People On Reddit Are Sharing The Best "You Have No Power Here" Moments (50 Stories)

I worked at the flight service station in Yellowknife, Canada. There we have a control tower and FSS. Tower had the radios at that time of day. Pilot reports smoke in the cockpit, declares an emergency. He was ~20 minutes out, and there's nowhere else to land, so he just continuing to come here. In the interim, emerg procedures put in place, Airport Firefighters are out in force. EMS is on standby, the town firehall comes out. And out comes captain jackass from the cops. BANGING on my door.
"HI IM HERE TO TAKE CONTROL!"
..... of what?
"THE SITUATION, IM IN COMMAND."
... ok, well, tower has the radios right now, so theyre the ones dealing with the emergency.
"THEN IM GOING UPSTAIRS TO TAKE CONTROL"
Alrighty, you do that. He starts to head up the additional floors to the control tower. Thing is, tower's door, like mine, is locked and can only be opened with our keys or from the inside. I call upstairs and relay there's a cop coming "to take control" Naturally they do not let him in. There's really nothing he could possibly do except make noise and be in the way. Not long after he stomps back down and I hear him radio some nonsense about "who do they think they are? IM IN COMMAND!"

sort of a you have no power here moment... but funny none the less.

My dad and I went to lowes one time, and the guy helping us had on a veteran hat and a few pins kept trying to insinuate we didnt know what we were talking about, and that we didnt need what we were there for, and kept trying to argue about everything. so my dad asked what service he was in trying to break ice, and the dude said he was in team 6 1970-1974 in Vietnam, and trained in Great lakes. which was the wrong answer, So my dad asked if he meant seal team 1 or 2. the man recognizing my dads service ring immediately buffed up on my dad and got tomato faced red and tried to assert dominance as a superior. So my dad immediately called the guy on his shit for stolen valor explained why he was full of [crap] and threatened to turn him in for it and get his management involved.

i havent seen that guy in town in a while.

I worked at a grocery store for five years putting up with crazy customers and their awful attitudes.

At the end of my tenure our store was set to be closed, and for the last month the store was sold to a liquidation company. Meaning we were no longer under our parent company's umbrella and were no longer concerned with retaining customer loyalty.

I got to tell customers "no" and respond with every bit of sarcasm and disdain to every Karen i encountered for one month until the store officially closed.

I joined the Army Reserve in 1983, in between my junior and senior year in high school.

Going to drill one weekend and we were doing war games with another reserve unit.

They mailed everyone a letter with the challenge and response to be let in to the unit.

As a lowly private, I was standing guard at the entrance and had to say the challenge.

Everything's going good until a city police car pulls up and the cop is a new lieutenant . I give the challenge and he just looks at me. I say it again and he said to just let him in because he didn't know it. He starts getting belligerent and I ask him to turn off the car and step out.

He gets out and starts yelling at me. The Sergeant Major heard the commotion and comes over and tears the young lieutenant a new asshole.

It was very satisfying to watch and I learned that day that even though a 2nd lieutenant outranks a sergeant major, it really doesn't matter because the sergeant major had been in for 20 years and didn't put up with any [crap].

Probably watching a few Texas DPS Officers realize they couldn't shut down a whole airport.

I was working as a flight instructor at small airport on a Saturday afternoon. We had one plane that had an issue on takeoff and veered off the runway, it cartwheeled and totaled the airplane but fortunately the pilot was not serious injured. I had a student who was next in line for takeoff when it happened, he called me from his phone as it happened. I hopped in the airport car with one of the rampers and drove out to the plane with a radio to inform inbound planes to use the other runway (we had no control tower). On the way to the runway I called the airport manager who drove to the airport and on his way he made a phone call to officially closed that runway.

About 30 minutes later a metric ton of DPS officers showed up and immediately tried to close the whole airport, treating it like a giant crime scene. They were carelessley driving around the airport like they owned the place, ignoring the planes that were moving around, and crossing our only open runway without regard to inbound traffic. A mechanic and I tried to tell them to be careful and they got mad at us. One of them told me they were "locking it down" a couple times, meaning the whole airport. Now I was a broke ass flight instructor and I had a flight that afternoon that was ultimately going to help pay for me to eat that week.

The airport manager was a short stereotypical country guy, also former Navy. He was not intimidated at all by the cops trying to close his airport. When he showed up I was about to go out with a student who was preflighting for a cross-country. There were about 5 cops in the lobby, me with my flight bag, the airport manager, and a mechanic. One of the cops saw my flight bag and said "I don't know why you have that or why he's out a the plane, you aren't going anywhere", the moment he finished his sentence the airport manager said "it's one runway that's closed, the airport is still open. This pissed off the cops.

I was about to head out the door, and one of the officers said he was driving out to the disabled plane. Idky, the pilot had been gone for about an hour. The mechanic said "you need to be careful" and the cop quickly retorted "AND WHY THE HELL IS THAT?" and he said "because this is still an airport, and the first thing that hits you is going to be a propeller" a few seconds later a plane took off as one of the cars was approaching the runway intersection ironing in that point.

I walked out, and as I was hopping in the plane with my student the same cop came up to me and said "you aren't going anywhere, we're locking this down!" I looked at the airport manager who followed all of us out to the ramp, he said "have a nice flight AjaxBU!"

You could see these cops just fuming that they didn't have the authority to close down an entire airport because one plane went off the runway. The airport had two runways, where the disabled plane was located was probably a mile or so away from the open runway. Why they were making a big fuss, I don't know. The occupant was relatively uninjured, his wife was the worst thing he had to deal with that day, he told her he wasn't going to fly.

We had a good flight, and I got to eat dinner that week.

I was working a lab assistant shift (I'm a tech) receiving specimens and such, when a doctor phoned the lab. He was very upset that there was a test that was taking far too long in his opinion. I said okay, let's look at it, and asked what the test was. A fungal culture...

A fungal culture takes at least two weeks to see if anything grows. The patient was in the ER. I politely told him the test was a send out and they generally take about about two weeks or longer depending on the fungus.

He got all huffy and asked why it took so long and is there a way to speed up the process since he wants to discharge the patient. I chuckled a little because this is a common problem with cultures, we're literally waiting for stuff to grow, we can't just make them grow faster. I told him we don't have magical wands that make fungus grow really fast.

He then asked for a lab tech because I was just a lab assistant. I then let him know I was in fact a lab tech with experience in microbiology and I can tell him from first hand experience that fungal cultures are some of the slowest cultures, right up there was AFBs, and assured him that if anything comes of it, we'll let ER know.

He didn't really like that, but said fine and hung up.

That would be a customer we had named Nick. I'll leave his last name out to protect the stupid. He would e-mail us and always cc editor@.com and most of his e-mails were things like "NOTHING [GODDAMN] WORKS". None of the national newspapers responded, I imagine some underling just rolled his eyes and deleted them. Finally, he said, fix this in 5 minutes or I cancel.

My manager says "let me see that e-mail". He responded "Thank you, I cancelled your account. We don't want customers like you anyway. If you want to contact the media, that's your call, I'll happily provide the months of threatening e-mails you sent to my staff".

He gave us months of headaches over a £45/quarter account. We definitely didn't need him.

At my university, it was always fun to watch the people who had been High School Popular People think that this sort of popularity would just naturally carry over and that on this campus of thousands, they'd be a big shot or something. Was always fun to see just how many people could not care less about their attention-[seeking].

Oooo I have a good one! I was responding to a call with our volunteer fire dept a couple years ago. I was west of town and a vehicle rolled halfway between where I was and the fire hall. So I called the responding people and said I’ll meet you there.

It was a single vehicle that rolled and they were all immigrants from the Pakistan/Afghanistan region. Before I got there, a doctor from the same region had stopped to lend a hand. She was from the similar region as those involved in the crash and I had assumed she was the eighth person in the van. She started to try to order me around and tell me I only needed to know certain information about the patient she was with. It went something like this. Dr: “She has midline neck pain and sore ribs.” Me: “Okay, and crepitus or deformity to the.....” Dr: “That’s all you need to know!” Me: “Uhhh wha?” Dr: “I am a doctor and that’s all you need to know!” That’s when I figured maybe I should ask what kind of doctor, in case this is some whackadoo who just claims to be a doctor like we’ve had happen before.

She tells me she’s a podiatrist. I gave her my best look of trying to be nice but their feet are fine right now. When doctors or nurses show up on scene, they ultimately can trump EMS. But they have to actually do the work and sign off as having taken patient control. As soon as I asked her to sign the paperwork and ride with us to the hospital she realized she was out of her knowledge area and disappeared.

My wife and I moved to WA state and my MIL tried to tell me that she was going to call the police because I had pot in the house.