoutrements! May I suggest this amazing hamster ramp? They’re very popular.”

      2. nnn*

        I would love to hear your manager’s explanation of what would constitute an appropriate recommended substitution.

        (Although, having worked in retail myself, I strongly suspect the answer would be “There is no appropriate substitution and also you need to recommend a substitution”)

        1. Abogado Avocado*

          “Regrettably, we don’t carry saltwater products here, but the Trader Joe’s next door has shrimp on sale. Tell them Jane sent you!”

      3. goddessoftransitory*

        It’s ridiculous–the secret shoppers get in trouble if they DON’T mark something down (otherwise the workers getting perfect scores might want raises or other commie nonsense) so they will deliberately conjure a scenario where the target cannot provide what they ask for.

    4. goddessoftransitory*

      If you didn’t perform a spontaneous Buzby Berkley-inspired dance routine about her blazers, you were NOT performing to standards, apparently.

    5. Meg*

      Ohhh, mystery shoppers. My coworker fell down a gravel hill while hiking and had really painful road rash on her arm, so she wore a nice sleeveless blouse the following day because it was too painful to cover with fabric. She ended up getting mystery shopped that day and the feedback said that the person helping her was kind but had “open sores on display.” We teased her about her “festering wound” and “oozing sores” every time customer feedback got brought up for years afterwards.

  21. Gahhh*

    Someone wrote on the online volunteer survey I sent out to all volunteers at a kids’ camp: “I’m kissing you.”

    1. Prudence and Wakeen Snooter Theatre for the Performing Oats*

      Our client was mad that we didn’t use her pet’s full name, especially on forms. Our systems were not designed to accommodate long names- sorry, Emperor Snufflebutt of Los Angeles.

      2. BubbleTea*

        My brother had a hamster who he called Hamster, but I called her Archibald, Third Duke of Windsor. She didn’t answer to either name anyway.

        1. Worldwalker*

          One of my cats is technically Summit Bengals Basil Maculus Felis Superbis. He responds to Mac. Also Squaglet. And sometimes “caaaaaaat!”

          1. The Other Katie*

            According to my then-teenage son, our oldest cat is formally named Sir Sombrero Alois de Constantine Vermillion. Daily name: Max. (Or Bunny, for short.)

  22. Cubicles & Chimeras*

    Weirdest customer complaint I ever received was when I worked at a diner in the middle of nowhere off a highway, so we had a mix of locals and travelers.

    A customer who was clearly passing through on a trip complained that our meatloaf did not taste like his mother’s meatloaf. Cue my unimpressed diner waitress face that he thought he could get his mother’s meatloaf instead of our cook’s mother’s meatloaf.

    2. goddessoftransitory*

      “I’ll bet my fist doesn’t taste like her meatloaf either.”

      Obviously do NOT choose violence, but oh, brother.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          There’s a children’s book I can’t quite remember about a newly wed couple. The husband expresses a wistful desire for seafood chowder like his mother made it.

          So every day that week, the new wife goes to increasing lengths to make the most amazing seafood chowder (milking the cow herself, even going out and catching the fish herself). The husband is always very complimentary of the chowder, but always says it’s “not quite like my mother’s.”

          On the final day, exhausted by her labors, the wife falls asleep and burns the chowder. Frustrated, she decides to serve it to her husband anyway, and he exclaims, “Yes, this is EXACTLY like my mother’s!”

          (At which point the wife dumps the pot of chowder over his head, and they end the book both laughing.)

    4. Jasmine*

      That would be the perfect response!
      “Oh no! Our cook makes HIS Mother’s meatloaf!”

  23. Broken Lawn Chair*

    Customer: You should have more cart corrals toward the far side of your lot.
    Me: Okay, well I’ll be glad to pass that feedback on to–
    Customer: See, I park all the way out there so I get my steps in!

    I so wanted to ask if she had a target number of steps she couldn’t go over, and that’s why she didn’t welcome the extra 100 steps to return her cart to the corral in the middle of the lot, but of course I did not.

    2. Strawberry Snarkcake*

      Meanwhile at my gym people will literally sit in their cars waiting for a “good” spot instead of walking an extra 50 steps. Sometimes people are aggressively baffling.

    4. Knighthope*

      And who cares if it increases the distance and work for the cart return employee!

  24. NW Mossy*

    Years ago, I took a call from someone with a complaint about their retirement plan that I will never forget:

    “I want to stop participating! All I’m doing is saving money! I can do that myself!”

    It’s always made me yearn for a word, probably polysyllabic and Germanic in origin, that means “to both grasp and completely miss the point simultaneously.”

    1. Our Business Is Rejoicing*

      As someone who educates people about a retirement plan, the number of people who think our not-for-profit plan is trying to put one over on them is always amazing.

      Also: Me: (repeatedly): It’s a lifetime pension.
      Them: So how many years do you get it?
      Me: As long as you live.
      Them: What if I live to 100?
      Me: Yep, you still get it.
      Them: That’s impossible. What’s the catch?

      I chalk it up to people in general not getting how traditional pensions work (no, you don’t get a monthly statement or your own account; you get a pension when you retire.)

      1. La Triviata*

        I once dealt with someone who insisted that our payroll system stop taking out money for Social Security and Medicare.

        1. Blarg*

          I had to explain to some colleagues that we couldn’t just delete the required federal boiler plate from our contracts (for work funded by the feds). No, we cannot edit the Certification Regarding Environmental Tobacco Smoke. Sorry…

      2. Unwatered Office Plant*

        To be fair, at least in the US, traditional pensions have largely fallen into the realm of myth and legend.

    3. Self Aware German*

      Don’t have a word, but there’s an entire sub Reddit devoted to this kind of thing: r/selfawarewolves.

  25. Midwest writer*

    I work for a little newspaper company in a very small Midwestern town. The fair and town festival are this month. Someone came in this week and began complaining to our ad salesperson that she almost didn’t want to renew her paper because her family tractors are never in the paper after the festival parade. But if her last name were (another local family name) they would be in the paper. This lady was furious over this slight.
    She still renewed her subscription though.
    And now I, the photographer and writer, have to decide if I put her family in the paper this year. If I can even figure out which tractors are theirs. (There are SO.MANY.TRACTORS)

    1. But maybe not*

      As someone who lives in a tiny Midwestern town (and knows the photographer/writer by name), I wish you the very best in making your decision.

    2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      That conversation would have ended with me not including any tractors in the paper, but that’s just me.

      1. The Prettiest Curse*

        Yeah, if this was me I would take great pleasure in identifying her tractors and then cropping all of the photos so they were juuuust out of shot. Although that would probably start The Great Midwest Tractor Feud of 2024.

    3. Tris Prior*

      I worked for a small newspaper a million years ago. The complaints I would get because “you put this other church’s event announcement FIRST in the listings! Why wasn’t MY church first?!”

      1. Midwest writer*

        Too many tractors, too spread out, for one photo. Although a drone parade pic would probably be pretty awesome in general.

    5. Penny Hartz*

      Sort of apropos of this–I live in a small Midwestern City that has a St. Patrick’s Day parade. My hubby, a local celebrity/DJ kind of guy and I are the announcers for it. Last year, for some reason, the “Jeep Club of ‘Small Midwestern City in Neighboring State'” decided to participate. Readers, 30 Jeeps came. Some tricked out, some just … Jeeps. Bad enough to watch them moving slowly and lurchingly through a parade route in between scout troops (especially since most of them weren’t throwing out candy), but there’s my poor dude just saying “And we have more Jeeps. Yep, here come some more Jeeps. Hey look, a pink Jeep!” for what felt like days.

      1. Wolf*

        Every local car show, ever. There are always people who come with a current, basic model, standard car. Nothing wrong with those cars, and it’s nice that the owners love them, but they are terribly disappointed when nobody admires their cars in the show lot.

    6. journeyboots*

      You could humour them (also internally making it a bit of a joke for you) and contact them asking to *feature* their tractor this year. Then in future years, feature other tractors or ask people to write in if they want their tractor featured this year.

  26. Legally Brunette*

    “My child won’t be able to keep up with the rest of the family when we ski!”

    I was told this after their preschool-aged child had one afternoon ski lesson, the day after staying up until midnight in the hotel pool, without eating lunch that day. So yes, your exhausted and starving preschooler cannot ski black diamonds with you, but did have fun doing age-appropriate snow sliding after I fed her some snacks…

    1. ferrina*

      Yeah….I have an acquaintance whose family plans ‘family vacations’ purely around the adults, and they are always annoyed when the kids put a damper in their plans by being normal kids.

    2. Anon too*

      Poor kid. I’m glad you stepped in and hope the kid has some reasonable adults around.

  27. NoLongerInSchool*

    When I was a TA in my doctoral program I had to teach Childhood Development. At the end of my first semester I got the normal good and bad feedback, but the one I still remember is “teacher drinks too much water.”

    2. allhailtheboi*

      How could anyone be annoyed by this!? When one of my lecturers drinks his water it’s my chance to desperately try and catch up on my notes.

  28. Nerds!*

    A 1999 Amazon review of The Story About Ping which I frankly considered one of the best geek jokes ever. Finally found it on the blog Coding Horror, if anyone wants to snag a screenshot for their own.

    PING! The magic duck!

    Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix’s most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.

    The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).

    The title character — er, packet, is called Ping. Ping meanders around the river before being received by another host (another boat). He spends a brief time on the other boat, but eventually returns to his original host machine (the wise-eyed boat) somewhat the worse for wear.

    If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the book. I can’t recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting.

    As good as it is, The Story About Ping is not without its faults. There is no index, and though the ping(8) man pages cover the command line options well enough, some review of them seems to be in order. Likewise, in a book solely about Ping, I would have expected a more detailed overview of the ICMP packet structure.

    But even with these problems, The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante’s seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API (“Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight — Nothing whatever I discerned therein.”), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress.

    2. Great Frogs of Literature*

      There is, or was, most of a decade ago, a man who reviewed rubber bands on Amazon. This man is Serious about rubber bands. He buys samples of all available rubber bands, tests their elasticity, their durability, exposes them to adverse conditions, etc. etc.

      My boss discovered this when looking for rubber bands, and found a review titled something like “The second-best rubber bands on Amazon (and the ones you should buy).” What followed was a novel-length rubber band review (okay, perhaps I exaggerate a little, but it was close to two page-fulls, IIRC). That review went into more detail about the rubber bands (and a value comparison to the #1 rubber bands, which were apparently enough more expensive to not be worth the slight increase in quality) than I have EVER, before or since, thought about rubber bands.

      It was a labor of love, the output of someone whose special interest is rubber bands. A thing of beauty. I’m sorry that I do not have the text to share with you, but I don’t work at that job anymore.

        1. Great Frogs of Literature*

          It’s possible it’s still there, but the rubber bands aren’t the top hits anymore — I didn’t see it when I looked.

      2. Anonymous 5*

        This is reminiscent of the reviews for the Hutzler 541 banana slicer (uh, I think it was model 541) on Amazon…

        2. Petey*

          Oh my – the reviews for the Hutzler are a stitch. Here is one (and hopefully its not too long):
          5.0 out of 5 stars In a city of a thousand bananas there is always a story
          Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2013
          Verified Purchase
          It was a night like every other. Too many cigarettes and not enough work. Clients were as rare as hens teeth these days. It seemed word got out that I was getting sloppy. “Mr banana fingers”, they called me behind my back. “He’s losing his touch”, they’ed whisper. But when you’ve sliced as many as i have you’d get soft too. Fat chance I was retiring now. Not with a ’57 convertible half way paid off and a tab at the banana stand on 4th that was well past its shelf life. I was a one punch palooka half way to loserville, smelling like cheap cologne and broken dreams.

          But then she walked in. She was a knock out. the kind of girl that made old men suck in their gut and young men puff out their chest. “We’ll hello there sweetheart, the dentist office is next door”, I said with a smile.
          “I’m not looking for the dentist”, she said. “I’m looking for Johnny Flynn Private Slicer.”
          “Well you came to the right place”, I said, mustering up what I hoped was a look of confidence. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

          The story she told would have turned the most jaded slicer green with banana envy. It was a big job. The biggest. And even though my gut was turning somersaults I knew I couldn’t turn it down. This was the kind of slicing gig that would make a hundred reputations or destroy a thousand more.

          Her father was the head of the Dole banana conglomerate and some Ivy League poindexter came up with the big idea to do the annual customer gala with a casino night theme. But this time they were gunna use banana chips instead of poker chips. These babies had to be stripped, sliced and dried to exact measurements if they were going to be handled by Dole’s biggest clients.
          “I heard you’re the best”, she said.
          “Was the best”, I thought. “Yeah, I’ve still got the chops. Watch this. I grabbed my number 7 knife and threw a banana in the air. I swung at it and missed it entirely. My knife stabbed down through nothin’ but air and dropped out of my hand on the table in front of me. I watched the banana spin slowly as it fell fell fell and slap, like some miracle you read about in those dime store slicer mags, the banana landed on the knife blade and was cut cleanly in two. My jaw dropped open in amazement and my eyes were big as saucers.
          “Impressive”, she said.
          “Impossible”, I thought. “Yep, impressive is my middle name.”, I stammered.
          She tossed her red hair back and said, “You got the job. See you Saturday at eight.”
          “B… Buh… but, we haven’t talked about my fee.
          She laughed and said as she walked to the door, “Whatever your usual fee is, I’ll pay triple.”

          Then she added, “Oh, and if you blow this gig you’ll never work in this town again.”

          And with a slam of the door she was gone. I realized then she hadn’t told me her name. That didn’t matter. Everyone knew who she was. It was splashed across the society pages every week. “Dole diva doles out dollars to the down and despondent” or “Lecherous love lorn Lothario leaves Linda Livingston livid”. L. & L. but friends just called her Elle.

          “You’ll never work in this town again”.

          Those words echoed over and over in my head. As I reached for my hat my hand was shaking. But then, I looked down at the table and saw the miracle banana perfectly sliced…. an accident, or was it? Maybe the big guy up stairs was gunna save my sorry heiner once again. I said a quick thanks to my guardian slicer and headed home. Once I got in bed doubt crashed into my head like a 500 lb gorilla on a sack of Dole’s finest. I wasn’t gunna come out of this. Not ol’ Banana Fingers. I needed help fast and I knew just where to get it. Johnny Flynns mentor in this business was a crusty old slicer named Harvey Muldoon. Long retired he learned the trade over seas cooking banana fritters and stew for the yanks during WWI. If anyone could help me pull this off it was him. I know it was late but I went over and told him everything–about the dame, the gig and the banana trick. He sat their stone faced until I told him about the banana flip, miss and slice. If it wasn’t so late in the evening I would swear he shed a tiny tear. He got up from his chair and stood there. And with a smile he said, “I guess you’re going to be needing this.” He dragged the paint chipped chair over to the corner of the room, got up on it. Reaching up to the ceiling he pushed at a plank which moved out of the way. He reached into the ceiling compartment and pulled out a box wrapped in an old World War I army issue banana sack. Inside was a battered tin box. With a look of immense pride he handed it to me like a father handing someone their new born to hold for the first time. “This saved my life”, he said as he carefully lifted the dented metal lid. Inside was a hand cut form made of velvet and soft cotton and nestled in the middle was a strange looking device. Reverently he took it out and handed it to me. “Be careful now. It’s razor sharp.”
          “What is it” I said.
          It’s the Hutzler 571. It’s what gave me the speed and precision to feed thousands of doughboys a day with mess tins and steaming bowls of banana fritters, pudding and stew.
          I was intrigued but skeptical… until I saw it in action. Shazam! It sliced bananas faster than Ricky Ricardo could smack a conga drum.
          “I will take good care of it”, I said solemnly.
          “You better. It’s yours now.”, he said.
          I was overwhelmed. “I don’t know what to say.”
          “You can start with a simple thank you” he said with a smirk.

          Come Saturday I was all ready. I made a small leather holster for it so that I could pull it out at a moments notice. I practiced my draw in front of the mirror day and night. I can’t say that the event went perfectly. But I got the satisfaction of Elle saying I could slice her bananas any old time of the year.

          I found my confidence that day. Thanks to some divine help and an old man’s secret weapon I made it to the big banana leagues. No more scraping around for the odd job. Now I named my fee and sliced my way across the banana circuit. But still, with my fame and banana jet set status Linda Livingston was still out of my league. Now when I read about her in the society section I save the article and place them in a folder in the large steel safe along with a battered tin box. When I see it I say a quick thanks to her for walking into my life and giving this old flatfoot a chance to start again.

          3. Chick-n-Boots*

            This is……magical. Incredible. OUTSTANDING.

            And this? Sheer poetry: ” Shazam! It sliced bananas faster than Ricky Ricardo could smack a conga drum.”

            5 stars

          4. Humble Schoolmarm*

            Noir reviews were I thing I never knew I needed in my life until this moment (any chance our hero brought his miracle slicer to a popular bar in Casablanca?)

      4. Overthinking it*

        Maybe not an enthusiast (or not an unbiased one) but the owner of the second-best rubber band company. I can imagine someone with great pride in his product – not going to make inferior rubber bands and compete based on price – but with little marketing budget and almost no way to effectively target buyers of rubber bands hitting on this a a single investment most likely to reach his customers. Intriguing!

  29. Here for Now*

    Comment to an auto dealership’s service department —

    If (the employee) is not the owner’s relative, lover, or blackmailer, you should review your hiring practices

  30. Hawthorne*

    This happened to me literally yesterday.

    We (US-based) had a customer in French Canada upset because something was damaged in transit. We agreed to replace it at no cost to them even though we could easily fix the damaged piece. They have been asking us to pay them for lost profits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars because of the delay and we’ve said no every time because that’s not within our contract.

    They then switched to asking about if we were still pursuing with the shipping company for damaging the equipment. We told them we were no longer pursuing this and they were shocked and pushed us to pursue it and ask the company for damages for lost profits (which is insane). We said we were no longer pursuing it and they kept asking and I found myself wondering if they had certain ideas about litigation in the US.

    Then they said out loud that they were shocked we weren’t pursuing this more fervently since Americans always pursue litigation. They said the quiet part out loud. It was WILD.

    1. Not on board*

      To be fair, the culture in French Canada is quite ornery. I say this as a French speaking Canadian.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        “Canadians are all so nice and polite!”

        “I see you’ve never visited Quebec.”

  31. Ghostess*

    Years ago I worked in publishing, and one of our presses had a series of Arabic language books (as in, books that taught you Arabic). I lost count of the amount of times someone would call to complain that their book was printed backwards.

    1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      Ha, every year at Seder my grandfather would make the same joke about the Passover Hagadah, that he claimed he couldn’t read because it was “backwards” (Hebrew is also read that way). At least he knew it was supposed to be that way, even if he liked a tired old joke.

    2. Zephy*

      Semi-related: I took Spanish in high school, and junior year one of the required texts was a visual dictionary – basically just a picture book with items labeled in the target language. The publisher of this visual dictionary offered it in multiple languages, and at the time the covers were all basically identical except for the name of the target language. The girl who would eventually be our class valedictorian and go on to attend Harvard made it a number of weeks into Spanish 4 before interrupting the teacher to say, of the visual dictionary, “Senora, I can’t read this. … Oh, it’s in Cambodian.”

    3. goddessoftransitory*

      I would bet all producers of English-translated Japanese manga have entire departments devoted to this complaint, as well.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        Every one I’ve seen that is printed right-to-left has a cheerful cartoon explaining “YOU NEED TO START THIS BOOK AT THE OTHER END” on its last page.

        1. JustaTech*

          The best is that the e-book versions of the manga do this too, because you also need to swipe the other way (at least in the Kindle versions).

    4. Janne*

      I once sold my Ancient Greek dictionary second-hand (didn’t need it anymore after graduating).

      Someone bought it just before summer break, then immediately returned it and complained that it didn’t teach her basic Greek sentences for her holiday travels.

      I’m sorry but the book even had pictures of an ancient clay tablet on the front!

      Also, I sold it for €50 which is stupidly expensive for a “teach me basic Greek” book.

  32. Anon for this*

    I worked at a parks and rec summer program that had a Dungeons and Dragons-style RPG camp you could register for, ie two dozen mostly pre-teen boys spending a week together developing their characters, making little figurines, and playing out their RPG game. The kids in this camp generally loved it.

    One day we had an angry parent come in who wanted to talk to the manager. She wouldn’t tell us why, but we eventually overhear the manager saying things “The eagle is a very majestic creature!” Turns out that her kid got assigned an eagle-type character in the game and she felt, as a level five dungeon master, that this was unacceptable because this was *not* a good character to get. The manager was not himself a D&D enthusiast so couldn’t really get into the weeds with her on what constitutes a good D&D character, and had to resort to what he knew from eagles in pop culture (“It’s the symbol of the United States!”). I will never forget this woman.

    1. Megan*

      I’m laughing out loud reading this. I can just imagine the hilarity of this playing out. Now I’m curious to hear from D&D enthusiasts if the eagle is actually a crappy character to get assigned in that game. lol

    3. VivaVaruna*

      As a D&D nerd, she was talking completely out of her rear end because
      A) Dungeon Masters don’t have levels, *characters* do.

      and

      B) Aarakocra (the most common “bird people” in the game) are considered to be horribly overpowered due to their ability to fly. Many DMs will just straight up disallow them from their games.

      My guess is that the kid didn’t want to be an eagle person, complained to his mom about it, and since no one was familiar enough with the actual core of the game her bluff worked.

      1. Galadriel's Garden*

        All I can think of is, “This story would really be better with Jarnathan…”

        (D&D: Honor Amongst Thieves reference, for the uninitiated)

      2. ferrina*

        Yeah, this whole complaint is baffling.

        But the camp sounds AMAZING. I would have loved to do this camp as a kid! Heck, I would do this camp as an adult!

      3. MigraineMonth*

        Weird that the players would get assigned to play a specific species; usually getting to create your own character and selecting their characteristics is a large part of the fun.

  33. Wakeen, Get Off the Toilet.*

    I work at a restaurant. A customer complained a few weeks ago because when she left nobody told her “goodbye”. We were incredibly short-staffed and in the middle of a $900 hour.

    The owners and upper management still thought it was horrific that this customer had such an AWFUL experience when walking out the door so she got a free entree and the entire staff (including all the employees who were off that day) got coachings about the necessities of making sure EVERY customer receives a warm farewell, and it was something we got coached on every day for a full week.

    The 6 – 5 star reviews we got that same day were completely dismissed as worthless because this woman gave us only 4 stars and was offended nobody told her goodbye. This is a casual Chinese restaurant similar to Panda Express.

    And no, she wasn’t anyone important, management and the owners just treat ANY less than 5 star reviews or minor complaints as a REALLY. BIG. DEAL. This just happens to be the stupidest one I’ve seen since I’ve been there.

    1. Megan*

      The fact that this was a fast casual restaurant similar to Panda Express makes her complaint so much more stupid…like since when do employees all say goodbye to everyone leaving a fast casual order at the counter type restaurant? lol

      1. Wakeen, Get Off the Toilet.*

        We are supposed to greet every single person who walks in, even if they are on their phone or we are in the middle of taking someone else’s order. We’re also supposed to follow an extensive script that is exhausting and that many customers find irritating. We also have to push surveys to every customer, and tell every customer goodbye. It’s impossible to do it all in the middle of a rush, we are constantly irritating people, and a lot of customers walk away in the middle of us talking. But the company hires mystery shoppers to come in randomly several times a week and the mystery shoppers all have a checklist of the script word for word and dock us points if we don’t hit every single talking part. It’s exhausting.

        1. goddessoftransitory*

          The reason the scripts are so elaborate is so you cannot possibly get everything in. If you don’t get docked you might wonder why, if your mystery shopper scores are so good, you aren’t getting a raise.

        2. MigraineMonth*

          What would happen if one of those irritated customers left a review that the person assisting them kept stopping to say “hello” and “goodbye” to other people, that there was an annoyingly long script, and that they hated being asked to fill out surveys?

          Nevermind, management would probably just add an additional paragraph to the script explaining the reason for the script.

        3. AmuseBouchee*

          You should find a new job if the owners are so out of touch that they let paying customers walk out and cater solely to online reviews. You will never win there.

          1. Kara*

            Welcome to retail! You’d have to do some fairly intensive screening to weed out the places that do stuff like this.

    2. goddessoftransitory*

      This is why, among so many other reasons, I DESPISE online reviews. I just automatically think “that person’s full of shit” when I read negative ones even if they’re making a good point because they’re lost among lunatic elk bellowings and bot spam.

  34. Anon4This*

    I work in a theatre. A couple of great comments over the years:

    -We were doing a show called “Miss You Like Hell” and we sent an eblast with that in the header. Someone mistakenly thought we were telling them we “missed them like hell” and took offense to our vulgarity with this response: “When you say a bad word I take offense to it… You could say “we miss you a great deal” OR “A great deal is waiting for you because you have missed you”.

    -We did Beauty and the Beast and someone asked why we added in the song “Gaston”. They were insistent that we made the choice to put that song in (and I guess that we wrote it ourselves???) and could not be convinced otherwise.

    -We also did the Carole King musical and someone asked why we didn’t include James Taylor as a character (again, we did not write the show…)

    -We did Lend Me a Tenor (a show in which a man has sex with a woman while pretending to be someone else) and the complaint we got from folks was that the cursing (limited to “Christ” and “Damn) was too much for them

    1. MsM*

      Reminds me of the time my husband’s high school did “Kiss Me Kate,” and someone complained about the line in “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” that goes “kick ’em right in the Coriolanus.”

      1. Shandra*

        On a side note, a local high school did the school edition of Les Miserables.

        Part of the song “Drink to Me” goes,”Here’s to witty girls who went to our beds.” I had the distinct impression that the student who got that line, was trying not to sing it with too much feeling. :-)

    3. fhqwhgads*

      “Miss You Like Hell” had plenty of things worth complaining about. The title was not one of them.

    4. Mysty*

      My senior year of high school, we did Damn Yankees (a play about an older guy who makes a deal with the devil to become younger so he can play in the Washington Senators and beat the Yankees). The local elementary school always comes over to watch the dress rehearsal for free, and apparently when the secretary was announcing it, she stumbled a bit over the title.

  35. persimmon*

    I used to work in a mall and our feedback surveys would come back with complaints about other stores aaaalllllllllllll the time. Personal favorite was when someone gave us one star with “Victoria’s Secret didn’t have my bra size” Like okay? How is that our fault?

    1. persimmon*

      NO WAIT my actual favorite was when someone mentioned Dick’s (sporting goods store) but the software censored it so it looked like they were cursing at us. I think it was something like “Couldn’t find the counter at *****”

      3. MigraineMonth*

        I think my favorite example of inappropriate censorship is still the blog filter that would replace slang words for genitalia with the scientific terms (so “penis” instead of “dick” or “cock”).

        It made one woman’s post about her apartment’s cockroach infestation a lot more interesting.

        1. JustaTech*

          How about the filter on the chat software that censored the word “bone” at a scientific conference about either orthopedics or paleontology? (This was early COVID, mid 2020.)

        2. N C Kiddle*

          I am a Scunthorpe United supporter. Our message board had some kind of override to allow us to use our club name, but only if it was written as a single word. Links to the official club website routinely got mangled. Also the message boards for other clubs couldn’t talk about their games against us.

  36. Serious Silly Putty*

    Not a true complaint but actually a sweet thank you letter:

    “Thank you for the space mission one thing is I wish the seats shook but it was still fun.”

    Kid, we have been wanting butt shakers for our space ship for years. You’re not alone.

  37. HappyMarketer*

    Back in the day I was a waitress. We had a cheap steak and chips on the menu for £5 – it wasn’t amazing but really good for the price. The customer asked for it well done so it was even more uninspiring than normal. When I served it up she turned round and said ‘that doesn’t look like a steak it looks like a piece of meat’. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her what she thought steak was so I just took it back to the kitchen to a very baffled chef…

  38. Medium Sized Manager*

    Years of working in restaurants have prepared me for this moment! Some of my favorites:

    – The carnitas fries came with pork, not chicken, even though it “always comes with chicken.”
    – The margarita came with tequila and she didn’t realize she was supposed to ask for a virgin one if she didn’t want alcohol (she was in her 40s-50s so I didn’t card).
    – The sirloin didn’t look like the picture of the ribeye.
    – The jalapeno burger was spicy.

    1. Desk Dragon*

      That last one might explain why I once ordered a jalapeño burger (literally called that on the menu) at a restaurant and then had to ask them to actually bring me the jalapeños that were supposed to be on it.

      1. Medium Sized Manager*

        I had so many sent back that I started asking people if they knew the jalapeno burger was spicy, which brought on a different set of looks. I get it to a degree because it was REALLY spicy but also??

        1. Desk Dragon*

          I wouldn’t have minded if they’d asked something like that—I know how people can be! But if I order something spicy I expect it to set my hair on fire, and receiving a burger where the spiciest ingredient was a “chipotle aioli” that might possibly have been in the same room as a pepper was disappointing; the fact that the server seemed shocked I actually wanted the jalapeños was also annoying.

        2. ferrina*

          I’ve gotten that question many times at various restaurants (I love spicy food). I always feel so bad for the waitstaff, because I know that they only ask because someone didn’t read the menu then complained.

        3. zinzarin*

          I once ate a restaurant that had a version of a Nashville Hot Chicken sandwich made with a habanero sauce to provide the heat. The menu did state quite clearly that it was very hot, and that you could not send it back.

          I read that warning with a lifetime of corporate-speak and legalese in mind, and figured it was probably as hot as most places, which means not hot at all because everyone is timid and nobody would really make it that spicy.

          Reader, it was that spicy. I ate a total of three bites of that sandwich the entire time we were there, open-mouth breathing and nibbling fries in between to let the heat settle down. I absolutely did not even attempt to send it back; I had been warned. Touché, Three Floyds. Touché.

          1. Bryce*

            My family used to eat at a place in Santa Fe with a sign “our hot chile is HOT. you are welcome to ask for a sample first. We promise our mild is also delicious.”

          2. Medium Sized Manager*

            One of my favorite memories of being in Nashville was being served a hot sauce with a lid on it – you had to open it yourself so you couldn’t claim it was an accident. They also will not toss the chicken in that sauce because too many people sent it back.

            I have a great video of my husband saying it wasn’t that bad and then nearly choking 20 seconds later.

    2. Alf*

      My favourite genre of this is customers who feign an “allergy” to make sure they get things just the way they like it –
      “I’m allergic to oil (yes, all oil!) so please prepare my *quesadilla* without any oil”
      “I’m allergic to eggs unless they’re boiled for over 10 minutes.”
      Or my all-time favourite:
      “I’m allergic to salt, can I get my homefries without any salt?”
      Ma’am, salt is an inorganic material!

      1. Medium Sized Manager*

        Especially because the people with real allergies are very understanding! I had a customer with a gluten allergy order something that normally comes with onion strings, so I obviously put in that modification. Some well-meaning person saw that my dish didn’t have onion strings on it and put it on after they had been waiting 20 minutes. When I told her why her dish would be a few extra minutes after everybody else’s, she was SO grateful that I didn’t just take it off and serve it anyway.

        1. Alf*

          Yeah as a cook I was always very happy to accommodate allergy requests when possible*, but it was just transparently obvious when people were lying about an allergy to try to ensure I paid attention to their special request.

          *One story I just remembered – I was working at a Canadian breakfast chain called Cora’s, which is famous for their elaborate displays of fruit. Pretty much everything you order comes with a large side of fruit. A family came in once and said they were all deathly allergic to kiwis, and could we serve them? We would have had to deep clean every surface and serving utensil and knife in the kitchen – we told them they were better off going literally anywhere else – but they insisted they would be fine and ordered anyway. I can’t remember if the manager made them sign a waiver or something.

        2. zinzarin*

          My sister has dairy and egg allergies, and it’s like pulling teeth to get her to actually say that to the server when ordering food. She tries so hard to be gentle and polite with her messaging that she’s like the bad managers here; too soft, and the message isn’t clear. Every time we dine together, I stop the server before they leave the table to clarify that what my sister just said meant that she has an allergy and those ingredients can’t be in her food.

          1. JustaTech*

            My husband can be like that with his (relatively new) shellfish allergy. I guess because he hasn’t been prescribed an epipen he doesn’t think it’s a big deal?

            But it’s such an easy one to avoid, so I always make a point of telling the waiter, who is usually quite grateful to know.

          2. NotBatman*

            MOOD. It might just be my training as a white American woman, but I hate having to tell servers about my allergies. I always feel like a whiny high-maintenance loser. And then every so often I’ll fail to mention it and accidentally poison myself, and remember all over again why I really do have to mention it every time.

      2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        Incidentally, while salt in small amounts is necessary for human survival (meaning this is only slightly more plausible than claiming to be allergic to calcium), it’s perfectly possible to be allergic to inorganic materials – I’m allergic to nickel. This obviously isn’t an issue for food, but is for skin contact (I need to make sure the rivets and buttons on my jeans don’t directly touch my skin for long periods of time.).

      3. Galadriel's Garden*

        Mannnn I hate that one of my allergies sounds like absolute BS, but is very, unfortunately real: raw onions. Specifically raw ones – not cooked ones. Thoroughly cooked ones don’t trigger a reaction as whatever protein triggers the allergy are evidently cooked out, but raw ones are very not fine. It sounds ridiculous. It *feels* ridiculous. I just avoid ordering anything with raw onions in it as they’re usually pretty obvious, or ask for no onions, rather than mention anything to a server and sound like an ass.

        Corn, on the other hand……….that’s the tricky one.

        1. Desk Dragon*

          That type of allergy isn’t even that uncommon! I have two (unrelated) friends who are allergic to raw tomatoes, but fully cooked isn’t an issue. I get that it probably seems “off” to servers when someone sends back a burger because it’s clearly had a tomato added and then removed, and then the person puts on ketchup on the replacement, but I learned in middle school science class that cooking/heat creates chemical changes in food.

          1. Worldwalker*

            Exactly.

            Take pineapple: fresh pineapple will keep Jell-O from gelling, but canned (and hence cooked) won’t. There’s an enzyme in fresh pineapple that is broken down by heat.

            Or my aversion to fresh peaches. I just really dislike them. But cooked peaches? Everything from peach cobbler to peach ice cream? Yummmm!

            It’s not at all uncommon for a cooked food to be edible when the raw form isn’t, because the allergen is a protein broken down by cooking.

        2. Jay (no, the other one)*

          My husband has a milk protein allergy. He can eat butter because it’s almost pure fat, and no other dairy. There’s no risk of anaphylaxis so cross-contamination isn’t an issue. Trying to explain this to servers is challenging, as you can imagine. Plus lots of people think mayonnaise is dairy, so that gets confusing. And then there was the young man who replied “well, we only have one gluten-free option on the menu.” So hubs didn’t trust anything and ended up with a piece of steak and salad with oil and vinegar, no cheese.

          1. Meow*

            Yes, my husband has a milk protein allergy as well, and was thrilled to discover he could eat most coleslaws (they are made with mayo, not milk!) although he always asks to make sure since once in a while some place will put milk in theirs. Half the time they’ll come back with “but mayo is dairy”. It is not. But it’s made with eggs! Eggs are not dairy. Which is a brain fart a lot of people have, but just… think for a second.

            Our kid’s favorite restaurant published an interactive allergy menu recently, where you could put in your allergies and it would show you what you could eat there. My husband tried it and, confusingly, it excluded french fries. I’m guessing it was either for cross contamination (probably fried in the same oil as mozzarella sticks) or because you can get a side of ranch with them that has dairy, but either way, made the menu useless.

            And don’t get me wrong, I’m happy when people take his allergy seriously, as opposed to the countless number of times we’ve gotten a hamburger half covered in cheese they clearly tried to scrape off. But when we have to argue like that about it, it feels more like the staff is treating us like we’re lying about the allergy than it does that they’re trying to make sure the food is safe.

        3. WantonSeedStitch*

          One of my best friends is allergic to raw onions: he eats them, they come right back up. But yeah, cooked onions are fine. I also know someone who’s allergic to corn. It’s really challenging for her, as it’s hidden in SO many things.

        4. MigraineMonth*

          That doesn’t seem odd to me at all. I have a friend who’s allergic to raw apples.

          I also have a friend who’s allergic to corn, including corn syrup, and it is ridiculously hard to find any packaged food (or drinks) she can eat.

        5. Kelsi*

          That isn’t that odd. My brother is allergic to fresh fruit (and avocado and a few other things) but he doesn’t have a reaction to cooked fruit in like, pies and stuff.

      4. Pescadero*

        Salt is an inorganic material… that can cause allergic reactions.

        Julia Matthias et al. ,Sodium chloride is an ionic checkpoint for human TH2 cells and shapes the atopic skin microenvironment.Sci. Transl. Med.11,eaau0683(2019).DOI:10.

      5. Admin of Sys.*

        Weirdly, the egg one is legit. There’s an allergy to the egg proteins that goes away if they’re sufficiently cooked – it denatures the protein they react to.

      6. Worldwalker*

        You can be allergic to inorganic materials. Carbon is not a necessary component of an allergen. Note jewelry (particularly earrings) advertised as hypoallergenic.

    3. goddessoftransitory*

      Oh man, the whole “my five chile-rated taco was TOO SPICY” routine. I cannot fathom how many people have ordered jalapenos from me over the years and then complained that their pizza was too hot.

    4. Pescadero*

      “The jalapeno burger was spicy.”

      I can kind of get that one.

      There is lots and lots of Jalapeno flavored foods available nowadays. Almost none of them are actually spicy. They just contain Jalapeno flavor.

      The modern norm seems to be for “jalapeno” flavored things to mostly NOT be actually spicy.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        I cook a dish that contains a jalapeño (yes, I have a very low spice tolerance), and whether the dish is spicy actually varies quite a bit each time I make it. It seems like individual jalapeños may or may not be spicy, which means that whether a dish is too spicy depends on the recipe, the chef, the ingredients and the customer.

        That’s a lot of variables for something that might make one basically unable to eat one’s meal!

        1. Worldwalker*

          There is at least one variety of low-powered jalapeños, and they grow nicely in containers if needed. They’re delicious. Look for “Tam” seeds or plants.

      2. Medium Sized Manager*

        Yeah, this one had fried jalepenos, fresh jalepenos, and then jalepenos in the aoili so it was actually a doozy. I have wimpy taste buds, so I never tried it, but I also wouldn’t order one in the first place.

    5. Kay*

      I ordered a squash steak and had the server say to me “just so you know, that isn’t a steak, it isn’t meat”. We had a good laugh and lamented the state of the world where he had to say that.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        As someone who doesn’t eat red meat, I have to be careful when ordering mushroom burgers. Sometimes they’re the top of a portabella mushroom served on a bun, sometimes it’s a beef burger topped with mushrooms.

  39. mari-an the librarian*

    Public library in a “historic” US building. We’ve preserved the architecture as much as we can while adapting the layout of the interior for modern library use – more social hangout spaces, a reading room with armchairs, etc. Concerted, deliberate effort to make the building welcoming and accessible.

    Cue a gentleman informing us that our chairs are “too comfortable”. Apparently people aren’t supposed to be able to relax when in the presence of Collected Knowledge. It’s disrespectful.

    1. Sharpie*

      I now have to scrape my eyebrows off the ceiling. The whole.point of a library and books is to be comfortable. The best thing ever is a deep comfy armchair, a wood fire, a cat, all the books you could dream of and more, a cup of coffee, tea or hot chocolate, and the rain beating against the windows..

      This is what the cool kids these days call ‘dark academia’, which I am reliably informed is ‘an aesthetic’.

      1. Worldwalker*

        It is. I had no idea that what I’ve loved all my life was now a named style until recently. It’s handy in a way, since it makes it easier to search for things that I like.

    2. ferrina*

      Interesting. I enjoy the comfort of Collected Knowledge- it’s usually Collected Ignorance that makes me uncomfortable and tense

  40. ella.s*

    I worked for a beauty brand and had a customer mail us a letter with an eyeliner taped TO the paper, with a note written in serial-killer style handwriting (in the eyeliner!) with an arrow to the taped-on eyeliner that read “this is the worst product I’ve ever used”.

    2. JustaTech*

      Hilariously I recently was recommended (and purchased) an eyeliner because a lot of people had complained that it wasn’t really waterproof.

      I asked the sales person at Sephora for not-waterproof eyeliner and he said “uh, we don’t really sell that, but you know, a lot of people have complained that this one over here isn’t really waterproof, do you want to try that?”
      “Sold!”
      (It is not waterproof, and comes off very nicely at the end of the day.)

  41. NotRealAnonForThis*

    How about “not strangest” but definitely most freaking maddening?

    Long ago (in RetailWorld as a teenager) I received complaints for the following things, which the store GM was irate at the world over because why were older men behaving so crappily to his teenaged store associates? Comparing notes, each of us teenaged girls had 2-3 complaints in this general line per YEAR lodged in writing in the main office. Please read on and feel the warmth of the flames on the sides of all of our faces….

    1. Refused to return customer’s shoes, referring customer back to the Shoe Department of the store because they handled all returns. Shoes were a completely separate department, and as they worked on commission, they handled all returns. In addition – they were very clearly another store’s house brand not ours, old and worn (meaning not that they’d been on feet, but that they’d been obviously used for a significant amount of time), and security had walked him out TWICE that day in his attempts to get money for the shoes.

    2. I had “the audacity to be on the sales floor while in a family way yet not wearing a wedding band”. My friends, I was in high school, wearing a babydoll style dress (hi, 1990s), and was 100% NOT expecting a child nor was I married. I further suspect that this complaint was lodged by the gross older man who leered at me and wondered “who the lucky father is?”. Yeah, security also escorted this one out.

    3. No, I will NOT try on lingerie for you, I don’t care if your (fill in the blank wife/girlfriend/daughter(!)) is the same size and you don’t know what size that is. And spoiler fellow readers, it was never my teenaged classmates or cohort who did this type of thing – it was grown men who were at least my Dad’s age, if not my Grandpa’s. There was a reason why the security office was NEXT to this section of the “Women’s Dept”.

    And RetailWorld was FAR less problematic than stints in food service or bartending, probably because both our department manager and the store GM were incredible people and would definitely not the be the ones written about on this site.

    1. Warrior Princess Xena*

      I’m sad that this can be said but kudos to your Gm for not being a creep!

      1. NotRealAnonForThis*

        He truly was a gem and I’m really thankful I had him (and my area manager) as bosses early on in life!

      1. NotRealAnonForThis*

        I found it really kind of sad and scary, as a teenager, that part of the reason that the main security office was where it was, was because of the lingerie section and the problems with customers encountered by staff there.

        It was also in line of sight of “fine jewelry” right at the mall entrance and the auto department (which had separate doors as well as work-bay doors). Everyone who didn’t work there figured it was in with electronics and appliances, but those departments didn’t have product regularly walk out the door.

  42. Ms. Chanandeler Bong*

    I work in public relations – one night I was on a local news broadcast as a spokesperson, talking about some initiative (now long-forgotten). But I will never forget the two unsettling, yet very different reactions I received in the days that followed.

    The first was a direct message – sent through Facebook – from a stranger, commenting that my smile was very symmetrical and inquiring if I might want to have dinner with him. And the other was a four page (front and back!), handwritten letter that arrived to my office, asking if I had found the Lord, telling me the story of their family’s salvation, inviting me to visit the website of a very popular televangelist and concluding with their favourite psalms.

    I mentally declined both invitations.

    1. MsM*

      “Your smile is very symmetrical” is “it puts the lotion on its skin” levels of creepy.

      1. Potatohead*

        “Your face is real symmetrical
        And your nostrils are so nice
        I wish that I was cross-eyed, girl
        So I could see you twice”
        -Wanna B Ur Lvr, Weird Al Yankovic

      2. goddessoftransitory*

        It’s “your hair is so braidable” from the guy sitting behind you on the bus levels of creepy.

  43. Proxy Solicitor*

    I work in investor relations as a proxy solicitor. We were handling calls related to a contested shareholder meeting for a client, where a group had nominated some opposing candidates for the company’s board of directors, so shareholders were getting two different sets of proxy materials, some from each side. I had a shareholder call in and complain that the proxy materials included a quote from “a dead person.” The shareholder thought it was really tacky to “quote dead people” and wanted that feedback known to us. As if this wasn’t odd enough feedback to begin with, the quote she referenced was a quote by Bill Gates…who is NOT dead, and in fact, was recently all over the news in an interview around the time I got this call. Then to add a third layer of absurdity to this complaint, it turned out the quote in question wasn’t even in the proxy material sent out by the company, which was the side our firm was retained to represent…I found the quote in the opposing side’s proxy materials! Her complaint wasn’t even directed to the correct party responsible for quoting Bill Gates. lol

    1. MigraineMonth*

      I’ve heard it’s tacky to speak ill of the dead, not to repeat what they said. There’s probably a famous quote about that, but probably by someone who is no longer living.

      1. Worldwalker*

        That one’s just bizarre.

        So no Shakespeare quotes, then? Abraham Lincoln is as forbidden as Julius Caesar? And Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and the entire Bible, are off limits? The mind boggles.

        1. Sharpie*

          I guess, depending on your faith, the red-letter bits of the Bible might be acceptable, being the words of Jesus, who Christians believe is not-dead.

  44. Jackalope*

    I was working at a zoo and aquarium, and happened to be in the aquarium when this happened. A visitor came up to me, standing right next to one of those huge tanks full of several kinds of fish (including some small sharks), sea anemones, urchins, etc. and asked where the animals were and why he couldn’t find any animals. I tend to get annoyed at the idea that animal=mammal, so I pointed out that there was a huge tank of animals right behind me, but he said, “No, I want to see ANIMALS.” I finally directed him to some of our charismatic mega-fauna (tigers and elephants, I think) and he left. But seriously, the aquarium is literally the only part of the zoo where you won’t find mammals; all he had to do was head anywhere else besides the aquarium, which one might reasonably infer would mostly house sea animals.

    1. Abogado Avocado*

      I would have been tempted to point him in the direction of the bathroom, where he could see an animal in the mirror.

  45. CTT*

    It’s minor, but shoutout to the client who was mad that I, a lawyer licensed in Tennessee, could not prepare real estate documents for her purchase of land outside of Mexico City.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      I’ve worked in the world of licensed professionals and it’s wild how many people will be genuinely upset that our office is not willing to get licensed just everywhere. Don’t you want someone who actually knows the local laws/regulations??

    2. used to be a tester*

      I still sometimes think of the poor lawyer in Ontario (Canada) who had to repeatedly explain to my MIL that he was not licensed to handle real estate law in Florida.

      MIL kept wording the request in slightly different ways, hoping maybe this time the answer would be different.

    3. Deborah*

      I’m an OB-GYN and you wouldn’t believe how many people want me to look in their ears.

      3. JanetM*

        A joke for your amusement.

        An OB-GYN got tired of paying the malpractice premiums and decided to go into another line of work. He decided on auto repair, and signed up at the local community college.

        At the end of the course, he called his instructor and said, “I’m confused. You graded my final exam at 200%.”

        The instructor said, “Yes, you earned 50% for correctly troubleshooting and disassembling the engine and 50% for correctly repairing the problem and reassembling it.”

        The man asked, “Okay, but what about the extra 100%?”

        “Well,” the instructor replied slowly, “it was the first time I’d ever seen anyone do all that through the tailpipe.”

        1. Chuffing along like Mr. Pancks*

          I don’t know if you keep a daily tally of the people you make snort with laughter, but please take a +1 if so!

    4. Sister George Michael*

      OMG my neighbor who was BAFFLED that I, an American immigration attorney, couldn’t explain to him how getting US citizenship would affect his ability to collect a German pension.

  46. ragazza*

    At my first job at a university press, I fielded a call from someone who wanted to know how to go about submitting a manuscript for book publication. I explained our process in deciding whether projects were a fit for us, including sending out manuscripts to independent academic reviewers. “And then what happens?” she asked. Well, we say yes or no. Her shocked response: “But isn’t that censorship?”

    1. Rex Libris*

      Public librarian here… We get that a lot too, especially from self published “authors” in our case. No, not adding the 80 page channeled autobiography of John Lennon that you published through CreateSpace isn’t censorship.

      The “censorship” vs. “selection” struggle is real. :-)

    2. ragazza*

      I was just remembering a lot of other incidents from that job (I had to answer the main phone line so there were a lot of them). One person was trying to figure out why they weren’t receiving a university publication anymore but she couldn’t remember the name of it. So some one at the university was forwarding her call around to every department that published things. I tried to explain to explain we published books, not publications, and then she got mad I didn’t know the publication she was talking about and hung up on me. Reader, this was a major university with two campuses, undergraduate and graduate schools, and presumably dozens if not hundreds of different publications.

      It also had a directional name so it was frequently confused with another university with a similar directional name. The managing editor of the press once had to deal with a attendee at a conference who insisted we published a book that we definitely did not. After about 10 minutes of this person getting progressively angrier, they finally looked at the sign at the booth: “Oh! This is Southwest State University, not Southeast State University!” and walked off without another word.

  47. Pop-up book from hell*

    A middle aged, middle class, white woman, said she felt discriminated against by me because I told her that the area she was sitting in was reserved for teens. I didn’t even actually make her move when she got stubborn – just waited for a group of teens to come in and game and show her why the area was reserved.

  48. AnonymousToday*

    My manager has printed out a survey response and pinned it up in his cubicle: “training was almost too adequate.”

  49. Apples and Oranges*

    Not my place of business, but my husband left this Yelp review at our neighborhood grocery store and it cracks me up every time I read it:

    “ I don’t know if there is a national competition for slowest cashiers in America, but if so I would like to personally sponsor a team from this store because it is the closest thing to a guaranteed win I could ever bet on. In fact, they could rival the Yankees for greatest dynasty in sports if slow bagging ever becomes a sport.

    Shopping (getting everything in your cart you want to buy) at this store is pretty quick and easy, and their selection is pretty good. But then you start waiting in line to check out, and your entire life changes. You start wondering what day it is. Didn’t I shave today?? Why do a have a full Ted Kazinsky beard now? Did that conveyor belt just move backwards? Is that cashier taking things out of bags or putting them in? I can’t tell! Have I had a birthday since I’ve been in here? One birthday or two?? When did I last see my wife and kid? Am I still even married? I hope she remarried someone who treats her well. Do I still have a job? Surely my PTO ran out and I’ve been fired by now, right? What life even exists for me now outside those sliding doors?!?

    Sarcasm aside, I honestly 100% have never seen a store with cashiers this slow, and it’s ALL OF THEM. Every time I shop here I go to a line with a cashier I’ve never had and I think, “Surely they can’t be slower than the last one.” But EVERY SINGLE TIME they are. This last paragraph is 100% true and I am in complete awe of this reality. Shop here if you want good selection, but only if you have no plans for the rest of your day…or week…or life.”

    4. len*

      Oof, clearly in the minority here but imo several public paragraphs of petty but vehement complaints about low-wage workers is pretty unpleasant to read.

  50. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

    That paper product review is poetic. None of my customer complaints have every been so well thought out.

    I spoke to a repeat customer on the phone…she was going to fax over an order form that had the payment information (this was…ahem…a long time ago). I waited maybe 2 hours and no fax — not from her anyway, there were other faxes, so the machine was working. I called her back and got the machine, so I left a message that I was following up on our phone conversation about her order, I hadn’t received her fax, and confirmed the fax number and then I went to lunch. When I returned she had called back and spoke to my supervisor. I was “laughing at her and throwing away her faxes”. My supervisor of course didn’t believe that but it became an office joke for a time. I must be going around just laughing and throwing away faxes. That was the whole story… never received her fax.

    1. But maybe not*

      Stories like this make you wonder what happened to that lady in her life that her brain told her “yes, the only option is that they are LAUGHING AT ME and throwing away the faxes.”

      1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

        Right? It started off as such a mundane call to me — IME fax machines were pretty notoriously buggy — so I was just letting her know it hadn’t come through and could she please resend, especially because her order form would have had credit card information on it and I wanted to confirm I received it and processed her order. Her reaction was completely out of left field.

    2. Great Frogs of Literature*

      Maybe this is a generational thing, but honestly I never really believe that a fax has been properly received unless the person on the other end confirms it. (You’re just… sending it out into the ether and hoping it’ll print out of a machine on the other end! You don’t even have an email receipt to look at and see that it went! Are you sure you didn’t put it in upside down and send a blank fax? Or mistype the number? Or they gave you the wrong number? Weirdly, I don’t feel the same way about letters, but in fairness, I have much more experience with sending and receiving letters, and a very small percentage of those did not arrive, unlike faxes.)

      1. ferrina*

        This. I was always paranoid when I had to send a fax- I had no faith in the process. No idea why- it always worked for me.

      2. Hiphopanonymous*

        I used to have to send faxes for my job. In the fax, I had to dial 9 to get an outside line, then 1 for long distance. And I sent a lot of faxes to area code 919. So I had to dial 91919 and then the rest of the number… at least twice I apparently accidentally called 911. In the weird, electronically distorted voice that came through the fax machine’s speaker, you could hear “9-1-1 what is your emergency” followed immediately by that fax machine screech *eeeeeEEEEEEEAAAAAAAALESFKJASLKFJASLKFDJSALFKJSDF*.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Ugh, why did they used to make you dial “9” for an outside line then “1” for long distance? I cannot be the only person who dialed “9” then “1” then “1-800” only to find myself speaking with emergency services. No emergency, just can’t figure out how to use this damn prepaid-call card! So embarrassing.

          Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about call cards.

          1. RAC*

            Previous employer’s old Rolm PBX was that way. “9” for an outside line. “9-1” for a long distance (or toll free) call. Emergency services was “9911” from a work phone.

  51. Combinatorialist*

    When I was a TA in graduate school, I got a review from a student (I don’t really think they are “customers” but close enough for this) that I was “a good teacher but too friendly”. I’m still puzzled at exactly what the complaint is.

    1. Jam on Toast*

      I was once told I smiled too much and I didn’t smile enough when I was teaching…on the same course survey.

  52. Broken Lawn Chair*

    We had a customer angry because the ATM in our store was broken. Let’s leave aside the issue that it belonged to the bank and we had no control over it or information about it. He thought someone should have called him to let him know it was broken.

  53. the Viking Diva*

    from a student:
    “I’ve noticed that Dr. Diva wants us to think in this class.”

    2. Irish Teacher.*

      This reminds me of when I was off work to have my thyroid removed and when I returned, one of my students greeted me with, “thank goodness you’re back. The sub teacher was making us write essays and stuff.” You’d think she was subjecting them to child labour, the way he said it.

    3. Collette*

      I remember a professor of mine once saying, university undergraduates are the only people anywhere in America who want less for their money.

      1. JustaTech*

        I don’t remember if we did evaluations in undergrad, but for one class my eval would absolutely have been “I think that Professor should be harder on us, ecology is too easy and we got to see the sun.”
        (My undergrad was *super* intense and while I’m sure Ecology wasn’t easy by most people’s standards, it didn’t have us up until 3am doing homework, so we were all worried it was “too easy”. Also the professor was a really chill guy.)

    5. Knighthope*

      From a grad student who either is a teacher or is studying to be one:
      “Ms. Knighthope WILL take off points for late work!” Yup, it’s in the syllabus, and I am modeling “Make your expectations clear.” and “Follow up with the consequences you have explained.”

  54. Irish Teacher.*

    Admittedly, this was from a 13 year old student, but my first year teaching, I had student fill in an evaluation about what they liked and disliked about our class over the year. One student wrote in “having *least popular teacher in the school* for *subject that teacher taught*” as what they liked least.

    This was in response to “what did you like least about history class this year?” and think they responded with “having *least popular teacher* for science.”

    I guess a positive is they didn’t criticise anything about my class, but…

  55. shrinking violet*

    Back in the Olden Days, when I worked retail, I was thoroughly chewed out by a customer for asking for an ID for her check. “Your store in (nearby smaller town) never asks for ID for checks!”

    Friends, we did not have a store in (nearby smaller town).