Starting in 2016 or so, I got a job as a DSD/pull-up vendor, and began regularly encountering situations in which I was mistaken for a store employee, despite clearly not being one. I asked around here and there, and eventually was recommended I share my stories to a subreddit called IDWHL: I Don't Work Here Lady. It turns out loads of people have had this situation, which a massive uptick in them during the pandemic-affected years.

I wrote several of them which got pretty good traction. Some of them are more embellished than others. There is no rule on the subreddit that the tale must be true, perhaps as an allowance for embellishment in order to eschew being identified by one's workplace. I eventually took that liberty to a level to invent a false co-worker who purportedly 'told' me these recollections from his experience, and crafted a tall yarn out of the vaguest of truthiness, but still based on fuzzy details of memories of actual situations. The only blatantly untrue stories were the dispatcher story, and one about the small-town paint shop.

This style of writing lead to me developing a type of story I decided should be called Frustrics for Frustration Fics, where the object of the story is to tell a narrative where anger or frustration is a peculiar element of comedy. This style is an amalgam of the popularity of my IDWHL stories, combined with a theory that 'old people' very readily rant about conceivably anything and that there should be a kind of fiction where such a person could grow angry about a false situation so that there is nothing to do about it, and the rant can be made to get-it-out-of-ones-system rather than take it out on a real subject.

The T-rating is my estimate, from 01 to 10, to the truthiness of the yarn.

paint chip lady for reference later