Dear readers,

The editors here at Not Always Right try our best to be good with the English! We’re not perfect and mistakes sometimes slip through, but we like to think that most native English speakers know the basics of the language to communicate clearly.

Obviously, when it comes to the customers, we were wrong. We’ve rounded up thirteen funny stories about customers who were a little too relaxed with their English, to the point that they were almost not speaking it! Injoy!

Spelling Gone Rogue – If you don’t have rouge, embarrassment will give your cheeks a nice glow.

D as in Duh – Delta Uniform Hotel.

Studying Post-Grammatic Stress – Hits from the comments: “They’re probably better off excluding data from somebody that dumb anyway…”

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(I’ve just finished a transaction with a customer who only speaks Spanish, and am speaking to my coworker who translated for me.)

Me: *to coworker* “I really should learn Spanish. So many customers come in and that’s all they speak.”

Customer: “No, you shouldn’t.”

Me: “It really would help. I have to get someone to translate every time I have a Spanish-speaking customer.”

Customer: “But you aren’t in Mexico! You are in America!”

Me: “Well, sir, America is a melting pot of all kinds of cultures and languages.”

Customer: “But if you come to another country, you should learn the language they invented! George Washington invented English, and that’s what everyone in America should speak!”

This story is part of our Confused-With-Spanish roundup!

Read the next Confused-With-Spanish roundup story!

Read the Confused-With-Spanish roundup!

This story is part of the Bad With English roundup!

Read the next Bad With English roundup story!

Read the Bad With English roundup!

Dear readers,

We live in a beautifully multicultural world full of different cultures, races, and languages. Spanish is the second-most spoken native language in the world with 460 million native speakers, yet many in the English-speaking world give it a bad rap. Whether it’s assuming that speaking Spanish in the USA is “un-American” or forgetting that “Mexican” isn’t a language, there are enough of them out there (especially in the retail world) for us to make this roundup.

We’ve rounded up ten stories about customers who find ways to approach the Spanish language in the worst ways possible. Disfruten!

Racism Rears Its Ugly Head, Gets Decapitated – Hits from the comments: “Oh, she stole your job as a university professor?”

Fun With Language Barriers – “Si, señor?” has never been so hilarious.

Hey Look, It’s Raining Change – So… should we consider that a tip, then?

(more…)