Let’s face it—almost every profession has a few secrets that the rest of the world would be surprised to find out. When faced with challenges, some businesses may decide to take the easy way out, which often leads to enforcing bad practices. And there’s no way of knowing about them… unless you’re a part of it.

Thousands of workers decided to share their stories on the r/AskReddit page. One after another, members spilled their industry secrets that companies keep from the general public. From paramedics and teachers to skincare specialists and SPA workers, these people did not pass the opportunity to share their knowledge.

As people say, the more you know, the more you’ll understand, so make sure to read these stories below, upvote your favorites and let us know what you think!

#1

Volunteer paramedic ... when we find an old person who clearly has been with no pulse for hours we close the doors, shut relatives out and pretend to do something to avoid useless legal action.

Image credits: pantograph23

#2

We didn't meet the contractual obligations to entirely destroy the laptops Google sent to us for decommissioning. We shredded the HDDs and sold the laptops for a profit.

Couldn't do s**t about the servers though, Google branding all over them

Image credits: septic_tongue

#3

I worked at UPS ages ago. The word "FRAGILE" on a box meant nothing to us, so make sure you pack your stuff properly.

Image credits: Kevoguy

#4

Idk the legality of this but it always seemed wierd. But we would get bags of another company's product (animal premix) and manually transfer that product into a bag of our own. We would give these products lot codes of our own and sell them to customers.

Image credits: DrMadlove

#5

Viagogo are just corrupt, straight up. Not a little thing here and there, they are just a criminal company.

They will take your money for tickets even if they have none of those tickets, assuming they will eventually have tickets to sell you. If they don't get them, you get the ticket money back. An example of this was when a guy in the UK bought tickets to the Superbowl in 2013, booked his air travel, flew to the states, booked his accommodation, was staying in a hotel he paid for, and was calling us every 15 minutes to ask where his tickets were. We were told to lie to him and say someone will meet him at the stadium. We let him know 30 minutes before the game started that he wouldn't be receiving any tickets. Viagogo refund the ticket cost, but the travel, accommodation and time wasted? Nothing at all. And they never had the tickets.

Same for festivals: I took loads (LOADS) of calls from people who were told to get to the middle of the wilderness in Eastern Europe for a dance festival, having booked time off work and prepared for a 5 day festival. When they got there they were told there were never any tickets. Just go home, write off the time off, write of the ticket costs, write off the transport, write of the preparation and deal with feeling s**tty for 5 days because they were ripped off by a company...except it isn;t that simple, because now they are in the middle of a field in Eastern Europe for 5 days, the bus that took them there has gone and they have no admittance to the festival...so essentially Viagogo were responsible for just dumping around 100 people in a field in eastern europe with no provisions and no way of getting back.

Far from discouraging the practice, they LOVE scalpers and give them preferential treatment ('super sellers'). They get discounts, skip phone queues, and get a higher price for tickets than honest customers with a ticket to sell.

If an event is coming up soon, the seller can meet you at the venue to pass the ticket over. What this means is if you show up and the seller isn't there for whatever reason (illness, decided to use ticket themselves, just can't be arsed etc.), you have paid and have no proof they did not meet you. Byebye money.

If you buy a ticket from Viagogo, I would honestly say you have a 40-45% chance of getting it.

Image credits: reddit

#6

Cleaning up animals after an oil spill is feel good propaganda to make the public think they are helping. 90% of those animals will be dead within a few days or weeks. They've ingested enough of the oil that they are moving corpses, they (and you mr. nice person with a bottle of Dawn dish soap)just don't know it yet.

Real oil spill work is done by trained professional crews, not volunteers. If you ever tried to help, you were given busy work to keep you out of the way.

Image credits: Skalite4

#7

A "high class" spa I worked at used epsom salts and vegetable oil for their $65 salt scrubs.

Image credits: captnfirepants

#8

I worked at a car dealership. The $1200 car care system that we would discount to $900 was “applied” with about 15 squirts of a spray bottle. Many times I’d hang out with the detail guys so the customer wouldn’t get suspicious at a quick turnaround.

Image credits: DirtynDurham

#9

Airline pilot here.
You know those blankets that we give you on the flight? The airline never washes them. Ever. We just shake them out and shrink wrap them for a later flight. Every once in a while we toss one that's unusable.

Image credits: _JackStraw_

#10

Applebees; on the tabletop computers, go to "Extras" and tap and hold the little white space on the top left of the screen. When it gives a password prompt, it's 4321. Lets you change the table numbers or play games for free.

Image credits: Atrrophy

#11

Our secret sauce is just Thousand Island dressing.

Image credits: PrettySureISharted

#12

Wash your fruits and vegetables very thoroughly a lot of them will end up being scooped off a disgusting warehouse floor and put back in the package after falling out

Image credits: x740xWastedx

#13

It has been several years, but when I worked at certain satellite tv company, they had a value system for customers.

You are valued at 1-5 stars, based on how much you spend, and how much they value you as a customer. If you are are a higher star value, they will do basically anything to keep you. You will get a ton of services and equipment for free, and they will bend over backwards to keep you from cancelling.

If you are a 1 or 2 star, they don't give a s**t. Especially 1 stars, because it usually means that you are late all the time, or that you don't spend very much. If you call in asking for deals or credits, they won't give it to you. If you threaten to cancel, no one cares.

Also, there are special phone lines for people they consider "VIPS". They never have to wait on hold, and only special employees are allowed to take the phone calls.

Image credits: mermaidsthrowaway

#14

I used to work in skincare: None of the products cost more than $2 to manufacture, but would retail at anything from $20 to $150 per product.

Always amazed me how much people would shell out for anything with volcanic clay or snake venom cream

Image credits: DWeb338

#15

Former Geek Squad here - most of the people that work there, aren't really technical at all. We usually just walk it over to a bench, hook it up to a corporate VLAN and run just run some software. If there are real issues - people remotely connect from India or somewhere else.

We are basically just salesmen with a clip on tie.

Image credits: Moots_point

#16

Wal-Mart would make us work past our shift and then force us to clock in late the next night to avoid OT. The managers got so paranoid about OT that they started accusing us of going over 40. I was docked 4 hours when I had no overtime and had to use my PTO to get back to 40.

Edit for clarification on my state. This was in 2012 and I live in Oklahoma. The labor board is a f**king joke and the keep you from going over your hours happened at two stores I worked at. Both stores also did shady s**t like having maintenance work both cleaning and stocking. I had to stock the first half of the night and clean five bathrooms the last half and had to get them all cleaned before 7.

I will never work for Wal-Mart again and I warn my friends not to work for them.

Image credits: reddit

#17

I used to work for a major card service company, and before the law changed if you bought a gift card to say a red lobster and didn't use it for like say a year. It was a distinct posibility that the entire value of that card would be gone due to monthly service charges. So picture me the guy trying to explain to the guy how his 50$ gift card was worth nothing, and you can imagine how that goes. Weirdly enough I ended up loving that job the most due to other types of accounts I used to handle. That was one of the worst parts of my job honestly.

Image credits: Memetic1

#18

I used to work for a large smart phone company.

During development, we used to go through phases, Engineering Verification testing stage, Design Verification Test, Production Verification Test, and finally Mass Production. Each stage was meant to have checkpoints in order to ensure that the final product was built with good quality and any known bugs would be able to ironed out before the product launch. Any bug that was not resolved would potentially have the ability to delay the launch.

Except that there is a thing called Waivers. So the PM could request that certain bugs be granted a waiver delaying the fix of the problem to a later date. No big deal, every project has a few minor bugs, right?

For each stage there would be hundreds of waivers. Some would be minor, to be fair, but sometimes they were definitely not minor.

I will never, ever, buy an electronic device in the first 3 months of mass production. Wait for the second wave of production, the quality of the product increases ten-fold.

Image credits: Project2r

#19

Worked for a private school. Grades were definitely bought. We were discouraged to give anything lower than a B. Had one principal that told a teacher to take the final for a student that went on summer vacation early. She called it a shadow final and said nonchalantly that it's no big deal, just answer how you think the student would answer.

This school is expensive, and these kids go on to fancy colleges because of these grades.

Image credits: dwarvenmonk

#20

Apple: All techs and “Genius” employees are fully aware of wide-spread issues well before they are officially released to the public. They are NEVER discussed at the morning staff meetings with management present but are ALWAYS a source of discussion in the 3:00-3:30 tech staff meeting.
For example: It got to a point where I would replace an iPhone 6+ for the “display” issue and sometimes had to replace the replacement 2-3 times while the customer was waiting. It was embarrassing and frustrating that the official release from the company was that the issue was caused by customer misuse. We all knew the truth and the techs with any sort of conscience would bend over backwards to do what we could to right the wrongs. That is one of several manufacturing issues masked as user error or misuse that we tried to work around.

Image credits: MrFrankReynolds

#21

Most sushi places will use the same distributor and have the same quality of seafood.

The difference between a fancy sushi place and a hole in the wall is pretty much the environment, and the price.

Image credits: DayGloMagic

#22

I worked at Whole Foods. Your cookies and bread were heated in store, not baked. Oh. And in AM meetings, you're referred to as "basket size", not customers.

Image credits: sauerpatchkid

#23

Fred Meyer (owned by Kroger) throws away literally tons of edible produce, deli and bakery food every day at individual stores. Mainly because it doesn’t look picture perfect. Most wasteful company I’ve even seen. We have homeless people stealing food everyday and being prosecuted when we could just give them the food. But no,It all goes to the garbage compactor.

#24

I used to work in a factory that produced pillows. Let me be the first to tell you, some nasty stuff goes into those pillows. Tell me, have you ever seen those pillows labeled "Memory Foam Cluster"? Do yourself a favor, and avoid them like the plague. What we do is, there is a bale of old, recycled memory foam brought behind the grinder. This bale consists of everything from old mattresses and pillows, to those cooling memory foam pillows. Except they are all old and dirty. We cut the bigger pieces into more manageable bits and toss it into a grinder that chops the foam into small, fine cubes. These cubes are stored in a large tank, and then blown into an empty pillow casing using pneumatic pressure. Now we made good pillows too, but for the love of god, stay away from anything labeled "cluster."

#25

Used to work in a business hotel. If You get scrambled eggs on sunday morning, You can be 100% sure it's left over from friday morning.

Image credits: Ask_me_if_i_do_yoga

#26

If you ever hear "Code Brown" over the walkie talkies at Target, it means they found s**t on some of the clothes in softlines.

EDIT: Most of the time, it was people coming in and trying on clothes while not wearing any underwear. It sounds disgusting. and thats because it was. Few times someone would just dump in the changing room, but most of the time its because after they tried on the clothes and decided they didn't want it, they would give it back to the employee at the counter to put back, and thats where the doodoo was found.

Image credits: Sharkbyte12

#27

When purchasing items on the internet (especially airline tickets), use incognito mode on your browser.

We use your own cookies against you: raising the price on tickets the more times you check, as you shop around for better deals. That way you'll think the price is going up or that seats are being actively sold - thus increasing your urgency to buy, and punishing you for trying to get a good deal.

Image credits: Valendr0s

#28

Red Cross makes a ridiculous amount of money selling plasma to makeup/skin care companies.

And Buffalo Wild Wings, wings are always frozen never fresh. And they cook them before hand and keep them in a warming drawer. The motto is “they come for the sauce not the wings”.

Image credits: reddit

#29

The icecream machine isn't broken it just needs cleaning which takes a long time. BK worker here

#30

I work in a public library. Sadly, since we're open to all, we get a lot of indigent customers. In this day and age, that means a lot of opiate users, many of whom shoot up in our restrooms.

We've had many overdoses, most of which are treated quickly and effectively by administering Narcan. However, that's not always the case, and some people are either beyond saving, or are found too late.

In 2019 alone, we've had 13 deaths. Security and the EMTs are always careful to make it appear that the body being wheeled out is only ill, so as not to freak out the patrons. The actual number of deaths is even 'hidden' from the staff. (I'm friends with a few of the folks in security, which is how I know about it.)

#31

I work at a major chemical plant up river from a major city. If it came out how old, run down, and poorly maintained literally all of the equipment that we use to make sure that hundreds of millions of gallons of contaminated water don’t leak or straight up spill into the river, the EPA would shut every plant on the river down.

However, the EPA is aware of how inefficient and poorly disposed all our waste products are. The plant I work for has a yearly budget dedicated to paying fines.

#32

People sometimes die in Hotel rooms, as soon as the body is out, we clean the room and put it back out for rent. Doesn't happen often, but there's a chance your bed had a dead person in it less than 2 hours before you checked in.

#33

Every, single, automotive parts company will let you return anything if you simply call the district manager. I have yet to see anything not taken care of when it reaches their level. You think your battery is under warranty but its not showing up? Call the DM. They'll tell the store to take care of it. 100%, everytime.

Image credits: jay2josh

#34

Used to work for a coffee shop who's claim to fame was that all food items were made from scratch in house. All of their pastries were made using Pillsbury dough, and every other kind of dessert was bought from a grocery store.

Image credits: Desperate4Potato

#35

I worked for a cold storage company that held products for Good Humor. The inside of the freezer was -20°.

One day a friend of mine caught some boxes on the racking causing popsicles to go everywhere. When he stepped off his lift to look up into the racking to evaluate the situation he stepped on a popsicle causing his feet to fly up in the air and busted his head on the ground. He lasted a few days in ICU and eventually passed.

Instead of this being a freak accident and giving us time to deal with it we were all brought into the freezer to look at the frozen puddle of blood to show us what could happen if we aren’t careful.

Image credits: chrisman0004

#36

Reality TV is anything but.

Ever seen House Hunters on HGTV? The couple "looking for a house" actually already bought and live in one of the houses that they're "looking at." The other houses are usually friend's houses, or houses that have sold but not closed or moved in yet.

#37

Former Starbucks partner here. I've worked at a variety of different stores during my stint as a barista, and I can't tell you how many times I've gone to clean an espresso machine and have found mold. I've only worked in one store that followed cleaning protocol correctly, out of a total of six (all in a major U.S. city).

Also, don't be a d**k when you place your order, otherwise you will without a doubt be decaffed. I've even witnessed assistant store managers do this to customers.

Image credits: crimewavedd

#38

I worked at a White Castle from 2000-2003.

It was clean. Nothing super disgusting at all. All of the equipment got a thorough cleaning every 24 hours. The floors were mopped regularly, walls were wiped down... everything.

The food was always fresh. If the burgers cooled enough for the buns to get hard, they were trashed. If fries/sides sat under heat lamp for 15 minutes, they were trashed.

We threw away a lot of food. We had to track it all for inventory purposes, and filled up a couple pages a day of stuff we through out.

Even when the bulk of the crew was teenagers, we really were trying to work fast and do a good job. Every year or so, they made us get timed on the griddle by a regional manager. Everyone had to do it. Starting with a clean griddle you had to fully prepare, box and bag 30 hamburgers as fast as possible without cutting any corners.

I know not all locations are like that, nor are all fast food restaurants, but when I was working there, we did a really good job of everything.

Image credits: wpmason

#39

KFC has teenage kids cooking with industrial pressure cookers that could blow their f**king heads through the exhaust canopy if they f**ked up. I literally have seen cooks bread their own hands up in flour and dunk them in 175 degree Celsius oil as a lark. I have seen kids use boiling hot urn water to clean the caked on flour and oil off their work boot and that water ran into their boot giving them serious burns. I have seen kids pick up huge pots of boiling oil and tip them to refill a cooker as a short cut to the slow melt method. Minimum age at the time was 14 and 9 months though they’d hire them at 14 flat with parents permission and you could be supervisor at 17/18.

Stuff may have changed in the last ten years since, I dunno.

Teenagers watching teenagers with that type of equipment was nerve racking. Not saying teenagers are stupid...just the ones I had to work with.

#40

I used to work at Whole Foods, in our bakery department. Almost nothing, aside from the bread is made from scratch there. This shouldn't be too shocking, considering they're a multi-national chain now, but really it'd be more correct to say that our cakes are "assembled" in house.

#41

Worked in retail jewellery in Australia. This would apply pretty much everywhere.

Most all items for sale (the exception would be promotional pieces, or special collections) has a “minimum” and a “maximum” price.

Don’t take for face value that the price is what you have to pay. Ask straight up “what is the min on this item”. Say it like you know what you are talking about. Sometimes the “min” price can be hundreds lower than the displayed price.

Michael Hill jewellers will clean all jewellery for free.

#42

Pizza Hut have a can of spray on garlic that they spray on their all their pizzas. At least they did in 2012.

#43

Local coffee shop. Unscheduled maintenance meant that there were rats upstairs. Owner was a cheap a** and didn’t want to close the entire shop down, so we kept the downstairs open for what could have forced his business to shut down forever had anyone found out. I quit that day.

#44

At the hospital they have "secret" employees who walk around to make sure doctors and nurses sanitize their hands before entering and existing a patient's room. You'd be surprised how many dont follow protocol and end up getting written up in a day.

#45

Your prescriptions are filled by unqualified people who don't always wear gloves or masks. The controlled substance pills are especially dirty. If a pill is dropped, there is a lot of paperwork to fill out that the pharmacists don't feel like doing so they'll throw it back into your prescription vial and send it off. I work in a distribution pharmacy.

#46

I used to work in a butter factory. As far as bricked butter is concerned, buy the cheapest s**t you can find. It's literally the same stuff. There are like 3 butter factories in the US, and they send them off to get packaged. That's what the company I worked for did. The butter came in 22kg boxes and were put in a giant churner for freshness, and that churner pushed it through the pipes to 16 different labelling machines. We had 200+ labels we would put on them, Land O'Lakes, Crystal, Great Value... Literally same butter, same machines. Have to fill 4 pallets of Great Value today? Put the labels in machine 4 for a few hours.

Salted and unsalted, that is the only difference.

#47

Name brand eggs are the same thing as the store brand, you are essentially paying up to a dollar more for the name. They come from the exact same farm one just gets a stamp. Also same with milk. Source: Dairy manager

#48

Sometimes students are given a better grade than they should because we are too tired to really give a s**t anymore.

Sometimes they are given a worse grade because of this, but those teachers suck.

#49

If you see rabbits or chickens at a zoo, they're food.

#50

Olive Garden Server: You can get 3 free wine samples every time you go.

#51

Worked in a no-kill animal shelter. The thing is, no-kill still does mean you have to put animals down sometimes. Especially behavioral issues are terrible. When is a dog too dangerous? Can you rehome a Pitbill with a bite-history? What if they get too dangerous for staff to handle?

Especially when it 'gets out' that we had to put a specific animal down and all those Facebook warriors start rioting and calling you names. It's not like we make those decisions for fun...

#52

I work for a company that sells auto parts online. We have about 25 different store names, so whichever company you think you're buying from on eBay or Amazon or any number of .coms, there's a very good chance it's actually us. There are any number of products on Amazon where every single seller on the list is us. It's also comical how many times people will say 'I bought from so and so and it was terrible, so glad I went with you instead.' Little do they know they're talking to the same customer.

#53

We claim to be a leader on the technology front..... but we are literally running off of excel macros with random codes that no one knows how to understand/correct without causing the entire company to crash.

#54

We're supposed to be teaching "information literacy," but none of us really checks to see if our students' sources are legit or not.

Edit: A lot of people are commenting about turnitin (we use Safe Assign). Those are only capable of flagging for plagiarism. What I'm talking about is checking to see if when a student cites a source for a claim if that source actually said it, and if that source is at all reliable. There's no software for that.

#55

The only thing not made on site at Cheesecake Factory is, ironically, the cheesecakes. They come in frozen and are thawed out.

They go through the trouble of mixing all their sauces and even salad dressings, but not cheesecakes.

#56

All of our videos are made by the same people, in the same building, and we just change the text/logo. All of the interviews are scripted too, they literally feed the lines to the subjects. Because they don't want to pay us a fair wage or give us benefits, we also don't have to sign anything meaning no NDA.

Dodo/Thrillist/NowThis

#57

The chicken bites aren't cooked to order.

The fries look darker today not because they're "extra crispy," but because the shift manager was too lazy to change the oil (which should be changed every 5 hours).

The house sauce is just mayo, ketchup, paprika, and pickle brine.

The sticky patch outside the bathroom might be pee.

#58

Guys guys guys, you know at the bottom of fast food receipts it has a 'do a servay to fill in the code for a free (item)' I worked at culvers and they told me the algorithm. It's always a 4 digit code. The middle two numbers add to 9. That's the code. Example? #09# #18# #27# #36# #45# Any of these will work I've been getting free cups if ice cream from culvers for years with this information. It also works for A&W Yeah the company is like 'I don't get it, they have the right code, but we didn't get a survey...' but who cares?

This at least applies in Wisconsin

#59

Goodwill has their own landfills for things that don't sell. Things sit on shelves for weeks with continuous price decrease, then one last shot at selling at the outlet stores where everything is price per lb.

#60

Receptionist: calling to reschedule you due to "schedule constraints" or because the doctor is suddenly traveling usually just means they decided to take the day off on a whim and now we need to clear off the schedule.

#61

Not a big company, but I worked at a flower shop. I would fill up the vases with the clients own water from their hoses outside before delivering their vase.

#62

Try to avoid going to dental chains. (Aspen Dental, etc.) They push you to get procedures done you don’t need and your appointment times are usually as fast as the doctor can find the first thing that’s wrong. Doctors are overworked and this increases the chance they will mess up. If you can’t pay, they help you finance, but you’ll get hit with a 20%+ interest rate when you miss your first payment. They also overwork and underpay staff. Which leads to disgruntled staff who don’t care. And like all public service positions, there’s no backbone against s**tty patients, you have to bend over backward and kiss their a**es.

The only way it works (and it does) is when you have caring, skilled skilled staff across the board. This rarely happens due to high overturn.

I had to get out when the new doctor at our office pulled too many teeth in a procedure and had to give a patient a full denture instead of a partial. He blamed the assistant and she was fired. The lab was overwhelmed with extra work from his mistakes. I didn’t feel the doctor cared about anything but money and I couldn’t morally do it. I couldn’t say he was a good doctor when deep down I knew it was a lie.

Reasons I hate commercialized medicine.

#63

I can assure you most things in Tim Hortons are not fresh. Unless you show up at rush hour, then you might get just brewed coffee.

#64

Ralph Lauren's outlet clothing is made for outlet, not from the main stores.

#65

The Canadian Tire in Port Coquitlam Canada blocks their emergency exits with metal bars to prevent theft and, consequently, prevents a quick exit in case the overly stuffed and flammables-filled building catches fire.

Someone use this knowledge to make some money. I'll take 5%.

#66

Worked in management for Trader Joe's for 8 years and boy have a I got a doozy for you: the employees are ACTUALLY that nice.

#67

-Regal Cinemas movie theatres has something called a "per cap". Per caps are calculated by dividing the attendance by how much concession sales there are. For example a low per cap is anything under $3, but a higher one is over $4. If there is a fifteen cent variance from one day to the next, you had to fill out a report stating why. You couldn't state things like the obvious. For example if I manage a theater in Minneapolis, and per cap sucked this past Sunday because everyone was at the SuperBowl, I could not use sports as an excuse even though it was so obvious. Instead I would have to say something like, "large groups in attendance who didn't purchase concessions". I'll also shatter another myth that nobody cares if you sneak drinks or bootleg candy in, just make sure you throw it away after the show so as to make cleaning the auditorium easier.
-It is marginally true that the theatre makes most money from the concession stand as we only profit about fifteen cents from a movie ticket, the rest goes to Hollywood. However, in the summer, running all that AC, neon, ice machines, etc it wasn't uncommon for the electric bill to hit $30,000 or so. Plus rent to the mall was another $60,000 a month so ya know.

#68

I worked at a YMCA as a lifeguard it was often that the chemicals were off. There were a couple of times that the chemicals had to much or no chlorine. This is dangerous for swimmers and could cause people to get really sick. It was often that my manager would keep the pool open although the chemicals where dangerously low or high and people would swim in the water.

#69

I used to work in the meat department at Whole Foods. Hopefully things have changed, but our manager was insistent on using past due meat to make grinds for burgers, sausages, etc. I once got in trouble because I threw out the ammonia scented chicken tenderloins that had expired two weeks ago, rather than grind them up for chicken patties.

#70

You always want to order your drinks without ice.

I've seen icemachines inside at fancy places and you definitly do not want anything in your drink what was inside there before. Ice cube machines are a real s**thole in general.

#71

90% of the time when you call Xbox for support you are talking to a person who is at home. If the person you are talking to was anything like me they were 100% not wearing pants.

#72

Liberty Mutual insurance puts every claim through an algorithm to determine whether to fight dispute it in court. The algorithm is able to guess the lawyers and judge that will participate and decide based primarily on their records.

Edit: I have another one. They chose their latest ad campaign by 1. Selecting a color no other major insurers were using (Yellow), and 2. They choose their slogan’s key word by finding words other insurers used most often but none featured in their slogan (Responsibility). I think they might have changed the slogan but I left a couple years ago.

#73

I guess it's not really that dark or a big secret just something very few people know about. In the 70s and 80s most commercial beekeepers in Canada poisoned all or almost all their Hives to death every fall. The hives were then replaced by packaged bees in spring from the US, used for the summer and then killed again in fall.

This was done just because packages from America were cheaper than the medication and labor involved with over wintering your hives. Especially as you can lose anywhere from 5% to 50% of your hives over winter.

This doesn't happen anymore as the price of packages now vastly exceed the cost of wintering your hives. Even if it did become economically feasible again I can't see it happening as the public out cry would likely be huge if people found out this was happening.

Like I said not really a secret. Just something few people remember.

#74

I write software for a large credit union.

We don't use any version control. No git, no SVN, nothing.

#75

I work in the hazmat industry. Mainly spill recovery. Holy s**t, if you work in industry, you need to look at your companies environmental policies. The company I work for works pretty closely with the EPA and our state environmental management agency, so we do a lot of jobs where other companies screwed up.

Lead contamination is stupid high in so many places.

I've seen visible Mercury literally swept under a rug so that companies don't have to pay for remediation. This will get on you, track throughout, and it will stay on your clothes or shoes for so long.

Acid spills where the company wants to save some money, so they wash it off into public fresh water sewers.

Tl;dr Large companies don't like to spend money on environmental clean up, so they do a lot of illegal stuff.

#76

People used to pay the janitor to steal other people's lunches for them.

#77

Worked in a small hospital. We had a room titled, "Utility Closet" which was actually the morgue or "body hold". Our ER was significantly far away from that room, so to transport dead bodies, we'd wheel the gurney down there with piles of laundry covering the body. Yep, that happened. I guess the hospital didn't want to tip people off there was a dead body passing them in the hallway.

#78

I used to work a small company and the secretary was "shared" among the owners, salesmen and some of the workers. The worst thing is that she acted all high and mighty like the owned the company, and I guess in a way she did.

She got preferential treatment and often the owner would pay her bills if she got behind, and rumor is that the owner paid off her car when she threatened to tell his wife. She was always invited to Las Vegas for trade conferences even though she had nothing to do with the trade besides answering phones and making appointments. We all knew what really happened on those trips.

#79

Not me but my Dental Assistant teacher once had to cover for a new dentist. He pulles the wrong tooth on a patient and she told the patient that they missed some decay on the tooth next to it, and since they missed it, it was free. So they pulled two teeth and the guy thinks he got a deal.

#80

At Planet Fitness, we do judge you. Especially the manager at the PF you go to.

#81

i worked in a store for building supplies and - as many people already suspect - we, the service personnel, truely try to dodge out as many customers as possible. we're basically like store ninjas, running from shelf to shelf and hiding from customers. that is though because we're also the people to refill all the shelfes, take care of the gardening section with all the flowers, make sure everything looks properly and we just wont get finished if we would deal with every question.

#82

At least 4 people have died here in the past 4 years, and the local Gov't is in Cahoots with the CEO. My own dept manager was involved in a huge embezzling scandal a few years ago but managed to wiggle free.

#83

Even if it's a nice vet clinic, sometimes "doggy daycare" is just putting your dog in a very small kennel with a bowl of water.

#84

At least half of the people who handle your food, both in restaurants and retail, and really any other retail, have some sort of cold or flu at the time, and are probably contagious. Very few retail or service industry job pay well enough or have benefits that make it possible to take sick days, and the management will guilt people into working even though they're sick, because the company can't handle being short staffed.

#85

AT&T does have secret phone plans. Depending on how long a customer you have been and how much you b**ch (always threaten to quit your service) they can hook you up.

You have to go to an AT&T store. NOT an authorized dealer, authorized dealer can't do s**t. They just sell the phones/planes and can't really do much else.

Also check to see if you can get a company discount. More than likely if your company is decent sized they have a discount. Also if you are a farm or something you can get a company discount.

OVERALL AT&T will rip you off. They are betting you don't check all the charges on your bill and will try and slip some bulls**t in there. It's not the store that sold you your plans fault it's 100% AT&T corporate.

I sold them for a while and just go get straight talk from walmart. It's cheaper and if you don't have the money it's no big deal unlike AT&T that will fee you out the a**. Also the "I got a free phone" is bulls**t or "I have an upgrade" you are paying full price. It's just broken down into monthly payments. You might have walked out of the store paying nothing but you will be paying full price for that phone. The "upgrade" is a trick to get you another $500-$1000 in debt with the company so you remain a customer until that amount is paid off because you can't close your account until that phone is fully paid for.

#86

I work in technical support. The vast majority of the time I know the fix immediately and it's something I deal with a dozen times a day. If I say "I need to put you on a quick hold whilst I research that" it means I'm Googling the answer to your problem. If I say I need to put you on hold for a few minutes it means I'm asking a coworker if they know what the answer is. If I say I need to call you back because I have to research more it means none of us has any f**king idea what the issue is and I'll actually have to do some real work.

Also, stop blurting out your passwords to me. I don't need to know what it is. Nobody does. If I need to log into your account I'll just ask you to type it when I remote into your machine. If you can't get in I'll reset it to something else and we'll deal with the password change later.

#87

I have sat in the board room of a major industrial agency, during the planning for a very major project, and watched a lot of faces go pale as the budgeting section for 'expected loss of life' came up.

In my experience, the CEOs who talk about safety being number one for their company, aren't kidding. They're often very much on board. It's getting the rest of the staff to get it through their skulls and follow suit that can be difficult.

Anyway. They budgeted for three deaths, in the course of the project. When asked why three, they said that statistically, the manhours involved said 3 was the conservative estimate, and there was a reserve for up to 6 deaths.

Each of those deaths were budgeted to cost the company 1.7 million dollars, factoring in fines, fees, loss of productivity, legal fees, etc.

It was a good meeting. It made it very clear to those who value money over human life just how much money a human life costs. And how much worse it can be if there's a major incident!

One death is bad on the bottom line. But a mass casualty incident? (Anything more than three?) means a worksite shutdown. Which can cost the company easily twenty million or more a day.

Believe it or not, the Occupational Health and Safety teeth that the government has is long and sharp. Long and sharp enough to even make massive petroleum companies think very carefully about their priorities.

#88

The mark up on HDMI cables are insane (any retail employee who works electronics)

#89

Subway. My franchise owner owned a coffee store right next to the subway too. He would get the subway cookie dough, and use 2 cookies to make a cookie cube. Those cookie cubes were sold at the cafe for £2.50, whereas you could walk into subway next door and buy 3 cookies for a pound. What a snake.

#90

Worked in a library for two years. We don't make diddly squat from your book or DVD fines; they're designed to be a deterrent more than anything else, and under the right circumstances we're very amenable to just making them go away. If you had a tough week and couldn't make it to the library to return your books? We can work something out. Laughing about being too lazy to bring them back/forgetting you had them entirely? Yeah, those fines aren't going anywhere.

That being said, libraries don't like to penalize people who can't pay their fines. If your kid has so many fines that the computer locks him out so he can't do his homework, we're usually more than happy to help you get logged on for the day.

#91

I'm a special education teacher, and the amount of injuries people sustain while working in this field is staggering. I teach high school and the kids can go until they are 21. So most of the violent students are adult sized. We get concussions, bites, broken wrists and arms, scalped, as well as sexualy assaulted by students who will grab you by your breast, pull out their d**k and start masturbating.

BTW I like my job very much and enjoy working with the students. However, there is so little public knowledge of how dangerous the position is.

#92

Worked for a place where the IT manager took dozens, maybe hundreds, of computers home for his own personal use and to give to the religious school where his kids attended, his wife worked, and he was a deacon. He also gave computers to the school district superintendent and some of the other execs. He and these same execs hired their relatives to put them on the payroll. The IT manager had his mother placed in one of the schools as an IT tech though she was completely and utterly incompetent with fixing computers. She was unable to pass the simple test that all the other techs had to pass under risk of termination. One summer he fired our linux administrator and brought in his 16y.o. sister and cousin, and two daughters, both 17y.o., of the execs to work on the district's payroll. He also hired his brother in law, a recently unemployed banker, to be a "database administrator". This DBA then went to his BIL's construction site and worked on it all day long.

The levels of system nepotism and corruption - or corruption and nepotism - were shocking and intolerable.

#93

Friend of mine worked for a US Post Office for a summer.

You know when you go into the post office, and there's those slots for you to drop mail into? One slot for "Local" and one slot for "Out of Town".

Both slots go into the same bin.

#94

Worked in a radio station. Made up texts and comments to add humour to a discussion or allow hard questions be put to politicians etc.

Was over 15 years ago so that has been tightened up since but likely still widespread in smaller operations.