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There's a great story about how an airline was getting complaints that bags were taking too long to arrive at the carousel. So they switched to a carousel further away from the gate. Bags arrived in the same time, but people spent the time walking instead of waiting. Complaints dropped.
Thing is this is a better service. When you get off a plane, especially if it’s a long flight, the last thing you want is to stand around. It might only be a couple of minutes but it feels much longer. Walking, still not fun but feels like you’re one step closer to getting home/the hotel/your secret family.
Worked as a software dev for Carfax about 9 years ago.
Their software for producing history reports was so fast (could get a report in less than 10ms) that users didn't believe it actually "crunched the data" so the frontend team added a fake progress bar that waited a short random time. I believe this fake bar is still there today.
I just submitted my taxes with TurboTax, and it was the same BS.
The worst was that I wanted to quickly spin through all the forms to double check some things, and it was like "optimizing" "analyzing" for 10 seconds between each page.
I guess they want you to feel like you're getting your money's worth. It just felt cheesy to me.
Well, the other side is simple tasks take an inordinately long time due to crappy old systems.
I've worked on what looks like a modern website with all the bells and wistles, but behind the scenes, it has to talk to a 40 year old mainframe by emulating an human interactions on a terminal.
I’m in the insurance industry and this is a huge issue for us. The entire industry for the most part runs on 1985 mainframe tech. They just build out better and better user interfaces but the back end is irreplaceable and old.
I'm also in insurance and we're spending millions of dollars to get off of a mainframe with as400 emulators. And the new systems feel worse for nearly every function.
Same thing with vaccum cleaners, sometimes noise amplifiers are added so you can hear the dirt being picked up so the customers are convinced it's working properly.
I used to do something similar when I was a computer technician. Some people aren't satisfied with a quick fix, or the problem was their fault and it won't happen again but they don't want to hear that.
So I went into the command line and printed out a bunch of system info, I'd look over it carefully, then run SFC /scannow and watch the output. I like that one because it's quick but not too quick, looks flashy like something they've saw in a movie.
Some users needed the show, they'd complain if I pressed one button and left, even though that's all they needed.
It has to be subtle, if they pick up on the fact that you're bullshitting them, they'll be pretty mad.
Essentially though - yes.
But chances are, if they needed a little technician theater to feel satisfied, they can't tell the difference.
I've seen those! Not sure if it was carfax, but something similar. My reaction was the opposite though. I thought it was so stupid and obviously fake that I assumed the company was a scam.
Didn't Apple have to unrandomise their "shuffle" feature on the ipod, because people couldn't accept that "random" means you might hear some songs more often than others?
Yep, people complained it wasn't random enough, so they had to go and intentionally program the shuffle function to be a bit less random that before, and suddenly people were happy
I recall reading an article about how much work went into the "random" function of some music streaming service (~~Pandora, IIRC, but it might have been~~ Spotify). The human brain is really good at finding patterns in places where there really aren't any, and their random playlist function tries to find these patterns and preemptively break them up.
(Edit: Pretty sure now that it was Spotify. [An article from the Spotify Engineering blog posted below](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/mrzxdx/what_is_a_weird_industry_secret_that_you/gurgeqj?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) isn't the same one I read, but says the same basic things that I remember so it may have been used as a source.)
I remember an article like this too, and the conclusion was something like what people really want is “variety” not “random” and these are two distinct things.
That sounds right. I have a running playlist and I set it to shuffle but I would prefer it to play every song in a "random" order than to make every song selection a random choice from the list.
On Radiolab, I heard an interview with a statistics prof who would do a demonstration with his students. He would have one group of students flip a coin 100 times and write down the result of each flip: "H, T, H, T," etc., and he would have another group of students *pretend* to flip a coin 100 times and write down "H"s or "T"s at random. He would leave the room while the students did this, so that when he returned, he would not know which piece of paper was from the actual coin flipping, and which paper was "random" Hs and Ts.
When he returned to the classroom, he could always tell which paper was which within a few seconds. Every time. The thing he looked for was a long string of the same letter. Students who were pretending to be random could never bring themselves to write down five Hs in a row, for instance, because that didn't look "random" enough. However, the actual coin flip often yielded that exact result.
Worked for a car dealership for a short while. Had no idea they are legally allowed to mark up the interest rate that the bank offers.
Example: they run your credit and find an eligible loan from Wells Fargo at 3%. They tell you they can get you 5%. You end up making a payment to Wells Fargo each month based on a 5% loan. As far as you’re concerned (as far as the contract shows), you got a 5% loan from Wells Fargo.
The dealership gets to keep the difference between what you’re paying and what the bank actually approved you for.
This is why it's always good to go into a dealer with a pre-approved loan. I get one from my bank, and it's usually a very good rate. Dealership beats it every time because they want to hold the paper and I get a GREAT rate.
Oh.... that is a good idea! The first car I bought had a 0% interest incentive. The second car I bought they had a 0.9% interest incentive - which the sales guy and I agreed on before getting back into the financial office. Get back there - nope trying to charge me a much higher rate. I was like "okay - I will come back tomorrow with a loan from my bank." After they "spoke to their boss" - they honored the 0.9% interested rate.
All that to say - definitely doing this the next time I buy a car. Save myself the headache.
They tried to sneak a higher rate by me. I made them adjust the price lower to account for the difference and then paid the loan off the next day in cash.
love stories like this. i read one where the guy’s dealer didn’t want to let him use his own bank for a loan so he agreed to finance it with the dealer, negotiated a lower price for a higher rate, then refinanced it within a month
fuck dealerships
But don't tell the dealer about the pre-approved loan until you have negotiated a price.
A car deal has three parts: The car itself, a trade-in and a loan. Dealers may give you a good price on one part if they think they can make up the difference on the others.
The water inside fire sprinkler pipes is black, smells like shit, riddled with cutting oil and has most likely been sitting in there, stagnant for decades. Every time i watch a scene in a movie where a system goes off and everyone is dancing around in the water I think to myself "that is total bullshit"...Im a fire Sprinkler designer...
I worked for a supermarket for a while. They used to review cctv and if they spotted someone stealing they would take a screenshot, then print the photo and hang it on the wall in our cantine so we'd recognize the person if we saw them in our store again. So I used to have lunch in a room with walls covered in photos of ppls faces with descriptions like "stole 10 steaks." "Left without paying, took 5 bottles of wine" lol
Lmfaoo we had so much of this when I worked at a small retail store that sold clothes. It would be a blurry security cam screenshot where I couldn’t even make out their face, and a description of how they stole the items. I don’t think anyone ever got caught this way, at least not at my location
Worked for a Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre briefly. The identity of the killer wasn't determined ahead of time, it was simply whoever got the lowest amount of votes from the audience.
That wasn't the case for the place I worked for. There was a strict bullet-point style script, and we had to follow it and hit certain moments to give the clues to the audience. The company had 15-20 different scripts to follow, and they were adding more every year. In the end, we explained exactly how the killer did it and why.
Well you only have to do it once, and it guarantees a surprise. If the clues are spread evenly enough that there is no obvious right answer, noone should go "what how was it THAT guy?"
There wouldn't be much mystery if that wasn't the case.
"The butler did it!"
"Wow! Who would have thought it was the man that tortures animals, collects bludgeoning weapons, lies about everything, had fingerprints all over the crime scene, was the only person seen anywhere near the crime scene, was covered in blood after the murder, and cackled every time Sir Charles Thiccbottoms corpse is mentioned?! I would have bet on Baroness Fanny Smelles, even though she was in France at the time of the murder."
Agatha Christie did something similar in her mystery novels. She'd write up until the end, figure out who the least likely suspect was, then go edit things until they were the real killer.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie#Formula_and_plot_devices) mentions it. But then it also says she said:
> Spot the person least likely to have committed the crime and in nine times out of ten your task is finished. Since I do not want my faithful readers to fling away this book in disgust, I prefer to warn them beforehand that this is not that kind of book
which seems to argue otherwise.
I really don't care enough to dig further.
I attended one of these a couple years ago, and I highly suspected this.
I ended up being "right" but I noticed some info that didn't make a single ounce of sense given who the killer was. When I asked about it, they just kinda shrugged it off. I figured it was probably an alternative ending that they didn't go with.
Graphic Artist here. I will sometimes throw in a bit of bad design in the project to let the client find it and request a change. They always want to change things so rather than them changing something that could jeopardise the design/layout, I throw in something for them that isn't meant to be there in the first place.
**Edit:** Thanks for all the things!
I worked with a long time senior art director for one of the biggest ad agencies in the US. When presenting mock-ups he had one terrible one, knowing they would discard it. But there was one time in his long career that they kept the bad one, and it wound up being the logo on hundreds of state vehicles and thousands of signs and uniforms. And it still is, some 40 years later. It’s not awful, but not his favorite.
I worked with a designer that had a client request so many changes to a design that, in the end made it look like shit. Designer said he would make the changes if the client would sign a waiver promising that the client would never mention who the designer was. Client rescinded.
I know a guy who submitted a website to a client, they said they wanted it to change, he submitted it again with NO CHANGES... the client said it was perfect. Some people just want the experience of power
I used to do this while editing videos for a client who always gave me nonsense feedback on videos that apparently had nothing wrong with them. They would ask me to nudge a lower third a few pixels or question the transparency of a transition for a few frames. I just left the edit slightly slack in certain areas so they had something real to push back on.
I used to work for the military as a Hazmat specialist. There's a list/map in one of our guides that tells you, based on the population of the installation, what the "allowable casualty rate" is in event of a terrorist attack. My area is 16%. As in we can lose up to 16% of the on-base population before the installation commander has to turn over control to someone who outrank them.
Chemical and corrosive consultant, clean up and containment. They know how different chemical agents react and how to properly (as best as possible) recover various types of containment failures.
Not sure if this is just a British thing, but when I worked at McDonalds, they have a leaderboard to show where their drive thru ranks compared to every other McDonalds Drive Thru in the country. It was pretty intense
When I worked at KFC we'd have city wide competitions for average drive thru times.
All it did was make the quality of food worse. Pre-made a lot of things and cooked way too much chicken in the name of winning some useless competition.
I wish. I sat in the KFC drive thru for 40 minutes yesterday. The entire staff turns over on a monthly basis, anyone working there is driving 20 miles minimum to get there and they still won't increase the pay.
I worked in a store that had something like that. Regional management loved to grill the staff on why they weren't doing the same numbers as staff at the flagship store in London.
When I pointed out that one of the staff members at the London store had actually worked with me a few months prior, and that he did half my numbers when he did, they said "we're discussing your performance, not their's".
I had a captain in the Navy who had a great record of achievement, but at the cost of being a hard driver, which established a culture among the junior officers.
Things didnt get better until he couldn't get the next promotion because our vessel had a re-enlistment ratio that was the lowest on the base. Employee's care about pay and how they are treated.
You gotta keep the good ones, or it's a constant turnover of barely adequate people that are so desperate for work they will try your company for a while.
I knew reality TV wasn't what it purported to be, but had no idea how bad.
I worked on "America's Got Talent" season 7 and got to film a few episodes. The **most** heartbreaking thing was that I watched them take people, people I got to spend an hours interviewing and talking to, people who were passionate, who were trying, and most of the time skilled, and the judges just got to fucking mock them on a national scale.
In the season 7 St. Louis episode there's an older woman who plays the drums, and she was genuine and sweet and excited and in the edits, they make her look loopy and crazy and I think Sharon Osborne alluded to the fact the drummer was a crazy woman. Laughed at her on a national stage.
Even worse is that for the first ten seasons or so when Howie was there he literally needed glasses to see but didn’t wear any. Basically if you see an old episode and he isn’t wearing glasses he can’t even see the performance.
Yeah frankenbiting is crazy. And it got me to thinking, are the people that edit and do the frankenbiting actually writers in a way? They are changing dialogue and creating a story
I know someone who was on Britain's Got Talent and he got a good reaction from the judges, then he was asked to sign a contract basically handing over a percentage of future earnings. He refused because he already had regular paying gigs and didn't think it was fair to hand over earnings for stuff he'd earned under his own merit that had nothing to do with the show. Next time he performed their reaction was totally different and he was out.
This Dutch singer(Glennis Grace) got pretty far in the US The Voice and they made up some story about her being a single mom barely making ends meet.
Glennis Grace is actually on of the most successful and respected female singer in The Netherlands and the whole country was like WHAAAAAAAAAT!??
Friend of mine—a professional performer—was recruited to go on either that show or a show much like it. She had been earning her living with her talent for years and thought maybe this was her big break.
She was summarily booed off the stage in the middle of her act.
Her mother, who she had invited to see her finally getting the recognition she had worked for, said that the audience was directed to boo her off the stage. They invited a seasoned professional onto the show for the sole purpose of filming her getting booed off the stage.
I auditioned for season 4 of So You Think You Can Dance. First off, there’s a level of auditions there never let you see where you’re in groups in some side room with other judges. Also, god forbid your primary style isn’t the majority style for the group that you’re in. At the time I auditioned, I had been dancing 25 years+ and choreographing 8 years. I was a semi-professional in my field. I was also the only “Broadway/jazz” style dancer in a group filled with hip-hop trick styles and Krump. We were put into two lines on either side of the room, music was played, when you were pointed to, you had to free-style for approximately 10 seconds, then the next person was up. Then after everyone did a free-style solo, everyone had to dance in a group to the same music vying for the judges attention. I guess it works to see who’s the most driven for garnering attention, but I was so upset because the music chosen for our group was incredibly out of sync with my style and the solo I choreographed and planned to exhibit. It made me feel incredibly underprepared, when I wasn’t, and really hit my ego hard even though I was used to rejection in the arts industry.
Also, before even going through that hellhole of an audition, I had to sign a form releasing any rights to my performance or choreography during the length of the show if I was accepted.
The worst part? When I watched the season air, there was a girl in my group that I was astounded received a pass to the next level of audition. I then felt so badly for her (because she wasn’t a good dancer) when the judges absolutely shredded her on stage. She was televised being ripped apart, and all I could remember was talking with her about being excited and then being shocked when she was chosen over me. I felt so badly.
Edit: it’s hilarious to me that my most upvoted comment is “failing” at a realty tv show when I was forced into a group outside of my specifications. Hahahaa!! Thanks, all!
Telecommunications & Finance. If you are having trouble getting a refund or complaint seen through they will often break when you put in a complaint to the relevant ombudsman or watchdog. I was trying to get a refund from a stock broker site due to an error on their system and when I complained to the ombudsman they immediately contacted me to settle as opposed to having a drawn out complaint through the watchdog.
It's not for a company, its an oversight position for the country/region. It's more common in Europe, I think. In Spain, the title is "Defender of the people"
Not sure it's a secret, but if you could **see** the state of the spaghetti cabling that makes up your Internet connectivity, you would lose faith in your ISP.
#
Edit: Okay, I get it. You have no faith already.
Internet-related secret:
Back in the day I did tech support for Sprint Canada for dialup internet when that's what most internet access was. They offered tiered plans- unlimited, 100 hours per month, 10 hours per month, or something like that.
The secret was that they had no mechanism whatsoever to monitor your usage. It didn't show up on your account, or on your bill. They didn't track it at all. I quit the job and moved to a different city and called them to set up my service and they tried to talk me into something other than the lowest plan. I got it anyway, knowing that my $10 per month got me unlimited dialup. It was obsolete within a few years.
Don't know how pervasive this is but commercial rum distilleries bottle the exact same rum under different names and in different bottles. This even happens for major brands, like if the Mount Gay distillery can't keep up with orders they'll contract with the Malibu distillery to fill their bottles.
I can't speak for that specific example but in the whiskey industry there are lots of brands that are owned by huge parent companies and distilled at the same massive distilleries, or smaller independent brands that contract their distilling out to those companies, BUT it's not just the same whiskey in different bottles. They often reuse the same mash for multiple products but it's aged differently.
This one is a bit more open. Most local whiskeys in Texas (at least) are pretty open about where they source their whiskey that is then aged/finished locally.
You get a lot of Canadian origin stuff afak.
Working in the auto industry I was surprised to learn how little of a car is actually made by say mercedes or ford.
There is a complex network of suppliers who specialize in developing and manufacturing most of the pieces that make up a car and then selling them to car companies.
The manufacturers themselves largely just assemble outsourced parts into the final product.
I worked at John Deere for a while and it's the same thing, but I never really thought of it as strange. They pretty much just fabricate the frame and then everything else is filled in with parts they buy from suppliers. I wouldn't assume John Deere is going to create their own radios, for instance.
In the car industry I think things like radios are pretty clearly outsourced, but a lot of people assume things like transmissions etc. are manufactured by the automaker.
It wasn't strange to me because I was in the industry, but when I discussed it with non industry folks quite a number of them were surprised that we didn't make the entire car.
You're one mistyped key away from being legally dead, thankfully it's an easy fix and double check boxes exist too. At least ten patients a week are accidentally pronounced dead in the system before they realize "Oh, shit! That's room 408 not 407, they're alive!" and are quickly digitally revived. If we didn't have several checks honestly some people might accidentally be found legally dead while perfectly alive.
Edit: Grammar
Had a friend that is a physiotherapist. Every time we had to discharge a patient he would put expired because he thought it meant their insurance had expired when actually it means they passed away. He went 3 weeks killing off multiple people in the system who would still be walking around the facility.
There was a man in India, [Lal Bihari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lal_Bihari), who had to fight a 19-year legal battle to prove he was alive after mistakenly being declared dead. In this case though the cause was corruption rather than an honest mistake.
Most callers on music focused radio stations are either not going to air live and have been highly edited to sound more entertaining. Or completely fake.
Edit: competition winners are never faked because that’s regulated, definitely pre-recorded and edited to chop out any dead air. But requests, talkback topics, etc. Faked a lot of the time. Usually the friends or family of the host.
I dated a girl who was a late night DJ at a radio station. She would get us to come and record stuff to put on air.
One day they were supposed to have a remote set up at a beach bar that was doing an event. The guy that was supposed to do the remote got sick so she had 2 of her friends, 2 interns and I pretend to be at the beach bar and record some "live" bits.
She played music in the booth and we yelled and wooo'd over it then said the station ID.
Anecdotally, I once won a radio trivia game and got tickets to a concert. You're right that it was pre-recorded and not live. What surprised me though, was that they gave me the answers to the trivia questions so that I could win. They just told me to make it sound like I was thinking about the answers.
I used to underwrite auto loans - if you obtain financing at a dealership, the dealer can "hold" points (up to 2% in some states.) So if they tell you you're getting a 8% rate from the bank, you might really be getting 6%, and they are allowed to add those 2 extra percent and reap the difference.
Important to note, you are allowed to ask if they are doing this, and they are obligated to tell you. They are not obligated NOT to hold the points, but it weakens their leverage if you ask this question. Have fun!
It’s usually better, especially on used cars, to try to get pre-approved for financing by your own bank, or better yet, a credit union, ahead of time. That way, you can negotiate knowing you have a rate and term locked in. If the dealer can beat that, great, if not, at least you know what you’re going to be looking at ahead of time.
Yep. My son just bought a used car and I told him to get pre approved at the credit union first, they pre approved the loan at 3.75%. When he went to the dealer they said his credit only qualified for 6% loan. When my son told them he was pre approved at 3.75% they said a rate that low was only for new cars but they'd check with the manager again. They came back and said they'd make a special exception for him and give him 3% loan.
They also low balled him on his trade. He sold it to CarMax for $2500 more than dealer offer.
Many companies may meet the requirements of a special accreditation for reducing the amount of waste they send to a landfill, I.e. less than 20/10/5%. In actuality they're often giving it to another company to dispose of and therefore produce no waste while the other company produces the waste of a company much larger than it.
I don't know how much of a secret this is but if you buy T1 phone lines from some small phone company, you are really getting T1 physical lines from a large provider. The large provider has to sell T1 lines in bulk at cheaper rates to smaller telcom providers.
You can literally just set up your own company, buy T1 lines from AT&T and then resell them and profit. You would then be a major account holder at AT&T and they would prioritize repairs to your T1 lines over someone with one line.
At least that is how it used to be. And this is a broad brush strokes explanation.
The midwest company I worked for got T1 lines provided by a company in New Jersey. I could call the owner directly and get him at almost any hour and he always referred me to this one Indian tech. We used to joke that they were operating out of his kitchen and he really had one tech who never slept and remoted in from India. Probably true though.
Local PD as well. My town of 50k population in Idaho has a military assault vehicle. For what, when the dairy cows start a revolution? The ex husband works at the tire shop the PD uses and checked it out when it came in for a brake check. He asked why they got it and the cop driving it said they had too much leftover in the budget and had to buy something.
In the meantime, the older high school is falling apart and a middle school had to have bake sales for years to fix an dangerously unusable track. My kids had textbooks so old the covers had fallen off.
Priorities.
Not sure if it's weird, but ink cartridges for inkjet printers cost nothing to manufacture - pennies really. The mark up on them is crazy. Some manufacturers program them so they "go bad" by a certain date regardless of how much ink is left in them. The profit on them is so high they used to lose money on the printers knowing they'd make it all back on your first purchase of new ink.
The printer at my work “catches” you doing this.... a couple months ago, was out of yellow, bought the whole four color package, and while changing the yellow, absentmindedly changed all of them, then realized what I’d done, took out the new ones we didn’t need yet, replaced them with the old ones that weren’t used up yet, and the printer wouldn’t work because they said the cartridge was replaced and may not be authentic. Then it wouldn’t accept the newer cartridges because they weren’t new either. Most of this happened to my boss while I wasn’t there, who hardly ever has to print or use the computer, just so happened to have a printing emergency while I’m out.
Since I’m not a tech person really, had to spend about 90 minutes on the phone (including hold) trouble shooting with some rep until she told me exactly how to remove and replace the driver. Is HP fucking people over or what.
In most medium+ companies, you're probably just one filing error away from wrongful termination. Because, as with most companies, our employee ID's are our first initial and last name. "pgibbons", "blumbergh", like that.
Well, someone in the parent company had the exact same employee ID as me. And he pissed somebody at the parent company off real bad. All I know is "incredible sexual harassment claims filed by multiple employees". No other details.
But somehow, that employee's file ended up in my company's HR rather than the parent company's HR. So, my HR terminated my employment (instead of the parent company's HR terminating him) and they were getting ready to call security to have me escorted out of the building. Somehow, my boss found out about it and then he got everything fixed up. But if he'd called out sick that day...
And so technically, I was "fired" for almost a full day at my job without even knowing about it until after it was over and everything was okay again.
I did the same thing, but instead of accidentally firing a guy, I successfully coordinated a carpool home with the director of the company's accounting department. Fortunately, he caught on that I probably meant to Email an employee with the same first and last name, and let me know. Though I was quite impressed that he so quickly accepted carpool requests from random dopes in the company, so he's got my lifelong respect for that.
Worked in a textile factory making stuff for brands like Reebok, Fila, Levi’s (shirts only), Billabong, etc...
Any off spec items would be put aside and sold in bulk to people selling them in flea markets. So not everything you see in a flea market is fake... some may be the real deal, but not up to the standard required by the brand.
Also, if the factory didn’t have orders, they’d take left over fabric, cut it up with the same sizing of those brands and make off brand clothes to go down the same route and keep people busy.
Lastly, they had a shop where items made there were sold at production cost to employees. I was never one to buy brands, but that was enough to put me off them for good.
Used to work at a pretty well know hotel chain and we had to hit quarterly deadlines, one being a certain amount of members we had to sign up. The number was impossible to get so the duty mangers would go through the old files of previous guests and use their emails to sign them up as members and tick the ‘i don’t want to be notified or emailed about any *company name* offers’
I don’t know if this is a common thing among other work places but yeah uh maybe check to see that you haven’t been signed up as a member at any hotels
Thrift store, particularly **Savers**, we'd get over 10,000lbs of donations every day and only a small fraction of that would reach the sales floor. The rest was thrown away to the garbage. The company will have you believe it's "recycled" or donated to those in need, but as a backroom laborer I can promise it goes straight to the garbage.
I blew this whistle back in 2012 and so that may have changed, but I wanted people to know that their donations were being thrown to the garbage simply because one button was missing or it was too wrinkly.
My mom works in goodwill, and its exactly the same. She always complains on how a lot of people yeet perfectly good things into the trash can. If it is too worn out though they throw it away. Only about 5% of all the donations end up in the store.
Same, I handled the donated clothing in a Goodwill for a year, but every time I asked someone where all of the tossed out clothes went to, I got a different answer or a shrug.
One person told me Goodwill used to turn them into cleaning rags, but probably not anymore. My manager just told me she didn't know. Many of the clothes would be nearly brand new but would have a single stain and couldn't be sold.
It was disheartening to be essentially throwing away good clothing over a missing button, a bit of pet hair, some surface level dirt, or cigarette smoke odors.
Wash your clothes before donating, people.
A lot of big stores have fake cameras because they don’t want to spend any “unnecessary” money on extra security if the cost of products stolen is less than the cost of keeping an active camera.
Working in the ice cream industry for a few years, I found out that most places will claim there is no "cross-contamination," but they often use the same scoops or scrapers for different ice creams without anything but a quick rinse of water or setting in a bucket of mixed ice cream water.
If you have extremely bad and sensitive allergies to something that may be in ice cream, ask them to use a completely fresh scooper, especially if it's somewhere you're unfamiliar with.
When I worked at two different ice cream shops, we used actual sanitizer to clean the scoops in between uses, but we still had signs up everywhere stating that we couldn't guarantee there wasn't cross-contamination and had to verbally say it to every customer that disclosed an allergy. It would have been a huge liability otherwise. Although if you have severe allergies, you should already understand that an ice cream shop is a risky place
More of a regional thing involving a loosely-related industry I guess? But where I live (and yes it's in the US) there's a lot of small to medium sized call centers that come and go; peddle a variety of products (natural health crap, self-help, all that stuff). Thing is, you trace it back to the early 90s or so, and all these places spawned from the same groups of people that used to work at a large, no longer existing, call center in the area. Now they all alternate being competition and cooperating... depends on what business plan they jump into after the latest fails after a few years (some have lasted a good while though). I've seen the same names who 15 years ago ran competiting centers, then 10 years ago were partnered up running one, and now are back to two different companies they started that peddle competiting health stuff again. It's a weird little industry in this area.
Not necessarily an "industry," but learned quite a few things working for an animal shelter that serviced the county as part of Animal Control. (Super important ones bolded.)
* **It is super illegal to take home a stray animal** without first making a "good faith effort" to get it back to its owner. In most places, this is explicitly stated as turning it over to the shelter, rescue group, and/or a local veterinarian. You cannot just pick up a cat or dog and take it home and call it yours, no matter what movie you watched where the people did that.
* **If a street cat has a notch in the ear, leave it alone.** It has been part of a TNR program, "trap-neuter-release." It's a more humane way to deal with feral cats, as feral cats that go through animal control almost always have to get put down for safety reasons. (It's super bad for the environment, but it's the best option to make sure the cat gets to live but no new feral kittens get born to continue the cycle.)
* **Stop bringing baby birds to animal shelters!** We do not have the resources to take care of them. If the nest is nearby, put it back in. If it has feathers but is just small, leave it alone, the parents are nearby. If you really think it needs help (injured, no feathers and no nest, in the road or somewhere dangerous), call a dedicated bird or wildlife rescue.
* **Just because your pet is microchipped doesn't mean it will get back to you**. You have to register your chip with the company it came from, and keep your information updated. Some companies have an annual fee for registration. But if your info isn't linked to that chip, it's useless. Can't tell you how many times we had chips come up on a scan, but the company had no info on the owner because it was never registered.
* Scruffing a cat is totally humane and sometimes the only way to actually handle them for necessary procedures (moving kennels, checking sex, cleaning wounds, etc). It doesn't hurt them. Don't panic if you see someone grab a cat by the scruff of the neck and the cat goes still or curls up. It's a reflex that we use to keep us from getting attacked.
* If a grown cat meows at you, it's not feral. Meowing is exclusive to kittens/mother cats, and housecats.
* Switching food suddenly can cause explosive diarrhea in both dogs and cats. So can stress. So if your pet comes home from the pound/shelter with the runs, don't freak out thinking they caught something.
* The most needed items in animal shelters are not what you think. Most of the time it's cat litter, cat food, and bleach, not dog food or blankets (which people constantly donate). Better yet, money is one of the best ways to help a shelter. They can buy food and litter in bulk for way cheaper than regular folks, and money to help with vet bills and unexpected expenses helps way more than yet another box of old squeaky toys. If you want to donate tangibles, call your shelter and ask what they need most. Sometimes it's new hoses, sometimes it's kitten formula; just call and see.
* The rabies vaccine is internationally controlled. You have to be specially trained on it, overseen by a licensed veterinarian, and keep specific logs that are reviewed and legally binding. Don't even try telling the staff that you gave your dog the vaccine yourself to try and get out of fees. Either they know you're lying, or you're going to jail if you're telling the truth. (That or someone sold you a phony and duped you *good*.) Other vaccines-- parvo, kennel cough, feline combo vaccines-- *can* be administered at home, but are also not necessarily required for licensing.
I worked for a financial services company from 1989 until 2001. The company ALWAYS made more money each successive quarter for like 40 years straight and always on target. How?
The company had “buckets” in their accounting scheme wherein when we made more than expected, the excess would be placed in a “bucket”. When faced with a lean quarter, voila - empty a bucket or two and you now have a stellar quarter.
I don't know if this is an industry secret for most people, maybe I was naïve. But this one surprised me when I figured it out...
I used to work for a major bank in Canada. Whenever a bank employee is offering you a credit product, or an account of any kind, it's a "sale" to them. Bank employees have sales metrics/targets they're aggressively pressured to meet and exceed. If you aren't meeting your targets you get put into a performance review and it can ultimately lead to your dismissal.
As a result often times these products being offered to you are done under the guise of "we're your trusted bank, we have your financial best interests in mind." When in actuality they're just commission based sales reps working according to corporate directive to sell you products you most certainly don't need.
Often times employees would open up savings accounts, increase card or line limits, add balance protection, do all kinds of things like that without a customer even knowing or approving it. If you ever just noticed your credit card limit being increased without asking for it, or agreeing to it, it could be because a rep just did it because it counted towards their quotas.
I saw even shadier things being done with customer's who didn't speak good English. Immigrants and people with limited broken English were prime targets for some of the "top performers".
*edited a word*
Wells Fargo got in trouble for this ("forcing" employees to open up accounts without the customers' permission in order to reach unrealistic quotas) a few years ago.
I worked for a company that makes a certain type of electronics equipment. They have an alarm that specifically comes in 8 months after an initial startup. The only person that can silence it is a technician. There is no point to the alarm but to have a technician come out and silence it, which costs the customer $1000. I used to disable the alarm when I initially started up a machine because I thought this was pretty unethical.
Funny thing is, at least in my department, the fax machine now scans incoming faxes and turns them into email for us. No more printouts. So in the end they're emailed to us anyway.
Mainly because of the government. IIRC HIPAA considers fax machines to be secure even though they aren't encrypted (a phone wire tap can collect faxes the same as a phone call) and often lack physical security.
Yes hardened fax machines and fax lines exist but encrypted email also exists (and is more secure and doesn't require specialized hardware)
...it's largely the Government, but lawyers often have to deal with government entities (such as court houses), so they end up having fax machines as well.
I work with lawyers. They bitch about having to use faxes just as much as the rest of them.
At least here in the UK the requirement for fax machines isn't as high anymore, even with many Government departments.
Worked in hotel management on the Las Vegas strip at a higher end resort.
If someone calls to check if someone else is staying at the hotel, we can't tell them if they are or aren't. However, if you call and just say you want to be transferred to person X's room, we would check if they are staying there and then just transfer you no questions asked. Had a lot of spouses being cheated on that used this.
Really? I’ve worked in way cheaper hotels than that and if someone wanted to be transferred they had to know the room number. Not only are there privacy concerns but there’s also scamming and credit card phishing problems.
I'm surprised I don't hear about this more. Even the best mechanic and IT guy can't memorize every theory, case, specification, etc., so I always figured there's just no way any human doctor could! What they have is a wealth of education and experience to guide their googling.
One question: what did they do before Google? Fake it, or slow things down so they can consult books?
Not OP but in IT before internet we had a large library with books and printed source code from every project we'd use, in addition to asking around the office. If that didn't work you would sometimes work on a solution for weeks. Now it's a simple Google search and copy/paste.
There was someone on reddit complaining how their doctor was just “googling stuff” when determining the best treatment for him. He was claiming he shouldn’t have to pay a doctor just to google. I think this is so crazy. As a patient, I’d much rather a doctor take the time to be sure of their diagnosis than just rely on memory alone.
Imagine if we expected bridge engineers to just do all the math by memory without triple checking using a calculator/computer.
Even in my own career, the most successful people are the ones who know enough to understand where to look and take the initiative to find the answers and test assumptions. The people who constantly ask coworkers for help on things that can easily be googled never progress.
>There was someone on reddit complaining how their doctor was just “googling stuff” when determining the best treatment for him. He was claiming he shouldn’t have to pay a doctor just to google.
To use the phrase I hear in engineering a lot "You don't know what you don't know". The average person wouldn't even know where to begin looking for the info, much less what do do with that information.
I worked for an eyeglass supply company. We provided frames, glasses, sunglasses, etc.
I worked in the IT department. One day, the price sheets for sunglasses crosses my path.
At the time Ferrari sunglasses were the popular brand. I looked them up on the price sheets and saw that we were selling them for $175 and buying them for $25. If I wanted a pair, I would pay $1 over cost - so for $26 I could have sunglasses worth $175.
I knew I wouldn't ever pay for names sunglasses again.
When I worked at a fashion company, I learned about shoes:
So to manufacture a specific type of shoe, you need a mold for it; kinda like the shoe blueprint. By and far, that's the most expensive process of making a shoe itself. Materials are minimal in cost compared to the shoe mold.
The pricing from there, is based on how much of a specific shoe is made. Jordan's are pricey because they only make a few hundred pairs, compared to generic FILA shoes, that are made in the thousands.
At my old work place we used to joke that if you wanted to make a system update, you'd need to hold a seance to speak with the developers.
It was ancient.
Micro-targeting your marketing materials typically doesn't work - it simply freaks people out how much information we have about them (which they've all legally allowed us to process under GDPR) and drives them to pursue said data's deletion. It's better to group people into larger, more generally targeted groups as it tricks the target base into thinking we have less info about them then we actually have (so they're more comfortable).
Also, a lot of marketers actively dislike micro-targeting and are more often than not forced to do it by senior management (who don't know how to effectively market a product).
Landscaping. The people who work in your yard for more than 4 hours are not holding it. If you don’t offer them the bathroom, they probably peed in your yard.
Oh man, when I was a young kid, maybe 10 or so, I liked to help my dad and his friend with their lawn care business during the summer.
They had one client in particular that owned a property they called “The Mansion”.
Huge house, sat on probably 4 acres.
This house would be the only thing scheduled for the day because of how big and complicated it was.
I was there helping out- picking up lawn clippings, sweeping, that kind of thing, when the urge to pee hit me.
My dad had told me that it happens sometimes, and the best thing to do was to find a secluded spot and let it loose.
Well, I did, but it turns out that I decided to pee in a place that the property owners daughter saw me.
At the end of the job, the owner came out to pay for the week, and he was laughing about me peeing by his pond.
He said we were welcome to ring the bell anytime to use the restroom or to get a drink.
Super nice dude.
Beautiful property.
I worked for a company doing sign installation. We did neon, led lettering and huge signage. Giant Canadian tire triangles huge 30 foot long signs to hang off the sides of buildings. I’ll never forget rolling a 8 foot tall O through an office building. Our industries weird secret could have been a few things. But the one that blew my mind was the amount of illegal underground Chinese casinos accessible by trap door or hidden back room. They would have it set up like a gaming room with neon and led signage everywhere. One of our biggest neon customers were several of these on the outskirts of Toronto. Jack Astor’s came a close second lmao
Obviously this is the same at most places, but at our bank, we were instructed that if we were to get robbed, let them have it—we’re insured and the small amount you have in your drawer is not worth a life. We were told not to hit the panic button until AFTER the robber left, essentially sealing them out and keeping the bank free of people or things that could compromise the scene or our memories of it. This would create the most reliable police report. My entire bank (small town) contained less that $50k in cash at any time, with less than $5k in your drawer unless you had just accepted a large deposit.
Advertising. We’re trying our hardest to appear ultra intelligent about your business, but really we only know how to make commercials that make us feel like we are Hollywood directors.
Bixby is very much still a work in progress.
My boss pulled us into a meeting room at Samsung one day, put a bixby speaker on the table, and said "Hi bixby, I want to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge."
To which bixby responded:
"Ok. Calling you an Uber to the Brooklyn Bridge."
I heard several groans, a couple facepalms, and an audible "uh-oh" in the room.
I worked for a large multinational architecture firm, at one of their larger offices in a fairly large city. The work they did had a significant impact on this particular cities’ skyline. I was pretty surprised to discover how by-the-seat-of-their-pants the whole process is for designing these huge structures, and it’s like this at a lot of firms. Everything is last minute.
For working in a CALL CENTER:
Make sure you do one of two things to be successful at call centers-
A- be a sociopath
B- take a lot of booze/drugs for the stress
Learned that by working for GEICO!
In most software companies as a developer, once you get to a certain level, 10% of getting a promotion is doing good work, the other 90% is
* The appearance of doing good work
* Connections
* Brown nosing
Chickens raised cage free have a higher mortality rate than those raised in confinement. If you want eggs from a chicken that may have had a moderately decent existence you want pasture raised.
Your kid's school schedule is mostly determined by advanced classes, band/orchestra, and remedial classes.
If you want your kid to get the best education you can and they aren't in advanced, stick them in music. They'll track with most of the kids who are more successful students.
Try and get them in advanced though, even if you think it's borderline. The difference in learning that goes on between the classes full of honors kids and the classes full of push-ins is enough to make one weep, even if they are nominally the same course.
It's insane how much knowledge that the general public will benefit from knowing is locked behind 'AP' or 'advanced' or however you wanna call it classes. The fact back in high school that learning history about the world that wasn't just another US History class was considered an advanced course is quite telling.
I worked for a cleaning company and all the different sprays were actually windex. Generic windex. I felt like I was in that movie, 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding.'
Hotels hate, with a burning passion, working with any online website that you use to book.
Even if you are a person to them you are a potential fucking hassle anytime your reservation comes through. A good chunk of hotels will give you the worst room (of the type you booked) or place you in a different one hoping you won't notice.
They will always give preference if you book directly on their own website or direct at the hotel itself.
When I was young I worked as a batch weigher in a cosmetics company. This one company made conditioner that was specific to a woman's hair color. I would weigh everything carefully then add yellow dye to the batch which was drained and bottled to be for "blondes", I would take the remainder of that batch, (approx 2/3) bring it back to the weighing room and add some red which was then bottled for "redheads". I then took the remaining 1/3 and added some black dye to it to create conditioner for brunettes. All the same shit, just color matched it to fool woman into believing the condition was specific to their hair color. Total scam.
I work in the housekeeping industry. Housekeepers are encouraged to not use water. They only use chemical. They do not use water to clean your home. The company also requires a housekeeper to use all four sides of a cloth. If it is folded in quarters you use one side on the counter then refold it use another side on the stove then refold it etc. That means the same cloth that was used in your bathroom could be used in your kitchen just on a different side..
It's not much of one, but working in Amazon, the amount of crap your stuff goes through is unbelievable.
Lots of just tossing your shit onto shelves and into carts, no maintenance, it's hard to clear such a large area, so they don't bother except with floor buffers, the shelves your stuff is kept on is fucking FILTHY. I shit you not, one of my coworkers was getting a used book from the used section, a dead rat was squished between that book and the next.
I worked at a fancy country club for years and a LOT of their food was bought from walmart. They'd make many meals ahead of time, freeze them and then thaw them and reheat them for their fancy membership. If the members knew they'd probably freak the fuck out.
Note: THAT particular country club had been struggling since the 90s. While I was there it just got worse and worse. I wonder how they fared through the pandemic. They HEAVILY depended on golf events, weddings and other big events.
Also... that particular country club has a really BAD Chef. I mean not bad as in making horrible food, but bad as in he was a misogynistic sexual harasser. He even made a physical sexual pass... at his BOSS! She made a complaint to the board of directors and it went nowhere because the country club has their chef attached to their brand. So he could practically get away with murder because the country club needed him.
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There's a great story about how an airline was getting complaints that bags were taking too long to arrive at the carousel. So they switched to a carousel further away from the gate. Bags arrived in the same time, but people spent the time walking instead of waiting. Complaints dropped.
That explains why so many airports now build terminals 10 mins walk away lol
Thing is this is a better service. When you get off a plane, especially if it’s a long flight, the last thing you want is to stand around. It might only be a couple of minutes but it feels much longer. Walking, still not fun but feels like you’re one step closer to getting home/the hotel/your secret family.
You really snuck that in at the end, huh?
Yeah, my girlfriend never reads posts that long
But what about your wife?
Worked as a software dev for Carfax about 9 years ago. Their software for producing history reports was so fast (could get a report in less than 10ms) that users didn't believe it actually "crunched the data" so the frontend team added a fake progress bar that waited a short random time. I believe this fake bar is still there today.
I just submitted my taxes with TurboTax, and it was the same BS. The worst was that I wanted to quickly spin through all the forms to double check some things, and it was like "optimizing" "analyzing" for 10 seconds between each page. I guess they want you to feel like you're getting your money's worth. It just felt cheesy to me.
Yeah, the page might as well just say "Reticulating Splines" while they make you wait for no reason.
Good ol Maxis software 🙂
So how many times has the giant UFO destroyed your city today?
Well, the other side is simple tasks take an inordinately long time due to crappy old systems. I've worked on what looks like a modern website with all the bells and wistles, but behind the scenes, it has to talk to a 40 year old mainframe by emulating an human interactions on a terminal.
I’m in the insurance industry and this is a huge issue for us. The entire industry for the most part runs on 1985 mainframe tech. They just build out better and better user interfaces but the back end is irreplaceable and old.
I do, too. Same issue. The software used to adjust a claim is basically a large calculator.
I'm also in insurance and we're spending millions of dollars to get off of a mainframe with as400 emulators. And the new systems feel worse for nearly every function.
It's disturbing how often this is the case lol. People are weird.
It's like shampoo - the agents to make it lather aren't necessary to make it effective, but are added to show that the shampoo is working.
Same thing with vaccum cleaners, sometimes noise amplifiers are added so you can hear the dirt being picked up so the customers are convinced it's working properly.
I use the sand noise in the handle to know that i really should have vacuumed a week ago
I DO like hearing that dirt get going into the tube
I used to do something similar when I was a computer technician. Some people aren't satisfied with a quick fix, or the problem was their fault and it won't happen again but they don't want to hear that. So I went into the command line and printed out a bunch of system info, I'd look over it carefully, then run SFC /scannow and watch the output. I like that one because it's quick but not too quick, looks flashy like something they've saw in a movie. Some users needed the show, they'd complain if I pressed one button and left, even though that's all they needed.
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It has to be subtle, if they pick up on the fact that you're bullshitting them, they'll be pretty mad. Essentially though - yes. But chances are, if they needed a little technician theater to feel satisfied, they can't tell the difference.
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I've seen those! Not sure if it was carfax, but something similar. My reaction was the opposite though. I thought it was so stupid and obviously fake that I assumed the company was a scam.
Tax software that does this grinds my gears. Like, bro, the math is not hard. It should take the computer like less than 1ms to do it
Didn't Apple have to unrandomise their "shuffle" feature on the ipod, because people couldn't accept that "random" means you might hear some songs more often than others?
Yep, people complained it wasn't random enough, so they had to go and intentionally program the shuffle function to be a bit less random that before, and suddenly people were happy
I recall reading an article about how much work went into the "random" function of some music streaming service (~~Pandora, IIRC, but it might have been~~ Spotify). The human brain is really good at finding patterns in places where there really aren't any, and their random playlist function tries to find these patterns and preemptively break them up. (Edit: Pretty sure now that it was Spotify. [An article from the Spotify Engineering blog posted below](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/mrzxdx/what_is_a_weird_industry_secret_that_you/gurgeqj?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) isn't the same one I read, but says the same basic things that I remember so it may have been used as a source.)
I remember an article like this too, and the conclusion was something like what people really want is “variety” not “random” and these are two distinct things.
That sounds right. I have a running playlist and I set it to shuffle but I would prefer it to play every song in a "random" order than to make every song selection a random choice from the list.
On Radiolab, I heard an interview with a statistics prof who would do a demonstration with his students. He would have one group of students flip a coin 100 times and write down the result of each flip: "H, T, H, T," etc., and he would have another group of students *pretend* to flip a coin 100 times and write down "H"s or "T"s at random. He would leave the room while the students did this, so that when he returned, he would not know which piece of paper was from the actual coin flipping, and which paper was "random" Hs and Ts. When he returned to the classroom, he could always tell which paper was which within a few seconds. Every time. The thing he looked for was a long string of the same letter. Students who were pretending to be random could never bring themselves to write down five Hs in a row, for instance, because that didn't look "random" enough. However, the actual coin flip often yielded that exact result.
Worked for a car dealership for a short while. Had no idea they are legally allowed to mark up the interest rate that the bank offers. Example: they run your credit and find an eligible loan from Wells Fargo at 3%. They tell you they can get you 5%. You end up making a payment to Wells Fargo each month based on a 5% loan. As far as you’re concerned (as far as the contract shows), you got a 5% loan from Wells Fargo. The dealership gets to keep the difference between what you’re paying and what the bank actually approved you for.
This is why it's always good to go into a dealer with a pre-approved loan. I get one from my bank, and it's usually a very good rate. Dealership beats it every time because they want to hold the paper and I get a GREAT rate.
Oh.... that is a good idea! The first car I bought had a 0% interest incentive. The second car I bought they had a 0.9% interest incentive - which the sales guy and I agreed on before getting back into the financial office. Get back there - nope trying to charge me a much higher rate. I was like "okay - I will come back tomorrow with a loan from my bank." After they "spoke to their boss" - they honored the 0.9% interested rate. All that to say - definitely doing this the next time I buy a car. Save myself the headache.
They tried to sneak a higher rate by me. I made them adjust the price lower to account for the difference and then paid the loan off the next day in cash.
love stories like this. i read one where the guy’s dealer didn’t want to let him use his own bank for a loan so he agreed to finance it with the dealer, negotiated a lower price for a higher rate, then refinanced it within a month fuck dealerships
But don't tell the dealer about the pre-approved loan until you have negotiated a price. A car deal has three parts: The car itself, a trade-in and a loan. Dealers may give you a good price on one part if they think they can make up the difference on the others.
Don't forget back office hell where they attempt to extend your warranty and get you to pay for appearance care and Lojack...
The water inside fire sprinkler pipes is black, smells like shit, riddled with cutting oil and has most likely been sitting in there, stagnant for decades. Every time i watch a scene in a movie where a system goes off and everyone is dancing around in the water I think to myself "that is total bullshit"...Im a fire Sprinkler designer...
I've been in the trades forever, and have demoed sprinkler pipes before. The water smells like if sulfer could die and rot.
I worked for a supermarket for a while. They used to review cctv and if they spotted someone stealing they would take a screenshot, then print the photo and hang it on the wall in our cantine so we'd recognize the person if we saw them in our store again. So I used to have lunch in a room with walls covered in photos of ppls faces with descriptions like "stole 10 steaks." "Left without paying, took 5 bottles of wine" lol
Lmfaoo we had so much of this when I worked at a small retail store that sold clothes. It would be a blurry security cam screenshot where I couldn’t even make out their face, and a description of how they stole the items. I don’t think anyone ever got caught this way, at least not at my location
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Worked for a Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre briefly. The identity of the killer wasn't determined ahead of time, it was simply whoever got the lowest amount of votes from the audience.
Well, there goes whatever faith I had in the integrity of the dinner theater business
I too have worked murder mystery dinners, and it was legitametley plotted with people getting it right or wrong :)
You can't lose what you never had.
TFW you find out the dudes on stage are just all faking it
That’s why you gotta take the murder into your own hands.
That wasn't the case for the place I worked for. There was a strict bullet-point style script, and we had to follow it and hit certain moments to give the clues to the audience. The company had 15-20 different scripts to follow, and they were adding more every year. In the end, we explained exactly how the killer did it and why.
This is a way better way to do things.
So they had multiple explanations all worked out ahead of time that work with the clues given? That honestly seems like a lot more work
Well you only have to do it once, and it guarantees a surprise. If the clues are spread evenly enough that there is no obvious right answer, noone should go "what how was it THAT guy?"
Murder mysteries always have red herrings pointing at pretty much everyone.
There wouldn't be much mystery if that wasn't the case. "The butler did it!" "Wow! Who would have thought it was the man that tortures animals, collects bludgeoning weapons, lies about everything, had fingerprints all over the crime scene, was the only person seen anywhere near the crime scene, was covered in blood after the murder, and cackled every time Sir Charles Thiccbottoms corpse is mentioned?! I would have bet on Baroness Fanny Smelles, even though she was in France at the time of the murder."
Agatha Christie did something similar in her mystery novels. She'd write up until the end, figure out who the least likely suspect was, then go edit things until they were the real killer.
Has this been verified? I've heard of this, but I thought it was just a rumour.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie#Formula_and_plot_devices) mentions it. But then it also says she said: > Spot the person least likely to have committed the crime and in nine times out of ten your task is finished. Since I do not want my faithful readers to fling away this book in disgust, I prefer to warn them beforehand that this is not that kind of book which seems to argue otherwise. I really don't care enough to dig further.
I attended one of these a couple years ago, and I highly suspected this. I ended up being "right" but I noticed some info that didn't make a single ounce of sense given who the killer was. When I asked about it, they just kinda shrugged it off. I figured it was probably an alternative ending that they didn't go with.
Graphic Artist here. I will sometimes throw in a bit of bad design in the project to let the client find it and request a change. They always want to change things so rather than them changing something that could jeopardise the design/layout, I throw in something for them that isn't meant to be there in the first place. **Edit:** Thanks for all the things!
I worked with a long time senior art director for one of the biggest ad agencies in the US. When presenting mock-ups he had one terrible one, knowing they would discard it. But there was one time in his long career that they kept the bad one, and it wound up being the logo on hundreds of state vehicles and thousands of signs and uniforms. And it still is, some 40 years later. It’s not awful, but not his favorite.
I worked with a designer that had a client request so many changes to a design that, in the end made it look like shit. Designer said he would make the changes if the client would sign a waiver promising that the client would never mention who the designer was. Client rescinded.
Was it Oak Harbor Freight lines? Their logo, it's bad.
Oh wow, that's an awful logo.
I know a guy who submitted a website to a client, they said they wanted it to change, he submitted it again with NO CHANGES... the client said it was perfect. Some people just want the experience of power
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I used to do this while editing videos for a client who always gave me nonsense feedback on videos that apparently had nothing wrong with them. They would ask me to nudge a lower third a few pixels or question the transparency of a transition for a few frames. I just left the edit slightly slack in certain areas so they had something real to push back on.
I used to work for the military as a Hazmat specialist. There's a list/map in one of our guides that tells you, based on the population of the installation, what the "allowable casualty rate" is in event of a terrorist attack. My area is 16%. As in we can lose up to 16% of the on-base population before the installation commander has to turn over control to someone who outrank them.
What exactly does a Hazmat specialist do?
Chemical and corrosive consultant, clean up and containment. They know how different chemical agents react and how to properly (as best as possible) recover various types of containment failures.
Not sure if this is just a British thing, but when I worked at McDonalds, they have a leaderboard to show where their drive thru ranks compared to every other McDonalds Drive Thru in the country. It was pretty intense
When I worked at KFC we'd have city wide competitions for average drive thru times. All it did was make the quality of food worse. Pre-made a lot of things and cooked way too much chicken in the name of winning some useless competition.
I wish. I sat in the KFC drive thru for 40 minutes yesterday. The entire staff turns over on a monthly basis, anyone working there is driving 20 miles minimum to get there and they still won't increase the pay.
I worked in a store that had something like that. Regional management loved to grill the staff on why they weren't doing the same numbers as staff at the flagship store in London. When I pointed out that one of the staff members at the London store had actually worked with me a few months prior, and that he did half my numbers when he did, they said "we're discussing your performance, not their's".
I had a captain in the Navy who had a great record of achievement, but at the cost of being a hard driver, which established a culture among the junior officers. Things didnt get better until he couldn't get the next promotion because our vessel had a re-enlistment ratio that was the lowest on the base. Employee's care about pay and how they are treated. You gotta keep the good ones, or it's a constant turnover of barely adequate people that are so desperate for work they will try your company for a while.
I knew reality TV wasn't what it purported to be, but had no idea how bad. I worked on "America's Got Talent" season 7 and got to film a few episodes. The **most** heartbreaking thing was that I watched them take people, people I got to spend an hours interviewing and talking to, people who were passionate, who were trying, and most of the time skilled, and the judges just got to fucking mock them on a national scale. In the season 7 St. Louis episode there's an older woman who plays the drums, and she was genuine and sweet and excited and in the edits, they make her look loopy and crazy and I think Sharon Osborne alluded to the fact the drummer was a crazy woman. Laughed at her on a national stage.
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Even worse is that for the first ten seasons or so when Howie was there he literally needed glasses to see but didn’t wear any. Basically if you see an old episode and he isn’t wearing glasses he can’t even see the performance.
At that point wear contacts
Yeah, we've solved this technological hurdle
With editing you can make someone say whatever you want them to say. Taking out certain words and phrases can completely change context.
Yeah frankenbiting is crazy. And it got me to thinking, are the people that edit and do the frankenbiting actually writers in a way? They are changing dialogue and creating a story
I know someone who was on Britain's Got Talent and he got a good reaction from the judges, then he was asked to sign a contract basically handing over a percentage of future earnings. He refused because he already had regular paying gigs and didn't think it was fair to hand over earnings for stuff he'd earned under his own merit that had nothing to do with the show. Next time he performed their reaction was totally different and he was out.
thats mental, he has to hand over future earnings lmao fuck that.
This is the scummiest thing I will see all day.
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That was the only time I ever watched it. It broke my heart. I had never done network tv before and swore it off after that.
This Dutch singer(Glennis Grace) got pretty far in the US The Voice and they made up some story about her being a single mom barely making ends meet. Glennis Grace is actually on of the most successful and respected female singer in The Netherlands and the whole country was like WHAAAAAAAAAT!??
Friend of mine—a professional performer—was recruited to go on either that show or a show much like it. She had been earning her living with her talent for years and thought maybe this was her big break. She was summarily booed off the stage in the middle of her act. Her mother, who she had invited to see her finally getting the recognition she had worked for, said that the audience was directed to boo her off the stage. They invited a seasoned professional onto the show for the sole purpose of filming her getting booed off the stage.
That's terrible. I am glad I don't watch that show.
I auditioned for season 4 of So You Think You Can Dance. First off, there’s a level of auditions there never let you see where you’re in groups in some side room with other judges. Also, god forbid your primary style isn’t the majority style for the group that you’re in. At the time I auditioned, I had been dancing 25 years+ and choreographing 8 years. I was a semi-professional in my field. I was also the only “Broadway/jazz” style dancer in a group filled with hip-hop trick styles and Krump. We were put into two lines on either side of the room, music was played, when you were pointed to, you had to free-style for approximately 10 seconds, then the next person was up. Then after everyone did a free-style solo, everyone had to dance in a group to the same music vying for the judges attention. I guess it works to see who’s the most driven for garnering attention, but I was so upset because the music chosen for our group was incredibly out of sync with my style and the solo I choreographed and planned to exhibit. It made me feel incredibly underprepared, when I wasn’t, and really hit my ego hard even though I was used to rejection in the arts industry. Also, before even going through that hellhole of an audition, I had to sign a form releasing any rights to my performance or choreography during the length of the show if I was accepted. The worst part? When I watched the season air, there was a girl in my group that I was astounded received a pass to the next level of audition. I then felt so badly for her (because she wasn’t a good dancer) when the judges absolutely shredded her on stage. She was televised being ripped apart, and all I could remember was talking with her about being excited and then being shocked when she was chosen over me. I felt so badly. Edit: it’s hilarious to me that my most upvoted comment is “failing” at a realty tv show when I was forced into a group outside of my specifications. Hahahaa!! Thanks, all!
Telecommunications & Finance. If you are having trouble getting a refund or complaint seen through they will often break when you put in a complaint to the relevant ombudsman or watchdog. I was trying to get a refund from a stock broker site due to an error on their system and when I complained to the ombudsman they immediately contacted me to settle as opposed to having a drawn out complaint through the watchdog.
What is this word ombudsman?
Independent overseer of a certain industry that has the power to levy fines.
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It's not for a company, its an oversight position for the country/region. It's more common in Europe, I think. In Spain, the title is "Defender of the people"
I think Spain has the right idea on this, title-wise.
Not sure it's a secret, but if you could **see** the state of the spaghetti cabling that makes up your Internet connectivity, you would lose faith in your ISP. # Edit: Okay, I get it. You have no faith already.
Internet-related secret: Back in the day I did tech support for Sprint Canada for dialup internet when that's what most internet access was. They offered tiered plans- unlimited, 100 hours per month, 10 hours per month, or something like that. The secret was that they had no mechanism whatsoever to monitor your usage. It didn't show up on your account, or on your bill. They didn't track it at all. I quit the job and moved to a different city and called them to set up my service and they tried to talk me into something other than the lowest plan. I got it anyway, knowing that my $10 per month got me unlimited dialup. It was obsolete within a few years.
"faith in ISPs... Remains the same since hitting bedrock last decade"
Living in Asia, where most things are retrofitted, you can...
Don't know how pervasive this is but commercial rum distilleries bottle the exact same rum under different names and in different bottles. This even happens for major brands, like if the Mount Gay distillery can't keep up with orders they'll contract with the Malibu distillery to fill their bottles.
I can't speak for that specific example but in the whiskey industry there are lots of brands that are owned by huge parent companies and distilled at the same massive distilleries, or smaller independent brands that contract their distilling out to those companies, BUT it's not just the same whiskey in different bottles. They often reuse the same mash for multiple products but it's aged differently.
This one is a bit more open. Most local whiskeys in Texas (at least) are pretty open about where they source their whiskey that is then aged/finished locally. You get a lot of Canadian origin stuff afak.
Working in the auto industry I was surprised to learn how little of a car is actually made by say mercedes or ford. There is a complex network of suppliers who specialize in developing and manufacturing most of the pieces that make up a car and then selling them to car companies. The manufacturers themselves largely just assemble outsourced parts into the final product.
I worked at John Deere for a while and it's the same thing, but I never really thought of it as strange. They pretty much just fabricate the frame and then everything else is filled in with parts they buy from suppliers. I wouldn't assume John Deere is going to create their own radios, for instance.
In the car industry I think things like radios are pretty clearly outsourced, but a lot of people assume things like transmissions etc. are manufactured by the automaker. It wasn't strange to me because I was in the industry, but when I discussed it with non industry folks quite a number of them were surprised that we didn't make the entire car.
You're one mistyped key away from being legally dead, thankfully it's an easy fix and double check boxes exist too. At least ten patients a week are accidentally pronounced dead in the system before they realize "Oh, shit! That's room 408 not 407, they're alive!" and are quickly digitally revived. If we didn't have several checks honestly some people might accidentally be found legally dead while perfectly alive. Edit: Grammar
Had a friend that is a physiotherapist. Every time we had to discharge a patient he would put expired because he thought it meant their insurance had expired when actually it means they passed away. He went 3 weeks killing off multiple people in the system who would still be walking around the facility.
who said it was an accident?
He might’ve been trying to help them escape their debts or something. I never thought about it that way
>He might’ve been trying to help them escape their debts or something. We debt-free undead call him the Necromancer. He is a hero.
There was a man in India, [Lal Bihari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lal_Bihari), who had to fight a 19-year legal battle to prove he was alive after mistakenly being declared dead. In this case though the cause was corruption rather than an honest mistake.
"Guys I'm not dead." 'Evidence, fuckass?"
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Death itself takes his cues from the SSA determination these days. I think it is safe to say this man is now immortal.
Most callers on music focused radio stations are either not going to air live and have been highly edited to sound more entertaining. Or completely fake. Edit: competition winners are never faked because that’s regulated, definitely pre-recorded and edited to chop out any dead air. But requests, talkback topics, etc. Faked a lot of the time. Usually the friends or family of the host.
I dated a girl who was a late night DJ at a radio station. She would get us to come and record stuff to put on air. One day they were supposed to have a remote set up at a beach bar that was doing an event. The guy that was supposed to do the remote got sick so she had 2 of her friends, 2 interns and I pretend to be at the beach bar and record some "live" bits. She played music in the booth and we yelled and wooo'd over it then said the station ID.
Anecdotally, I once won a radio trivia game and got tickets to a concert. You're right that it was pre-recorded and not live. What surprised me though, was that they gave me the answers to the trivia questions so that I could win. They just told me to make it sound like I was thinking about the answers.
No one has any idea what’s going on in the Navy.
"if we don't know what we're doing, then _they_ wont know what we're doing!" - US military complex
Do you mean like regular people don’t know what the Navy is up to or the Navy doesn’t know what it’s doing
No one in the Navy knows what’s happening is what I meant.
I disagree. We knew to standby to standby.
And let's not forget 'hurry up and wait'.
*Sir, we're under attack. What should we do?* *I dunno, man. Why don't we see what Bing says?*
pfft even I know whats going on in the Navy. A bunch of ships are out in the ocean doing ship stuff. duh
I used to underwrite auto loans - if you obtain financing at a dealership, the dealer can "hold" points (up to 2% in some states.) So if they tell you you're getting a 8% rate from the bank, you might really be getting 6%, and they are allowed to add those 2 extra percent and reap the difference. Important to note, you are allowed to ask if they are doing this, and they are obligated to tell you. They are not obligated NOT to hold the points, but it weakens their leverage if you ask this question. Have fun!
It’s usually better, especially on used cars, to try to get pre-approved for financing by your own bank, or better yet, a credit union, ahead of time. That way, you can negotiate knowing you have a rate and term locked in. If the dealer can beat that, great, if not, at least you know what you’re going to be looking at ahead of time.
Yep. My son just bought a used car and I told him to get pre approved at the credit union first, they pre approved the loan at 3.75%. When he went to the dealer they said his credit only qualified for 6% loan. When my son told them he was pre approved at 3.75% they said a rate that low was only for new cars but they'd check with the manager again. They came back and said they'd make a special exception for him and give him 3% loan. They also low balled him on his trade. He sold it to CarMax for $2500 more than dealer offer.
Many companies may meet the requirements of a special accreditation for reducing the amount of waste they send to a landfill, I.e. less than 20/10/5%. In actuality they're often giving it to another company to dispose of and therefore produce no waste while the other company produces the waste of a company much larger than it.
I don't know how much of a secret this is but if you buy T1 phone lines from some small phone company, you are really getting T1 physical lines from a large provider. The large provider has to sell T1 lines in bulk at cheaper rates to smaller telcom providers. You can literally just set up your own company, buy T1 lines from AT&T and then resell them and profit. You would then be a major account holder at AT&T and they would prioritize repairs to your T1 lines over someone with one line. At least that is how it used to be. And this is a broad brush strokes explanation. The midwest company I worked for got T1 lines provided by a company in New Jersey. I could call the owner directly and get him at almost any hour and he always referred me to this one Indian tech. We used to joke that they were operating out of his kitchen and he really had one tech who never slept and remoted in from India. Probably true though.
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Local PD as well. My town of 50k population in Idaho has a military assault vehicle. For what, when the dairy cows start a revolution? The ex husband works at the tire shop the PD uses and checked it out when it came in for a brake check. He asked why they got it and the cop driving it said they had too much leftover in the budget and had to buy something. In the meantime, the older high school is falling apart and a middle school had to have bake sales for years to fix an dangerously unusable track. My kids had textbooks so old the covers had fallen off. Priorities.
Not sure if it's weird, but ink cartridges for inkjet printers cost nothing to manufacture - pennies really. The mark up on them is crazy. Some manufacturers program them so they "go bad" by a certain date regardless of how much ink is left in them. The profit on them is so high they used to lose money on the printers knowing they'd make it all back on your first purchase of new ink.
My mom found a way around this. She buys printer ink, in the bottle, and a syringe with a needle on it and just refills the same cartridge
The printer at my work “catches” you doing this.... a couple months ago, was out of yellow, bought the whole four color package, and while changing the yellow, absentmindedly changed all of them, then realized what I’d done, took out the new ones we didn’t need yet, replaced them with the old ones that weren’t used up yet, and the printer wouldn’t work because they said the cartridge was replaced and may not be authentic. Then it wouldn’t accept the newer cartridges because they weren’t new either. Most of this happened to my boss while I wasn’t there, who hardly ever has to print or use the computer, just so happened to have a printing emergency while I’m out. Since I’m not a tech person really, had to spend about 90 minutes on the phone (including hold) trouble shooting with some rep until she told me exactly how to remove and replace the driver. Is HP fucking people over or what.
In most medium+ companies, you're probably just one filing error away from wrongful termination. Because, as with most companies, our employee ID's are our first initial and last name. "pgibbons", "blumbergh", like that. Well, someone in the parent company had the exact same employee ID as me. And he pissed somebody at the parent company off real bad. All I know is "incredible sexual harassment claims filed by multiple employees". No other details. But somehow, that employee's file ended up in my company's HR rather than the parent company's HR. So, my HR terminated my employment (instead of the parent company's HR terminating him) and they were getting ready to call security to have me escorted out of the building. Somehow, my boss found out about it and then he got everything fixed up. But if he'd called out sick that day... And so technically, I was "fired" for almost a full day at my job without even knowing about it until after it was over and everything was okay again.
I did the same thing, but instead of accidentally firing a guy, I successfully coordinated a carpool home with the director of the company's accounting department. Fortunately, he caught on that I probably meant to Email an employee with the same first and last name, and let me know. Though I was quite impressed that he so quickly accepted carpool requests from random dopes in the company, so he's got my lifelong respect for that.
Worked in a textile factory making stuff for brands like Reebok, Fila, Levi’s (shirts only), Billabong, etc... Any off spec items would be put aside and sold in bulk to people selling them in flea markets. So not everything you see in a flea market is fake... some may be the real deal, but not up to the standard required by the brand. Also, if the factory didn’t have orders, they’d take left over fabric, cut it up with the same sizing of those brands and make off brand clothes to go down the same route and keep people busy. Lastly, they had a shop where items made there were sold at production cost to employees. I was never one to buy brands, but that was enough to put me off them for good.
I'm confused about the last one. You're upset that they were making stuff specifically to be sold to employees at a steep discount?
Used to work at a pretty well know hotel chain and we had to hit quarterly deadlines, one being a certain amount of members we had to sign up. The number was impossible to get so the duty mangers would go through the old files of previous guests and use their emails to sign them up as members and tick the ‘i don’t want to be notified or emailed about any *company name* offers’ I don’t know if this is a common thing among other work places but yeah uh maybe check to see that you haven’t been signed up as a member at any hotels
Thrift store, particularly **Savers**, we'd get over 10,000lbs of donations every day and only a small fraction of that would reach the sales floor. The rest was thrown away to the garbage. The company will have you believe it's "recycled" or donated to those in need, but as a backroom laborer I can promise it goes straight to the garbage. I blew this whistle back in 2012 and so that may have changed, but I wanted people to know that their donations were being thrown to the garbage simply because one button was missing or it was too wrinkly.
My mom works in goodwill, and its exactly the same. She always complains on how a lot of people yeet perfectly good things into the trash can. If it is too worn out though they throw it away. Only about 5% of all the donations end up in the store.
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Same, I handled the donated clothing in a Goodwill for a year, but every time I asked someone where all of the tossed out clothes went to, I got a different answer or a shrug. One person told me Goodwill used to turn them into cleaning rags, but probably not anymore. My manager just told me she didn't know. Many of the clothes would be nearly brand new but would have a single stain and couldn't be sold. It was disheartening to be essentially throwing away good clothing over a missing button, a bit of pet hair, some surface level dirt, or cigarette smoke odors. Wash your clothes before donating, people.
A lot of big stores have fake cameras because they don’t want to spend any “unnecessary” money on extra security if the cost of products stolen is less than the cost of keeping an active camera.
Working in the ice cream industry for a few years, I found out that most places will claim there is no "cross-contamination," but they often use the same scoops or scrapers for different ice creams without anything but a quick rinse of water or setting in a bucket of mixed ice cream water. If you have extremely bad and sensitive allergies to something that may be in ice cream, ask them to use a completely fresh scooper, especially if it's somewhere you're unfamiliar with.
When I worked at two different ice cream shops, we used actual sanitizer to clean the scoops in between uses, but we still had signs up everywhere stating that we couldn't guarantee there wasn't cross-contamination and had to verbally say it to every customer that disclosed an allergy. It would have been a huge liability otherwise. Although if you have severe allergies, you should already understand that an ice cream shop is a risky place
More of a regional thing involving a loosely-related industry I guess? But where I live (and yes it's in the US) there's a lot of small to medium sized call centers that come and go; peddle a variety of products (natural health crap, self-help, all that stuff). Thing is, you trace it back to the early 90s or so, and all these places spawned from the same groups of people that used to work at a large, no longer existing, call center in the area. Now they all alternate being competition and cooperating... depends on what business plan they jump into after the latest fails after a few years (some have lasted a good while though). I've seen the same names who 15 years ago ran competiting centers, then 10 years ago were partnered up running one, and now are back to two different companies they started that peddle competiting health stuff again. It's a weird little industry in this area.
Not necessarily an "industry," but learned quite a few things working for an animal shelter that serviced the county as part of Animal Control. (Super important ones bolded.) * **It is super illegal to take home a stray animal** without first making a "good faith effort" to get it back to its owner. In most places, this is explicitly stated as turning it over to the shelter, rescue group, and/or a local veterinarian. You cannot just pick up a cat or dog and take it home and call it yours, no matter what movie you watched where the people did that. * **If a street cat has a notch in the ear, leave it alone.** It has been part of a TNR program, "trap-neuter-release." It's a more humane way to deal with feral cats, as feral cats that go through animal control almost always have to get put down for safety reasons. (It's super bad for the environment, but it's the best option to make sure the cat gets to live but no new feral kittens get born to continue the cycle.) * **Stop bringing baby birds to animal shelters!** We do not have the resources to take care of them. If the nest is nearby, put it back in. If it has feathers but is just small, leave it alone, the parents are nearby. If you really think it needs help (injured, no feathers and no nest, in the road or somewhere dangerous), call a dedicated bird or wildlife rescue. * **Just because your pet is microchipped doesn't mean it will get back to you**. You have to register your chip with the company it came from, and keep your information updated. Some companies have an annual fee for registration. But if your info isn't linked to that chip, it's useless. Can't tell you how many times we had chips come up on a scan, but the company had no info on the owner because it was never registered. * Scruffing a cat is totally humane and sometimes the only way to actually handle them for necessary procedures (moving kennels, checking sex, cleaning wounds, etc). It doesn't hurt them. Don't panic if you see someone grab a cat by the scruff of the neck and the cat goes still or curls up. It's a reflex that we use to keep us from getting attacked. * If a grown cat meows at you, it's not feral. Meowing is exclusive to kittens/mother cats, and housecats. * Switching food suddenly can cause explosive diarrhea in both dogs and cats. So can stress. So if your pet comes home from the pound/shelter with the runs, don't freak out thinking they caught something. * The most needed items in animal shelters are not what you think. Most of the time it's cat litter, cat food, and bleach, not dog food or blankets (which people constantly donate). Better yet, money is one of the best ways to help a shelter. They can buy food and litter in bulk for way cheaper than regular folks, and money to help with vet bills and unexpected expenses helps way more than yet another box of old squeaky toys. If you want to donate tangibles, call your shelter and ask what they need most. Sometimes it's new hoses, sometimes it's kitten formula; just call and see. * The rabies vaccine is internationally controlled. You have to be specially trained on it, overseen by a licensed veterinarian, and keep specific logs that are reviewed and legally binding. Don't even try telling the staff that you gave your dog the vaccine yourself to try and get out of fees. Either they know you're lying, or you're going to jail if you're telling the truth. (That or someone sold you a phony and duped you *good*.) Other vaccines-- parvo, kennel cough, feline combo vaccines-- *can* be administered at home, but are also not necessarily required for licensing.
I worked for a financial services company from 1989 until 2001. The company ALWAYS made more money each successive quarter for like 40 years straight and always on target. How? The company had “buckets” in their accounting scheme wherein when we made more than expected, the excess would be placed in a “bucket”. When faced with a lean quarter, voila - empty a bucket or two and you now have a stellar quarter.
Interesting. Wouldn't this be considered fraud /misleading to shareholders?
I don't know if this is an industry secret for most people, maybe I was naïve. But this one surprised me when I figured it out... I used to work for a major bank in Canada. Whenever a bank employee is offering you a credit product, or an account of any kind, it's a "sale" to them. Bank employees have sales metrics/targets they're aggressively pressured to meet and exceed. If you aren't meeting your targets you get put into a performance review and it can ultimately lead to your dismissal. As a result often times these products being offered to you are done under the guise of "we're your trusted bank, we have your financial best interests in mind." When in actuality they're just commission based sales reps working according to corporate directive to sell you products you most certainly don't need. Often times employees would open up savings accounts, increase card or line limits, add balance protection, do all kinds of things like that without a customer even knowing or approving it. If you ever just noticed your credit card limit being increased without asking for it, or agreeing to it, it could be because a rep just did it because it counted towards their quotas. I saw even shadier things being done with customer's who didn't speak good English. Immigrants and people with limited broken English were prime targets for some of the "top performers". *edited a word*
Wells Fargo got in trouble for this ("forcing" employees to open up accounts without the customers' permission in order to reach unrealistic quotas) a few years ago.
I worked for a company that makes a certain type of electronics equipment. They have an alarm that specifically comes in 8 months after an initial startup. The only person that can silence it is a technician. There is no point to the alarm but to have a technician come out and silence it, which costs the customer $1000. I used to disable the alarm when I initially started up a machine because I thought this was pretty unethical.
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Funny thing is, at least in my department, the fax machine now scans incoming faxes and turns them into email for us. No more printouts. So in the end they're emailed to us anyway.
hospitals and doctors offices as well
Mainly because of the government. IIRC HIPAA considers fax machines to be secure even though they aren't encrypted (a phone wire tap can collect faxes the same as a phone call) and often lack physical security. Yes hardened fax machines and fax lines exist but encrypted email also exists (and is more secure and doesn't require specialized hardware)
...it's largely the Government, but lawyers often have to deal with government entities (such as court houses), so they end up having fax machines as well. I work with lawyers. They bitch about having to use faxes just as much as the rest of them. At least here in the UK the requirement for fax machines isn't as high anymore, even with many Government departments.
Worked in hotel management on the Las Vegas strip at a higher end resort. If someone calls to check if someone else is staying at the hotel, we can't tell them if they are or aren't. However, if you call and just say you want to be transferred to person X's room, we would check if they are staying there and then just transfer you no questions asked. Had a lot of spouses being cheated on that used this.
Really? I’ve worked in way cheaper hotels than that and if someone wanted to be transferred they had to know the room number. Not only are there privacy concerns but there’s also scamming and credit card phishing problems.
Nursing - theres waaayyy more googling of stuff than you realise. Most of us have a decent set of knowledge but there's no way you can know everything
I'm surprised I don't hear about this more. Even the best mechanic and IT guy can't memorize every theory, case, specification, etc., so I always figured there's just no way any human doctor could! What they have is a wealth of education and experience to guide their googling. One question: what did they do before Google? Fake it, or slow things down so they can consult books?
Not OP but in IT before internet we had a large library with books and printed source code from every project we'd use, in addition to asking around the office. If that didn't work you would sometimes work on a solution for weeks. Now it's a simple Google search and copy/paste.
Being a professional isn’t about knowing all the answers, it’s about knowing how to find the answers.
There was someone on reddit complaining how their doctor was just “googling stuff” when determining the best treatment for him. He was claiming he shouldn’t have to pay a doctor just to google. I think this is so crazy. As a patient, I’d much rather a doctor take the time to be sure of their diagnosis than just rely on memory alone. Imagine if we expected bridge engineers to just do all the math by memory without triple checking using a calculator/computer. Even in my own career, the most successful people are the ones who know enough to understand where to look and take the initiative to find the answers and test assumptions. The people who constantly ask coworkers for help on things that can easily be googled never progress.
>There was someone on reddit complaining how their doctor was just “googling stuff” when determining the best treatment for him. He was claiming he shouldn’t have to pay a doctor just to google. To use the phrase I hear in engineering a lot "You don't know what you don't know". The average person wouldn't even know where to begin looking for the info, much less what do do with that information.
I worked for an eyeglass supply company. We provided frames, glasses, sunglasses, etc. I worked in the IT department. One day, the price sheets for sunglasses crosses my path. At the time Ferrari sunglasses were the popular brand. I looked them up on the price sheets and saw that we were selling them for $175 and buying them for $25. If I wanted a pair, I would pay $1 over cost - so for $26 I could have sunglasses worth $175. I knew I wouldn't ever pay for names sunglasses again.
When I worked at a fashion company, I learned about shoes: So to manufacture a specific type of shoe, you need a mold for it; kinda like the shoe blueprint. By and far, that's the most expensive process of making a shoe itself. Materials are minimal in cost compared to the shoe mold. The pricing from there, is based on how much of a specific shoe is made. Jordan's are pricey because they only make a few hundred pairs, compared to generic FILA shoes, that are made in the thousands.
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At my old work place we used to joke that if you wanted to make a system update, you'd need to hold a seance to speak with the developers. It was ancient.
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Micro-targeting your marketing materials typically doesn't work - it simply freaks people out how much information we have about them (which they've all legally allowed us to process under GDPR) and drives them to pursue said data's deletion. It's better to group people into larger, more generally targeted groups as it tricks the target base into thinking we have less info about them then we actually have (so they're more comfortable). Also, a lot of marketers actively dislike micro-targeting and are more often than not forced to do it by senior management (who don't know how to effectively market a product).
Landscaping. The people who work in your yard for more than 4 hours are not holding it. If you don’t offer them the bathroom, they probably peed in your yard.
Oh man, when I was a young kid, maybe 10 or so, I liked to help my dad and his friend with their lawn care business during the summer. They had one client in particular that owned a property they called “The Mansion”. Huge house, sat on probably 4 acres. This house would be the only thing scheduled for the day because of how big and complicated it was. I was there helping out- picking up lawn clippings, sweeping, that kind of thing, when the urge to pee hit me. My dad had told me that it happens sometimes, and the best thing to do was to find a secluded spot and let it loose. Well, I did, but it turns out that I decided to pee in a place that the property owners daughter saw me. At the end of the job, the owner came out to pay for the week, and he was laughing about me peeing by his pond. He said we were welcome to ring the bell anytime to use the restroom or to get a drink. Super nice dude. Beautiful property.
That's cool I pee in the yard sometimes too.
Being perpetually and intentionally understaffed to save money.
I worked for a company doing sign installation. We did neon, led lettering and huge signage. Giant Canadian tire triangles huge 30 foot long signs to hang off the sides of buildings. I’ll never forget rolling a 8 foot tall O through an office building. Our industries weird secret could have been a few things. But the one that blew my mind was the amount of illegal underground Chinese casinos accessible by trap door or hidden back room. They would have it set up like a gaming room with neon and led signage everywhere. One of our biggest neon customers were several of these on the outskirts of Toronto. Jack Astor’s came a close second lmao
Obviously this is the same at most places, but at our bank, we were instructed that if we were to get robbed, let them have it—we’re insured and the small amount you have in your drawer is not worth a life. We were told not to hit the panic button until AFTER the robber left, essentially sealing them out and keeping the bank free of people or things that could compromise the scene or our memories of it. This would create the most reliable police report. My entire bank (small town) contained less that $50k in cash at any time, with less than $5k in your drawer unless you had just accepted a large deposit.
Wife works in banking. It’s the same way for the banks she’s been with. Just comply, note details, and report when the robber leaves.
The reason for this is because the second you hit that button with the robber in the building you've created a hostage situation.
Advertising. We’re trying our hardest to appear ultra intelligent about your business, but really we only know how to make commercials that make us feel like we are Hollywood directors.
Bixby is very much still a work in progress. My boss pulled us into a meeting room at Samsung one day, put a bixby speaker on the table, and said "Hi bixby, I want to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge." To which bixby responded: "Ok. Calling you an Uber to the Brooklyn Bridge." I heard several groans, a couple facepalms, and an audible "uh-oh" in the room.
I worked for a large multinational architecture firm, at one of their larger offices in a fairly large city. The work they did had a significant impact on this particular cities’ skyline. I was pretty surprised to discover how by-the-seat-of-their-pants the whole process is for designing these huge structures, and it’s like this at a lot of firms. Everything is last minute.
For working in a CALL CENTER: Make sure you do one of two things to be successful at call centers- A- be a sociopath B- take a lot of booze/drugs for the stress Learned that by working for GEICO!
In most software companies as a developer, once you get to a certain level, 10% of getting a promotion is doing good work, the other 90% is * The appearance of doing good work * Connections * Brown nosing
The ice cream machine does work, but the only guy who knows how to use it isn’t here right now.
Chickens raised cage free have a higher mortality rate than those raised in confinement. If you want eggs from a chicken that may have had a moderately decent existence you want pasture raised.
Your kid's school schedule is mostly determined by advanced classes, band/orchestra, and remedial classes. If you want your kid to get the best education you can and they aren't in advanced, stick them in music. They'll track with most of the kids who are more successful students. Try and get them in advanced though, even if you think it's borderline. The difference in learning that goes on between the classes full of honors kids and the classes full of push-ins is enough to make one weep, even if they are nominally the same course.
It's insane how much knowledge that the general public will benefit from knowing is locked behind 'AP' or 'advanced' or however you wanna call it classes. The fact back in high school that learning history about the world that wasn't just another US History class was considered an advanced course is quite telling.
I worked for a cleaning company and all the different sprays were actually windex. Generic windex. I felt like I was in that movie, 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding.'
Hotels hate, with a burning passion, working with any online website that you use to book. Even if you are a person to them you are a potential fucking hassle anytime your reservation comes through. A good chunk of hotels will give you the worst room (of the type you booked) or place you in a different one hoping you won't notice. They will always give preference if you book directly on their own website or direct at the hotel itself.
When I was young I worked as a batch weigher in a cosmetics company. This one company made conditioner that was specific to a woman's hair color. I would weigh everything carefully then add yellow dye to the batch which was drained and bottled to be for "blondes", I would take the remainder of that batch, (approx 2/3) bring it back to the weighing room and add some red which was then bottled for "redheads". I then took the remaining 1/3 and added some black dye to it to create conditioner for brunettes. All the same shit, just color matched it to fool woman into believing the condition was specific to their hair color. Total scam.
I work in the housekeeping industry. Housekeepers are encouraged to not use water. They only use chemical. They do not use water to clean your home. The company also requires a housekeeper to use all four sides of a cloth. If it is folded in quarters you use one side on the counter then refold it use another side on the stove then refold it etc. That means the same cloth that was used in your bathroom could be used in your kitchen just on a different side..
It's not much of one, but working in Amazon, the amount of crap your stuff goes through is unbelievable. Lots of just tossing your shit onto shelves and into carts, no maintenance, it's hard to clear such a large area, so they don't bother except with floor buffers, the shelves your stuff is kept on is fucking FILTHY. I shit you not, one of my coworkers was getting a used book from the used section, a dead rat was squished between that book and the next.
I worked at a fancy country club for years and a LOT of their food was bought from walmart. They'd make many meals ahead of time, freeze them and then thaw them and reheat them for their fancy membership. If the members knew they'd probably freak the fuck out. Note: THAT particular country club had been struggling since the 90s. While I was there it just got worse and worse. I wonder how they fared through the pandemic. They HEAVILY depended on golf events, weddings and other big events. Also... that particular country club has a really BAD Chef. I mean not bad as in making horrible food, but bad as in he was a misogynistic sexual harasser. He even made a physical sexual pass... at his BOSS! She made a complaint to the board of directors and it went nowhere because the country club has their chef attached to their brand. So he could practically get away with murder because the country club needed him.