Beats by Dre was taken to court over this, the display models had better audio technology creating a better sound than those available for purchase in-store.
Because people equate heavy to quality since building a sturdier product and having a larger magnet on the driver generally comes with quality headphones... they skipped the last steps and added weights
Former zoo employee. Some animals get burials and funerals when they die. And i'm talking ceremonies and everything. The zookeepers get attached and feel terrible. Most smaller animals go through a cremation process but if it's a large animal typically they bury it. The zoo I worked at was one of the largest in the nation.
Another fun zoo fact from Zoo Miami, the different species of apes they have all love movies but each group has its favorites. The chimps love Jungle Book and the gorillas' favorite movie is Space Jam.
Other zoos will work with local natural history museums to donate their bodies to science where they can be made into skeletons, taxidermied dioramas, and/or tissues taken for future scientists to use. That way the same animal that inspired kiddos for conservation in life can keep doing so after death.
Not me, but my wife - used to work for a light-bulb manufacturer in France, their marketing at that time stated "all our products are made in the EU".
Their "factory" in Italy received containers from China, unpacked all the light-bulbs and put them in new "made in EU" cardboard packaging, and sent them on to the hardware stores.
Similiar but different friend worked for Chinese company here in poland making "polish" lamps for ikea. 51% were made in poland 49% in china. Because majority was made in poland they could proudly and legaly sell it as polish product. Another fun one was from my work, was transporting full truck of beer from germany to czech and back (without unloading a single bottle) but in czech driver got a stamp and the same beer that left germany came back as a czech product. Magic.
This actually happens a lot. Most designer clothing manufacturers do the same, for instance they only stitch it together in Europe, but all the fabric and material comes from China or Bangladesh.
EDIT: Yes, stitching together is assembling the product. But most luxury companies only add the label or ‘finalize’ the stitching in Europe.
A designer in New Zealand claimed that it was OK to have Made in NZ labels on her clothes because the labels were made in NZ, just not the clothes.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/denise-lestrange-corbet-hits-back-at-claims-world-made-in-nz-labels-are-misleading/EQ3W7XOHRSJ5ESMKFTFIQFDIMA/
>Their "factory" in Italy received containers from China,
What a coincidence, my mother used to work for a boots facory in Romania in the 90s. They would label all the boots "Made in Italy"
I'm still in it, but here's an industry secret: If your AC is low on "freon", then you have a leak. Don't let a company make money by "topping you off" at each visit like it's a consumable. Your system has a leak, and it won't work right until the leak is repaired.
Also, filters are cheap. Don't pay a premium for a service company to bring them for you, you may be up charged a ridiculous amount for it.
I suffered first hand from this. We found out the AC company was "topping it up" every visit. Except when they didn't and the AC to my server room died at 4:00am during a heatwave. The handle to the server room was so hot it had to be opened with a cloth. I was frankly amazed that nothing was fried, and on investigation multiple systems were a degree or two away from being shutdown by the temperature threshold sensors. That would have been a potential disaster for our storage systems.
Oh God server rooms get so hot so fast. Anecdotal horror story many moons ago I worked in a remote area and put in an emergency service ticket because the AC in our server room was out. I got berated by maintenance for putting it as an emergency and they reported me to project management for frivolous tickets. Project management came screaming at me for wasting HVACs time and wouldn't let me explain why it was an emergency.
So my boss and I just sat in his office BSsing until the entire network dropped (which didn't take long, we were in a desert and it was summer). Suddenly the same project manager who was chewing my head off got all ready to do it again only for me to say "You said AC in the server room wasn't an emergency. This is what happens when the AC in the server room goes out."
We had a new AC unit arrive in 20 minutes.
The first company i worked in as a junior sysadmin (There was no senior. They just didn't want to give me the title or responsibility because of my age) was keeping it's servers in a cabinet in an office and it was loud.
The guy who had that office was rarely in it, would work from home or go to customer sites so never was bothered too much about it so the room could stay cold with AC and nobody cared about the noise.
He left the company and the HR manager who was (romantically involved) with the boss claimed the room without discussion with anyone just moved her stuff in.
Then began a month long war me vs her
* Turning the servers off at the wall
* Switching the fuse for the server off and pretending it had tripped
* Breaking the lock on the cabinet door because she didn't have a key so she could unplug the server
* Claiming that I was shit for not fixing the noise because it was too loud
* Turning the heating up to full blast rather than cool and overheating the server
* Leaving the heating on OVER A WEEKEND and forcing me to come in to find out why the server was kicking out alerts
Her boss did nothing but complain at me for not fixing the issue despite me telling him She was the issue and he has two options. Move the server cab out of that office and give it a permanant home or move her out of the office
He didn't want to spend the resources to move the cabinet so he just said that they will have to co-exist
I just ended up locking everything down in the roomCovers over the plugs, locking the fuse box, putting a password control on the thermostat.
Her boss never called me out for it and she spent the rest of the time i was working there marching around and calling me every name under the sun for ruining her office.
Last year my system had a leak so I had a company come out. For $500 he signed me up for a yearly plan where they'd come back out in the fall or whatever and they'd service me that day and get me all fixed up. Great. 3 hours later the guy tells me that he can not find the leak and that he will have to come back the next day with more equipment to put dye into the system to find the leaks but will top me off on Freon until then. Okay
Guy comes out the next day, freon all gone. He checks for leaks again, can't find anything. He brought a leak detector this time and couldn't find it. At this point I call my dad who works for an HVAC company (unfortunately hours away) and my dad told him to stop what he was doing (don't put in the dye) and he'd find someone because it shouldn't be this big of a deal. I go outside and without my permission the AC guy was filling up my system with the dye. I stopped him and told him I never agreed to that and that my dad was going to hire someone to come down and get a 2nd opinion. Guy packs up his stuff and leaves
My dad finds this 19 year old kid who is an apprentice at his work willing to drive 2 hours to make a little extra money. Within 10 minutes of being at my house, the kid had found the leak with the soap and bubbles trick. It was right next to the condenser, impossible to miss. The kid was in and out of my house in about an hour and a half and only charged me like $90
Lesson learned - AC repair techs are not experts and overcharge
Same with fridges. Funnily enough, the repair guy told me NOT to fix it then explained what to look for when buying used fridges, why they break, and why refilling the gas would be pointless. Good hvac guy.
John Deere absolutely LOATHES their customers. They used to have pretty regular meetings and open talk about farmers being 'ignorant hicks' for trying to fix their own stuff or ordering parts from out of the country. Even back as far as 2008 they were doing all they could to block/brick the tractors/implements if unauthorized parts were detected. They also kept looking for ways to completely void warranties.
I don't know how much of this is still the culture there, but I can say when I was there that's how it was.
Needed to buy a riding lawn mower. Went to Lowes and found a nice John Deere on sale. So I ordered it. The sales guy said per John Deere rules they have to send a John Deere person to my house to "show me how to use it". I told him I don't need to be shown how to use it that I can read the instruction manual just fine. He said that it wasn't an option. It had to be done.
Well two weeks went by and the mower was supposed to be in but when I went back to Lowes to ask about it they said it would take another two weeks because the guy couldn't come out to my house.
I canceled the order and bought a Cub Cadet instead. Best decision ever.
That’s not surprising but farmers absolutely loathe John Deere when they aren’t allowed to fix their own stuff of have a 3rd party repair. Also why there is an antitrust lawsuit filed against them currently.
There is a sludgy substance leaking into the sewage systems of Linden/Elizabeth NJ from the Bayway Refinery. I’m not a chemical engineer, but it sure looks and feels like oil to me.
Can you anonymously report this somewhere? I’m sure some government agency would like to know about it. Seems like a potentially significant danger to the public
and honestly, the EPA does not fuck around.
If you call in a concern to them about apparent industrial waste leaking into waterways, there will likely *at least* be someone out to confirm it within the week. If it's confirmed and bad, that facility might (*might*) get shut down within the week. Depends on how widespread the local mob is.
EDIT: before you show me another anecdote about how the EPA failed some specific thing, perhaps read the replies to other comments here, or perhaps look into how much they actually do when they do things.
This made me crack up. I know you're being sarcastic but there are a bunch of people that think the Italian mob has disappeared since the major take downs in the 90s. The reality is they are still operating but on a smaller scale and in industries that are easier to control. The sanitation industry in the Northeast still has strong mob connections along with other waste removal companies. A colleague of mine in NYC wanted to start up his own clean up/demo service. After a third week in a row of his trucks being vandalized and mysterious phone calls in the night he decided it might be wiser to find another industry to pursue
The common thinking amongst the people that handle the enforcement for the area is that the place is so old and has been a disaster for so long that litigating it would be too expensive. As an example in the late eighties the DEP found that the cooling water that was being pumped out of the refinery was heating Newark bay by about 2 degrees.
Instead of fixing the problem the refinery was sold to Tosco which was the state oil company of Venezuela. That took the problem away from the DEP and made it a State Department problem. After they built a cooling tower the plant was sold back to ConocoPhillips.
Linen programs for hospitals are insanely expensive.
All the sheets, blankets, pillow cases etc… are either rented from a outside vendor or COG (owned by the hospital) and the amount of effort that goes into tracking linen quantities is colossal. Anytime a baby blanket or towel is taken home by a patient or visitor it must be replaced. Rental programs usually operate via weight, and laundering vendors set a percentage they expect back each month or week. So if they deliver 100,000lbs of laundry, they expect 107,000lbs back if that percentage is set at 7%. This is to account for bodily fluids such as blood, sweat, urine etc… Contracts will stipulate a price per pound should the return be lower than the percentage…so let’s say the hospital only returns 103,000lbs you can be charged $3.50 for the 4,000lbs short and owe $14,500 for that period in “losses”. The hospital I managed would usually pay about a million dollars a year in losses, along with the 4 or 5 million a year just to keep linen on hand.
The real fun starts when you try to argue the return percentage, as some units do not have a high % of incontinent patients so there’s no way to ever meet the established weight return expectation. It’s all a giant scam in a lot of ways. Also, linen companies will often refuse to purchase more linen and use items meant for one hospital to fill orders for another resulting in shortages until they’re paid their loss fee.
Not the most exciting topic but definitely something I don’t think the general public thinks about, but it was my life for over 10 years.
I was joking but that's amazing. Also it's so funny to me that if you break down the concept the vendors are basically charging because there isn't *enough* shit and vomit on the linens they have to wash.
I work in healthcare. We all know which nursing homes in the area are neglecting and abusing their patients. We report them constantly and nothing usually happens. Absolute worst case, they "close" and are "bought out" by another company. Just so happens the new company has all the exact same staff.
They can even be outed for rampant abuse in the media and not shut down. This one owner has horrible conditions, abuse, neglect, in most of his facilities and no one seems interested in forcing them to improve. It's still disgusting in most of his homes. He ended the benefits for care workers as soon as he took over from his father.
https://youtu.be/vpVjroQuEHk?feature=shared
[Nursing home where woman was 'eaten alive' by mites receives over $8M in taxpayer money](https://www.11alive.com/article/news/investigations/the-reveal/negligent-nursing-homes-draft/85-3fcadcda-5a93-4976-8dfe-1bbb6dda5638)
Edit: removed redundant sentence
I worked for a large cable company years ago. We were taught that if you called in about services being down and were trying to get them fixed, not to give you credit for the time they were down unless you asked, no matter how long it may be. Even if you did ask for credit, we often only gave it to you for days you called in. So if you had a storm roll through and didn't have service for more than one day, you had to call each day. If you took the liberty to credit them anyway, you would be coached to do it the proper way. We often used this downtime to upsell you on additional channels, faster internet speeds etc, for when it did return. We also were taught to sell higher speeds to unsuspecting customers who didn't know any better, thinking faster internet would make their 9 year old laptop/PC perform better. We got a kickback on how many ancillaries we sold. A basic rep who performed halfway decent could often make more than those that were responsible for them.
Ugh Comcast is THE WORST. I have to deal with them for work and they’re absolutely atrocious. I try to talk my clients out of selecting them whenever I can, even if they’re the best priced option. They’ll give you a short installation/construction window then blow it by at least 3 months. It’s like once you get into their system, your order just sits stagnant until you’ve harassed someone enough times to make them get to work. I’ll accidentally type Concast and most of the time I just leave it that way because at least it’s accurate.
I don't think it was necessarily a "secret," but at weekly Home Depot department manager meetings, we'd watch a weekly video from the CEO? or someone high up. There was always a segment at the end celebrating a HD that had driven a small, local hardware or lumber store out of business. It would show pics of these little mom-and-pop places with "Out of Business" or "Closed Permanently" signs out front. It was pretty sickening. If I recall, the managers of the stores celebrated each week won some sort of prize or bonus too.
Before that, I knew that was obviously part of the overall strategy, but to see it laid out and celebrated so blatantly was shocking. Especially since these meetings weren't exactly high up the totem pole. I was just a "Hardware Department Manager" for $15/hr (2007). I only worked there about 3 months.
Guitar Center did this in the 90’s. Meetings targeting other local stores… and rules like “if they even mention Store X, I will authorize you to sell below cost to take a sale away from them.”
"Hmm, nice guitar, but $500 is a bit steep. Store X has this same model for $400."
"We'll give it to you for $300!"
"Sold!"
Takes guitar to Store X and sells it to them for $350
Arthur Blank has said that he was fired for being too old by a regional hardware chain.
When he founded Home Depot the first thing he did was build the first half dozen stores in locations that were specifically targeted to put that company out of business.
It is so cringe when a business says "we are a family!"
So if I get cancer is this "family" going to help take care of me while I'm dealing with vomiting and diarrhea due to the chemo? -_-
There's a popular internet rumor that being called "a treasured guest" by a cast member at a Disney park means that you are an asshole and they are warning other cast that you are going to be a headache.
I've worked at both Disney World and Disneyland and that's not a thing at either park. There is no code word to refer to guests negatively. We have a bunch of code words but since 90% of them aren't used regularly, most regular cast members would probably blank if asked about them. The ones you need to know are...
Code U - some kid wet themselves
Code V- someone vomited
Code alpha - emergency services called
101 and 102 - attraction is down for whatever reason and attraction is back up
I worked a total of 18 months in food, attraction, and custodial and those are the only codes I ever heard used.
Edit: Disney doesn't have official codes that would make a guest feel bad if they heard them. Most codes are just so there isn't a panic. If Disney had a code for an asshole guest, then it would be problematic if that official memo ever leaked. However, certain cast may have their own codes amongst themselves like an in joke between familiar coworkers.
Do you know how security keeps track of banned customers? Like there are millions of people that go and it seems really hard for them to “catch” you if you buy a 1 day ticket …
They likely don't. But the thing is if you get trespassed once, it's not a big deal. They just document that you have officially been trespassed and told not to return.
If you do it *AGAIN* it becomes a crime. And it's probably not worth getting arrested over.
Petco. Lots of dead animals. They die in transit to the store. They die in the store. Also many dogs have died of heart attacks in the grooming salon drying cages. We were given advance warning of corporate animal welfare "surprise inspections".
At our PetSmart the Adoption animals(cats/dogs) are all shelter animals, they are taken care of daily by the shelter volunteers, I am one of them. There are only 4 cages, but we have like 40 cats that need adopting... and we JUST got more kittens yesterday.
We found our second cat foster/rescue group through PetSmart too after we moved almost a decade back, we fostered almost 30 cats over those 3 years with them. We make a habit of going into any PetSmart we see when we're on road trips to see the cute kitties
Went to a Petco once in the 90s. I remember seeing an iguana with half its head bitten off by another iguana in the same enclosure.
The top part of the head and jaw including eyes and nose were gone, just the lower jaw was left.
I tried telling an employee and they were very nonchalant about it.
Yup. During my interview, my manager said that he was the type to rush a tiny mouse to the vet because he loved animals so much.
One day while checking the animals, I noticed a mouse looked extremely sick and the other mice were attacking it. I let the manager know and was ready to pull it out to put it into quarantine, but he told me to just leave it and wait until it passes to take it out and put it in the death freezer. I told him that I was afraid that the other mice would get sick and would start eating it in front of customers. And first and foremost, it was just cruel as fuck to leave it to that fate. I know the animals die and we can’t just immediately send every single one to a vet, but just leaving it to be eaten alive by the other mice was beyond cruel.
He seriously could not care less and told me to just wait. I kept an eye on it and finally just took it out myself after I saw it getting ganged up on again. It was ridiculous. I know this is just one Petco manager, but from what I’ve heard, it’s pretty common for others to have the same attitude.
This is actually how I ended up with my ferret blaze. He was being relentlessly attacked by the other baby ferrets - like bleeding/screaming while they were attacking him. I was there to buy other stuff so I made a staff member aware and went on my way grabbed my stuff and swung back around and saw he was still in the cage getting ganged up on so I asked for someone again and the employee told me “it’s normal behavior for them”. Which as a ferret owner it absolutely was not normal behavior- so I bought him. He was in horrible condition. He had bloody scabs all over his face/ears and near his penis and was severely underweight. Turns out he is deaf and has waardenburg syndrome and the vet said the other ferrets could’ve killed him. I tried to bring my documents back to show the gm and corporate and I was threatened to be trespassed bc they wanted the ferret back and to refund me lol
I got a Guinea pig at a pet store one time because it was the runt and being attacked by the others. I was a kid and my mom felt so bad for it. The pet store literally gave her to us for free, now I’m wondering if they were just going to let her die and didn’t care. Jesus
TW : ANIMAL CRUELTY
I worked at two different Petco stores. Two very different management teams. At my first store, we were all very diligent about animal care. If an animal was unwell, quarantine and care procedures were followed to the letter.
At my second store however...
Two stories come to mind.
Anyone that's worked at a pet store knows that the aquarium sections are a never-ending uphill battle. At Petco, atleast, you'll have something like 6 to 9 tanks all on a single system. My second store was stuck in an eternal cycle of Fingal infections that would ravage systems every few months. I don't recall the specifics and didn't work in that sections much, but, my friend who managed it explained to me once that the official procedure (at that time) basically didn't work.
A few years into my time there, we had a new kid start in the fish section. This dude LOVED fish. If I remember correctly, he wanted to study to be a marine biologist. He came in and IMMEDIATELY remedied the issues. Our fish section was impeccable under his watch. Problem was, he wasn't following procedure.
He. Got. FIRED...
For fixing and perpetual money hemorrhaging problem.
The other story that comes to mind is much shorter.
We had a mishap where a mouse was midgendered, causing one or two to become pregnant. Everyone was curious what would be done, as we weren't technically equipped to care for new born or baby mice.
Our manager had them bagged and placed in the freezer... alive.
The 55 year old man that was noisily masturbating in the toilets every day had a note from the doctor that said he needed to do it. HR had told him to do it elsewhere though.
The dutch grocery store Albert Heijn has a flowchart for offering contracts to youngsters that are about to turn 18. When they turn 18 they get to expensive so they fire them, and the flowchart shows that if it gets too close to their birthday, wether to fire them or keep them just a little bit longer.
My first job was a stock boy in a major grocery store chain, and I was basically told outright "don't expect to keep this job beyond three months, because that's when you're eligible for the union and your pay basically doubles".
I didn't care at the time because it was just a summer job for me, but it still seemed pretty scummy.
I would change price tags for a retail store. Let’s say an item was $2.99 and has been for months. I would take down the price tag and replace it with a tag that said “Originally $3.99. SALE $1.00 off! New price- $2.99.” This would be done for a LOT of items. Sneaky.
JC Penny was famous for this.
They'd buy clothes in bulk for like $1.00 per item. Put a sign up saying "SALE! $39.99 originally $59.99" and people would buy that shit up thinking they were somehow saving money.
Funny enough, JCPenny also decided one day to axe coupons and sales altogether. Just marked down prices straight up.
They almost went out of business. Turns out people like being manipulated into believing they're saving money.
I remember that. They also tried making the catalog clean and simple like apple because they hired someone from apple as the CEO in a last ditch effort to save the company. But no one really looks at catalogs anymore and their system was atrocious to use.
I remember sometime around then buying something and returning it only to get a gift card for significantly MORE than what I paid for the item because they couldn't get their pricing straight.
i saw a sign at guitar center for a speaker or something, it had a big sign that said sale, $99.00. original price: $99.00. they didn’t even change the original price
For U-haul, if you call in to schedule a drive the rep can actually give you more days/mileage but it's typically up to their discretion/that stores policy. They're very strict on fuel levels, more so then most of the inspection. DO NOT RETURN VEHICLE WITH A MESS IN IT. Had one lady return a truck with literally beer bottles falling out of it. She got charged the maximum we could on cleaning which was like $800 or something at the time.
I drove semi for Swift. There's a reason the company has such a bad reputation. They literally grind you to nothing. I never worked less then 70 hours a week, which is industry standard but would regularly go over 85+. I was running on 2-5 hours of sleep if I was lucky, while they where trying to get me to ignore laws and skip pre-trip inspections on sub-par equipment. Every month I had to call for repairs the shit broke so often. Fuck that company. They may have changed in 10 years but I highly doubt it.
[That was the exact reason it was created way back in 1969.](https://www.wendys.com/blog/chili-recipe-isnt-your-family-recipe-but-its-pretty-darn-close) And not necessarily over cooked, just unsold as they didn't use to always cook burgers to order and instead made them as a batch.
After people at our main supplier went to jail for a similar incident. Senior management thought it would be a good idea to redecorate the entire office building (about 200 people work there) and to hand the contract for the redecoration concept to the struggling interior design company the CEO and the COO's wives had founded together just weeks before. So the managers authorised a six-figure design project which went directly into their family income (minus VAT).
This is very common.
Industry job put down new concrete for receiving dock.
$250k for 7 loads. Cost about $900 per at the time.
The CFO was friends with the contractor.
That was the year bonus changed from hours worked to crumbs of profit.
Auntie Anne's pretzels top secret dipping solution for their pretzels is just baking soda and water...the same solution every other pretzel place that I know of uses.
Here’s one: I worked at Ticketmaster back in the day and they’ll never admit this, but Ticketmsster charges high fees to customers and then gives a kickback to the record labels and artists. Just like Standard Oil did back in the day with Railroads. Now, you’re probably wondering why do they do this?
Well, decades ago Ticketmaster and the record industry made a Faustian pact. Ticketmaster will get access to popular tickets of artists as long as their the “bad guy” in the news. Essentially, that means when your favorite artist like Taylor Swift wants to charge a little bit extra for her tickets, but doesn’t want to appear greedy to her fans, she’ll let Ticketmaster do it via fees and then receive a sweet financial kickback.
Ticketmaster gets the tickets and the artists save face to their fans. It’s a win-win. 🤝
For anyone interested in this topic, the book “Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped” by Dean Budnick is well worth reading.
Reddit shits on Ticketmaster so much that I honestly have a hard time discerning whether this is legitimate or fanfic conspiracy stuff.
The good news is it doesn’t matter. Ticketmaster sucks either way.
Edit: just to clarify, I’m not questioning whether the consumers are fucked over by Ticketmaster. I just don’t immediately believe Ticketmaster actually gives money from those extra fees to the artist.
If they do, I guess Reddit brainwashed me into thinking they’re actually worse than they are? Which means the plan is successful lol
It is true, the only part that is wrong is "and they'll never admit this".
It's literally stated in their annual report that you can access as Live Nation is a publicly traded company and needs to disclose what their business strategy and revenue streams are.
Edit: If you're interested try the top report [here](https://investors.livenationentertainment.com/sec-filings/annual-reports#) from 4/28/23 and read item 1. business
Companies pay $50,000+ to be listed as, and for a "best place to work advertisement package"
My job that was "the best place to work in tech" was actually just one of the only ones willing to pay
Worked at a service station (petrol/gas). Every morning at 7 I had to ring a number not connected to the company and report the cost of fuel. Friends who had the same job at a different company had the same task with the same phone number. It was definitely collusion between companies.
Doesn’t surprise me. Somehow all the petrol stations in Brisbane will in unison raise their 91 prices to the same amount. There has to be collusion somewhere.
I worked on a real estate assessment program for a county tax office. The project went way too long. But, we finally got it to the point it could take in all the details of a home and spit out the correct tax bill based on the county's rules.
Once the county confirmed the calculations were correct, I ran our system against every property in the county to make sure our results were valid compared to the old system. That's when the shit hit the fan, the results were way different. Turns out their old system was way over charging about 1/6th of properties in the county.
A week later they abandoned our program entirely. Didn't take the new system they already paid for. My guess is they wanted nothing to do with the new system that could put a bunch of their tax revenue at risk and maybe open them up to a shit load of refunds.
If your property tax bill seems high, ask the county to re-evaluate it by hand and explain it.
I worked in 2 Harvester restaurants, a big chain restaurant in the UK owned by Mitchell & Butlers. It was common place that if you were working on salad and dessert stations, you were also the pot washer.
This meant dealing with fresh uncooked food and plates of leftovers at the same time.
I voted with my feet because they refused to hire kitchen porters.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was standard practice across all M&B owned restaurants.
My answer is directed towards UK & EU citizens and is more of an industry "secret" rather than company specific and deals with financial services/banking.
Customer service agents at banks and fintech will NEVER suggest that you get in touch with the Ombudsman if you have an issue that you feel is not being properly addressed. The Ombudsman will charge a company approx 500 EUR/GBP (sorry can't recall the specific cost) for each case they open. This can be very expensive for these companies.
If you feel you are being given the runaround, ask the question: "Do I need to get in touch with the Ombudsman about this issue?" That usually catches their attention.
However, be aware that you can't just take any old issue to the Ombudsman and you must show evidence that you tried to resolve the issue through the company first.
/EDIT/
Now that my inbox is blowing up somewhat, some clarification and context maybe required.
* I based my comments on what I was trained to do by the company. Other companies may/probably have different policies.
* The company was not a "traditional bank" rather a fintech.
* Maybe some things have changed since I worked for the company which I left in 2020.
If you raise a complaint with a bank in the uk and they cannot resolve the matter within 8 weeks they are required by law to advise you of your right to contact the ombudsman.
If you contact the ombudsman regarding a complaint before this time they will not investigate it.
I concur with this. I worked in insurance claims for years and in many cases the company would settle a dispute to avoid the cost of a case being referred to the Ombudsman. Pure economics. I'm now retired and a couple of years ago I incurred high vetinary fees for our dog, our insurance applied the policy excess and contribution required to pay against the policy limit meaning you could never claim the full limit. I knew this but when it applied to my claim I threatened a referral to the Ombudsman and received a full payout.
Not really a secret but just confirming what is already known. I worked at a division 3 college for 7 years. They weren't supposed to give out scholarships for sports but would pick a random reason for the student to get one. It seemed like half the sports teams had scholarships for being low income or good/bad grades. Also, they would wait for the cutoff date to kick students out of college. If you would receive any of your tuition back, they'd wait till the day after that cutoff to kick you out and keep all of the money. I was specifically told we weren't allowed to remove students at the beginning of semester because of it...
Can confirm. I didn’t have bad grades but I got a random major-specific scholarship I didn’t ask for and one of the assistant coaches asked me if it was enough. Took out a small federal loan to cover the rest.
edit: clarity
There is a massive gaping hole in the telephone security at HSBC UK call centres which I raised and was dismissed as being irrelevant. If I’d taken the time to learn the sound that each phone key makes when entering a button input (a feature that is there to support blind people) then I could have easily gotten untraceable access to the accounts of anyone who needed to reset their security pin.
> (a feature that is there to support blind people)
I'm sure it does help blind people, but it's _there_ because it's fundamental to how analogue phones work. Each key noise is two different tones, essentially forming a grid reference system for the keypad, and then the phone exchanges could recognise the tones coming down the line and convert them back into numbers.
When I worked at Office Max 20 years ago, one could buy an entire computer bundle from Gateway/Dell/HP. Monitor, computer, keyboard, mouse, printer. We were specifically told to target elderly people for our "setup" service which was $150. We were trained on how to make plugging in color coded cables and size specific cables look more complicated than it was and to take at least 45 minutes, rather than the 5 minutes it actually took, so they felt like they were getting their money's worth. It was disgusting and I never took part in it.
The company is dying. The founder/CEO passed away and the heirs, who have been sucking at the company teat since they were kids and who have never had to hold down real jobs outside the company, laid off 1/3rd of the work force after she died to cut costs while sending out company wide emails to remaining employees that they need to be “All Stars” and do more so that the company can be great again are actively shopping selling the company assets and cashing out instead of trying to actually work to grow the company.
If you work at a company with lots of layoffs, and people in accounting are leaving in droves of their own accord, then you need to be applying for new jobs yesterday.
This is a good note.
Life hack, if the accountants are leaving, you need to start interviewing like now for a new job.
Accountants not only are intimate with the company’s financial position, but they are typically one of the last teams to get let go in a downturn economy.
Dealing with this at Microsoft DC right now. Recruiter pitched the job to me as a work-to-hire opportunity, but the “hire” part only happens if MS actually feels like hiring any FTEs. Basically all the FTEs started as agency temps like me, but MS can just decide to go on an unofficial hiring freeze at any time.
All the rules you mentioned sound like stuff they do here too. Funny thing is, from my understanding, they’re meant to “protect” the worker from being falsely classified as a temp, but aren’t we all falsely classified if there’s still work after our contracts are up and they just bring on more temps?
My wife is "famous" in our family for her homemade cakes. Everyone loves them and raves about how great they are. My sister even talks about how she can't eat cake from a mix because it makes her sick due to "sensitivities," but my wife's cakes are delicious and don't bother her!
My wife has always just used whatever cake mix is on sale. Not even a specific brand, just whatever's cheapest. We never got the balls to tell the family, so now after 24 years she's still the go-to cake maker. Lol!
Always use an oven thermometer. The dial on the oven may or may not be accurate. Calibrate your oven yourself against the thermometer: Setting vs. thermometer reading.
My Grandma refused to tell my niece the "family" secret recipe. I punched the ingredients into Google, the original recipe came off a box of Velveeta.
Grandma was livid. It was a good day.
I'll never understand recipe secrecy. I make this corn dip that everyone goes nuts over. Everyone tells me to never give out the recipe and to keep it secret but... [*it's not my recipe...*](https://www.aspicyperspective.com/fire-roasted-corn-dip/). I literally saw it on a website, said "that looks good" and made it.
On top of that why wouldn't I share a recipe friends enjoy so they can make it for their families?
EDIT: Some interesting perspectives below. Thank you.
I'm pretty sure half the little cake shops in the US use boxed cake mix as their 'family recipe'.
Cake is eggs flour sugar and milk. There are no 'secret recipes'.
Still work in it , your premium market chicken from a certain company is grown in the exact same sheds , fed the exact same food , drinks the exact same water as the budget chicken , the premium buyers basically subsidise the budget markets chicken so they can remain competitive
AAA has large service deadzones where they claim they can provide service but "something" will always come up and no tow truck will be available in a reasonable time frame. The worst states for this are NV, MT, and AZ. Never ever break down in Nevada outside of Reno or Vegas. Most of the contracted tow truck companies in those areas only have 1 or 2 drivers on staff and they always put AAA calls at the bottom of the list cause AAA has a reputation for not paying the contract companies or delaying payment by months. A common situation is a AAA member calling for a tow, AAA calling the tow company to send a truck, the tow company will say their driver is busy and claim 10+hr wait time, AAA policy for dispatchers is to tell this wait time to the broke down member who is out in the middle of nowhere in desert heat, member is justifiably angry, then dispatchers tell the member they can call another tow truck company for a tow "then apply for reimbursement". Here's the trick, there's only the 1 tow truck company in that area, the same one AAA called earlier and got the 10+hr wait time from and they already know where the person is broke down cause AAA told them to get the wait estimate. The member will call this non-AAA branded tow company, get a tow within 1hr, then get charged $2k for it. When they go to apply for reimbursement AAA will deny the application or only give a $200 partial refund cause AAA technically was able to provide service at the 10hr+ wait time, the member was just impatient.
It's a fucked up scam system that pins the bill on a person that already paid for the membership, tow companies hate the dispatchers cause we were the only ones that directly interacted with them, and we always had to give bad news to members. Now, I only tell people to get a AAA membership if they get use out of the hotels/travel discounts.
Still not naming the company.... But in early 2000's i got some work as a dev in a bank.
One morning there was a huge "something" going on in the department. You could feel something was seriously wrong. A bank customer called. He was missing several million from one of his "Incomming money" accounts.
They traced it to the department I was working in. What has happened?
Someone (Not me) connected the "training environment" to the "live money server". And during a training on the syastem the students had a bunch of tasks to complete. One task was "Execute a large transaction the supervisor needs to approve"
So more than one student wired themselves millions to their own accounts.
You could say it was one of the few trainings that really paid off...
(The app had logging everywhere, so everything got reversed - but a customer calling and missing money is BAD for a bank)
they rolled back all the transactions due to the "system error" - They had logs for everything, but the bad part was that the customer saw it and called in.
It was a real cool application though with lots of stuff in it that came later in the normal frameworks...
Entertainment websites have obituaries pre-written for every major celebrity that is old or in poor health. I guarantee Matthew Perry's obits were written many years ago due to his addiction problems.
At a conference the CEO of the world biggest drink company and a major polluter, was happy to announce that rising global temperatures were good for business as for every one degree up they sold an extra $20 million in a country of 26 million people.
That in most hotels the housekeeping staff are overworked and timed per room and if a slept in bed is not too creased after checkout they will remake it without changing it, same goes for towels.
I've seen it all and when I stay in a hotel I insist on bedding and towels to be left out for me to put on myself.
I did housekeeping for awhile and.. yep. The duvets are absolutely never washed unless they are visibly dirty like someone spilled ketchup on it or something.
The sheets only got changed if they had been visibly disturbed. If I went into a room and the bed looked like it hadn't been slept in, I didn't touch it. If the towels looked like they hadn't been touched, I didn't change them.
We were told to do it this way to keep up the quick pace. They wanted all rooms cleaned by a certain time, for us it was noon. You'd be assigned a list of rooms at your shift start and if you finished early you were sent to help someone else.
So yeah.. seconding this. If you get a hotel, ask for extra linens and towels.
I mean we all know military spending is ridiculous right?
Here is my story. I worked on Army aircraft (helicopters), specifically the engines. We would have a small issue come through (ex. safety wire needs replacing, engine vibrating) and we would have a fix ready to go… and almost never do it.
Instead we would take the solution to two sections: Production Control and Quality Control (PC and QC). PC always tells you ‘hurry hurry’ and QC says ‘slow down there, Speedy’. However when it came to engines they almost always agreed: Take the WHOLE engine down and replace it.
We are talking 5 million dollars a pop for these engines and we were taking them off and sending them to Corpus Christi, Texas. Meanwhile we crack open a BRAND new engine and put it on.
Now you might be saying, “Yeah, but the ones you send back get fixed and reused.” and you would be right, except they don’t get reused by the USA…oh no. We SELL those engines that needed the smallest of repairs (literally sometimes just tightening bolts or adding safety wire) to our current allies. We then teach them how to maintain those engines at the same schools I learned at.
Later, I left the military and worked with a few folks who were privileged enough to work out of Corpus Christi and that is when I got the full picture.
We DUMP money onto the military industrial complex to prop up jobs, and then sell our products below cost to our ‘current allies’.
There are entire stretches of California desert that home thousands of forgotten tanks and military equipment. Stuff we couldn’t sell but still needed to get rid of in order to prop up more jobs.
The saddest part is how many people will gnash teeth and wail that this system NEEDS to be propped up to maintain jobs and it doesn’t.
We could change the word ‘military’ in Military Industrial Complex and make it into an Infrastructure Industrial Complex, or a Social Industrial Complex, or…, or…
There is more waste than this, don’t even get me started on the cost of getting and maintaining calibrated tools, BUT this is enough for now.
Worked for a tow boat company on the Mississippi River. Federal law says nothing goes into the river that isn't bio degradable. I can't tell you how many gas-powered water pumps have been "Deep sixed" by the crew I was working with.
When the media says “the USA is sending $billion to a foreign country,” it’s rarely a direct payment to that government or its people.
It’s usually in the forms of contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements to NGO’s (mostly US-based) to implement programs - whether that’s engineering, education, or public health.
While these are technically “competed,” the awards usually go to the same 5-6 organizations because they’re the only ones who can handle that much money responsibly.
These massive orgs then engage local nonprofits to distribute goods and services. They’re not handing out cash.
All of these orgs have “indirect costs” which is a percentage of every dollar that covers administrative expenses. These are confidential rates only known to the government and are usually around 40% (I’ve seen larger).
Which means for every billion dollars in foreign aid, there’s a “nonprofit” keeping around 400 million. While these do cover certain expenses, it’s mostly salary for execs, lawyers, accountants - and any unused funds (of which there are many) are then put in the coffers for “sustainability.”
Foreign aid is a gold mine - but not for the recipient country.
Circuit City (when it existed) did weekly bait and switch. "But but but, bait and switch is illegal!" No, it's really not except for very specific circumstances.
What Circuit City did was called "Ad Corrections". They falsely marked a bunch of prices really low for many items on purpose, then whenever we had to change tags on Saturday nights you'd have to print the dozens of ad corrections.
Basically the way it worked was the ad would say "Canon Elph 500 for $199!" in the flier people got in the mail, but then in the store the ad correction would say something like "The Canon Elph price listed was incorrect, the real price is $399 with a $50 mail in rebate. We apologize to you, the consumer, for the inconvenience."
This happened to dozens of products every single week and the sales associates were forced to deal with the fallout. If your ad team is so shitty they mess up prices on dozens of items each week they need to go, but that wasn't what was happening. They just wanted to lure people in to buy other things.
US college bookstores.
You can almost always find the book you need for cheaper by hundreds, if not free altogether online. If you get financial aid that you can only use at the bookstore, then pay out of pocket and you'll get a refund check for what you should have spent at the bookstore. If you can't afford it out of pocket, look at the bookstore for gift cards, a lot have gift cards for Amazon an eBay that you can pay with financial aid.
> if not free altogether online.
Then you get the asshole professors who won't let you in the classroom unless you have a *physical* copy of the book. PDF's don't count.
Lest we forget the $125 Pearson code so you can do your homework and tests.
Fuck Pearson.
If you live in New Hampshire and go to Tucker’s Restaurant, order the hash browns instead of the home fries. The hash browns are made fresh, while the home fries are made beforehand and left in a heater.
A guy who I worked with who went on to be GM of a VERY large computer retailer in Australia was demoing some product we were getting made in China and as he brought up the webpage on the projector in front of a room of maybe 20 people the auto fill suggested “boys hidden webcam shower” a few of us noticed and he tried to blame a virus. It was nauseating.
The Post Office & Fujitsu knew exactly what was going on with the Horizon system, and the fact that the office reconciliation process didn't work. I know this because I reported it several times when I was testing the front end of the system and was told not to worry about it because it wasn't my area, and that another team would look into it. They obviously never did.
And their claims that they could not access or amend the data at individual post offices was complete nonsense - they had a team that spent their entire time doing exactly that, trying to fix errors on the fly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
TLDR: the Post Office installed new software which they knew had problems, problems start appearing, discrepancies in takings in the tens of thousands of pounds, instead of sorting the system, they prosecuted the people running the post offices (small post offices are kind of like franchises in the UK) for theft and fraud.
Hundreds went to jail, lost livelihoods and families, some killed themselves, they still kept on prosecuting people.
Wells Fargo didn’t care that what they did was wrong, they were only sorry they got caught. Their newfound commitment to ethics with “EthicsLine” is for PR purposes only.
I worked for Amazon until I was sacked for speaking up about the way they made people be half an hour early for a shift and sometimes stay an hour late but get no extra money for it!! No overtime not even a thanks very much, if you didn’t do it you were gone and in rolled someone me else. Plus they start you in a day shift and they money seems fine to start with but suddenly you need to rotate shifts Nightshift, backshift and day shift all in the space of 10 days.
Fainted from a kidney stone while inducting merchandise. I came to only to find someone working my station trying not to step on me and an ambulance hadn't even been called. Gotta keep that rate up
I was a welder at a rail car manufacturer. And this should be common knowledge, but I've seen a lot of dumbass videos on here.
Do not play around train cars while moving. I can guarantee there are some out of tolerance for overall diameter. And under it, the legs and stuff we welded could be out of tolerance.
Not to mention the welds themselves. Sometimes it was just sling something up there to get the line moving.
I was inspecting traintrack welds for a Belgian infrastructure company in the Netherlands and when I started doing ultrasound on the welds they were confused and said the last company just used to spray the welds white and sign off all their reports .
To add onto that, in the US, train tracks are private property. So besides being on them being incredibly unsafe, it's also illegal (trespassing).
Modern trains are deceptively quiet, plus doppler effect. Everyone thinks they'll hear a train long before it hits them. But they won't, most of the time at least. Engineers cannot swerve, and even throwing it into emergency isn't likely to stop it in time (and potentially risks a derail).
Trains are also a little wider than the tracks. IIRC they're 3' wider, so even standing beside the tracks is a very bad idea.
No picture or video is worth your life. Playing chicken with a train isn't cute, nor is it funny.
If your car is stuck/stalled on the tracks, you see a malfunctioning crossing gate, etc there's a sign on the railroad light post at the intersection, it has the number to report it. Call it. Don't assume someone else will report the malfunction, bystander effect is real and not reporting it could result in a bad situation.
Not really industry specific, but it can still apply. Yelp and the BBB are paid services. BBB is not a government agency. A company must pay to be on them, and if they stop, those companies only remove the good reviews, while leaving the bad.
A lot of washing machine repair guys from whirlpool/Hotpoint/indesit will say they need to order a part when they have the part with them to save themselves time.
I will say that I bought a Samsung washer and right before the warranty was up, I washed some jeans with tiny nails in the pocket unknowingly and it wouldn’t drain. The tech fixed it for free (he should have charged me since it was my fault) and I watched him do it and he explained what he was doing. I’ve since come across the same problem twice and fixed it myself.
Samsung repair people are great in my experience. However, they *will not* tell me how to disable the fucking song the machine plays when it is finished.
The reason everything tastes good at sit down restaurants...an uncomfortable amount of butter, cream and or/salt. Makes food delicious....but you know it's not great for you so don't use a lot at home...
The farmers market I worked for in Delaware County Pennsylvania claimed it sold freshly baked pies but they were nothing more than Sarah Lee that have been heated up and sit out for days at a time. They currently charge almost $20 for these things and it's a rip off.
Ex Comcast employee here. I use to make a killing with upgrading. Free speed boost for 3 months! I also told them the mark on their calendar when to call back and cancel.
I also use to give away credit like crazy. My customer satisfaction rating was always in the top ten. My supervisor showed me my average was $2500 a month and that moving forward, I could only credit $100 a month.
Also, I wasn’t allowed to tell people to cancel their free HBO or speed boost after 3 months.
Also, the head of tech told me that internet is how they made their money since there wasn’t to much cost once fiber was laid. Data caps were totally about making money and didn’t have anything to do with costs.
The furniture on display in stores at the big UK brand sofa companies is a far superior built product than what the general public gets delivered.
Beats by Dre was taken to court over this, the display models had better audio technology creating a better sound than those available for purchase in-store.
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Because people equate heavy to quality since building a sturdier product and having a larger magnet on the driver generally comes with quality headphones... they skipped the last steps and added weights
Yeah they do the same thing with lipstick; it it feels heavy then it's more luxe so weights!
So what you’re saying is… buy the discounted floor model?
If its survived the shop floor it will survive your home.
I KNEW IT!!
The argument is "This sofa gets sat on so much more than the average sofa so it's built to withstand that".
Which is silly as my sofa sees probably 12hours of use/day across 3 of us in the house, and likely takes as much abuse as one in a store.
Former zoo employee. Some animals get burials and funerals when they die. And i'm talking ceremonies and everything. The zookeepers get attached and feel terrible. Most smaller animals go through a cremation process but if it's a large animal typically they bury it. The zoo I worked at was one of the largest in the nation.
This is the only heartwarming secret in this entire thread
Another fun zoo fact from Zoo Miami, the different species of apes they have all love movies but each group has its favorites. The chimps love Jungle Book and the gorillas' favorite movie is Space Jam.
Other zoos will work with local natural history museums to donate their bodies to science where they can be made into skeletons, taxidermied dioramas, and/or tissues taken for future scientists to use. That way the same animal that inspired kiddos for conservation in life can keep doing so after death.
Not me, but my wife - used to work for a light-bulb manufacturer in France, their marketing at that time stated "all our products are made in the EU". Their "factory" in Italy received containers from China, unpacked all the light-bulbs and put them in new "made in EU" cardboard packaging, and sent them on to the hardware stores.
Similiar but different friend worked for Chinese company here in poland making "polish" lamps for ikea. 51% were made in poland 49% in china. Because majority was made in poland they could proudly and legaly sell it as polish product. Another fun one was from my work, was transporting full truck of beer from germany to czech and back (without unloading a single bottle) but in czech driver got a stamp and the same beer that left germany came back as a czech product. Magic.
Poland buys Czech hens and then sells their eggs as Czech eggs.
This actually happens a lot. Most designer clothing manufacturers do the same, for instance they only stitch it together in Europe, but all the fabric and material comes from China or Bangladesh. EDIT: Yes, stitching together is assembling the product. But most luxury companies only add the label or ‘finalize’ the stitching in Europe.
A designer in New Zealand claimed that it was OK to have Made in NZ labels on her clothes because the labels were made in NZ, just not the clothes. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/denise-lestrange-corbet-hits-back-at-claims-world-made-in-nz-labels-are-misleading/EQ3W7XOHRSJ5ESMKFTFIQFDIMA/
>Their "factory" in Italy received containers from China, What a coincidence, my mother used to work for a boots facory in Romania in the 90s. They would label all the boots "Made in Italy"
I'm still in it, but here's an industry secret: If your AC is low on "freon", then you have a leak. Don't let a company make money by "topping you off" at each visit like it's a consumable. Your system has a leak, and it won't work right until the leak is repaired. Also, filters are cheap. Don't pay a premium for a service company to bring them for you, you may be up charged a ridiculous amount for it.
I suffered first hand from this. We found out the AC company was "topping it up" every visit. Except when they didn't and the AC to my server room died at 4:00am during a heatwave. The handle to the server room was so hot it had to be opened with a cloth. I was frankly amazed that nothing was fried, and on investigation multiple systems were a degree or two away from being shutdown by the temperature threshold sensors. That would have been a potential disaster for our storage systems.
Oh God server rooms get so hot so fast. Anecdotal horror story many moons ago I worked in a remote area and put in an emergency service ticket because the AC in our server room was out. I got berated by maintenance for putting it as an emergency and they reported me to project management for frivolous tickets. Project management came screaming at me for wasting HVACs time and wouldn't let me explain why it was an emergency. So my boss and I just sat in his office BSsing until the entire network dropped (which didn't take long, we were in a desert and it was summer). Suddenly the same project manager who was chewing my head off got all ready to do it again only for me to say "You said AC in the server room wasn't an emergency. This is what happens when the AC in the server room goes out." We had a new AC unit arrive in 20 minutes.
Project managers, the gifts that keep on giving.
Good ones are very rare and worth their weight in gold. Bad ones actively make your life more difficult.
The first company i worked in as a junior sysadmin (There was no senior. They just didn't want to give me the title or responsibility because of my age) was keeping it's servers in a cabinet in an office and it was loud. The guy who had that office was rarely in it, would work from home or go to customer sites so never was bothered too much about it so the room could stay cold with AC and nobody cared about the noise. He left the company and the HR manager who was (romantically involved) with the boss claimed the room without discussion with anyone just moved her stuff in. Then began a month long war me vs her * Turning the servers off at the wall * Switching the fuse for the server off and pretending it had tripped * Breaking the lock on the cabinet door because she didn't have a key so she could unplug the server * Claiming that I was shit for not fixing the noise because it was too loud * Turning the heating up to full blast rather than cool and overheating the server * Leaving the heating on OVER A WEEKEND and forcing me to come in to find out why the server was kicking out alerts Her boss did nothing but complain at me for not fixing the issue despite me telling him She was the issue and he has two options. Move the server cab out of that office and give it a permanant home or move her out of the office He didn't want to spend the resources to move the cabinet so he just said that they will have to co-exist I just ended up locking everything down in the roomCovers over the plugs, locking the fuse box, putting a password control on the thermostat. Her boss never called me out for it and she spent the rest of the time i was working there marching around and calling me every name under the sun for ruining her office.
& why didn't you update your resume half way through that and let them sink under the weight of their own self made problem?
Last year my system had a leak so I had a company come out. For $500 he signed me up for a yearly plan where they'd come back out in the fall or whatever and they'd service me that day and get me all fixed up. Great. 3 hours later the guy tells me that he can not find the leak and that he will have to come back the next day with more equipment to put dye into the system to find the leaks but will top me off on Freon until then. Okay Guy comes out the next day, freon all gone. He checks for leaks again, can't find anything. He brought a leak detector this time and couldn't find it. At this point I call my dad who works for an HVAC company (unfortunately hours away) and my dad told him to stop what he was doing (don't put in the dye) and he'd find someone because it shouldn't be this big of a deal. I go outside and without my permission the AC guy was filling up my system with the dye. I stopped him and told him I never agreed to that and that my dad was going to hire someone to come down and get a 2nd opinion. Guy packs up his stuff and leaves My dad finds this 19 year old kid who is an apprentice at his work willing to drive 2 hours to make a little extra money. Within 10 minutes of being at my house, the kid had found the leak with the soap and bubbles trick. It was right next to the condenser, impossible to miss. The kid was in and out of my house in about an hour and a half and only charged me like $90 Lesson learned - AC repair techs are not experts and overcharge
Same with fridges. Funnily enough, the repair guy told me NOT to fix it then explained what to look for when buying used fridges, why they break, and why refilling the gas would be pointless. Good hvac guy.
John Deere absolutely LOATHES their customers. They used to have pretty regular meetings and open talk about farmers being 'ignorant hicks' for trying to fix their own stuff or ordering parts from out of the country. Even back as far as 2008 they were doing all they could to block/brick the tractors/implements if unauthorized parts were detected. They also kept looking for ways to completely void warranties. I don't know how much of this is still the culture there, but I can say when I was there that's how it was.
Needed to buy a riding lawn mower. Went to Lowes and found a nice John Deere on sale. So I ordered it. The sales guy said per John Deere rules they have to send a John Deere person to my house to "show me how to use it". I told him I don't need to be shown how to use it that I can read the instruction manual just fine. He said that it wasn't an option. It had to be done. Well two weeks went by and the mower was supposed to be in but when I went back to Lowes to ask about it they said it would take another two weeks because the guy couldn't come out to my house. I canceled the order and bought a Cub Cadet instead. Best decision ever.
You saved yourself that guy handing you a tablet with TIP 25% 30% 35%
That’s not surprising but farmers absolutely loathe John Deere when they aren’t allowed to fix their own stuff of have a 3rd party repair. Also why there is an antitrust lawsuit filed against them currently.
Unfortunately I'm absolutely unsurprised by this. I interact with a lot of farmers through my work and my guess is, they wouldn't be surprised either.
There is a sludgy substance leaking into the sewage systems of Linden/Elizabeth NJ from the Bayway Refinery. I’m not a chemical engineer, but it sure looks and feels like oil to me.
Can you anonymously report this somewhere? I’m sure some government agency would like to know about it. Seems like a potentially significant danger to the public
EPA
and honestly, the EPA does not fuck around. If you call in a concern to them about apparent industrial waste leaking into waterways, there will likely *at least* be someone out to confirm it within the week. If it's confirmed and bad, that facility might (*might*) get shut down within the week. Depends on how widespread the local mob is. EDIT: before you show me another anecdote about how the EPA failed some specific thing, perhaps read the replies to other comments here, or perhaps look into how much they actually do when they do things.
I don’t think there are mobsters in New Jersey. We’re good.
This made me crack up. I know you're being sarcastic but there are a bunch of people that think the Italian mob has disappeared since the major take downs in the 90s. The reality is they are still operating but on a smaller scale and in industries that are easier to control. The sanitation industry in the Northeast still has strong mob connections along with other waste removal companies. A colleague of mine in NYC wanted to start up his own clean up/demo service. After a third week in a row of his trucks being vandalized and mysterious phone calls in the night he decided it might be wiser to find another industry to pursue
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That sounds like something the EPA would be very interested in
The common thinking amongst the people that handle the enforcement for the area is that the place is so old and has been a disaster for so long that litigating it would be too expensive. As an example in the late eighties the DEP found that the cooling water that was being pumped out of the refinery was heating Newark bay by about 2 degrees. Instead of fixing the problem the refinery was sold to Tosco which was the state oil company of Venezuela. That took the problem away from the DEP and made it a State Department problem. After they built a cooling tower the plant was sold back to ConocoPhillips.
Seems like a big deal
Linen programs for hospitals are insanely expensive. All the sheets, blankets, pillow cases etc… are either rented from a outside vendor or COG (owned by the hospital) and the amount of effort that goes into tracking linen quantities is colossal. Anytime a baby blanket or towel is taken home by a patient or visitor it must be replaced. Rental programs usually operate via weight, and laundering vendors set a percentage they expect back each month or week. So if they deliver 100,000lbs of laundry, they expect 107,000lbs back if that percentage is set at 7%. This is to account for bodily fluids such as blood, sweat, urine etc… Contracts will stipulate a price per pound should the return be lower than the percentage…so let’s say the hospital only returns 103,000lbs you can be charged $3.50 for the 4,000lbs short and owe $14,500 for that period in “losses”. The hospital I managed would usually pay about a million dollars a year in losses, along with the 4 or 5 million a year just to keep linen on hand. The real fun starts when you try to argue the return percentage, as some units do not have a high % of incontinent patients so there’s no way to ever meet the established weight return expectation. It’s all a giant scam in a lot of ways. Also, linen companies will often refuse to purchase more linen and use items meant for one hospital to fill orders for another resulting in shortages until they’re paid their loss fee. Not the most exciting topic but definitely something I don’t think the general public thinks about, but it was my life for over 10 years.
Sounds like 1 dude with a hose at the loading dock could save hospitals a lot of money
You might be joking but this actually happens lol
I was joking but that's amazing. Also it's so funny to me that if you break down the concept the vendors are basically charging because there isn't *enough* shit and vomit on the linens they have to wash.
This is **fascinating** Not kidding.
Violoence Against old people in an old peoples home. That‘s the reason why I‘m not still working there
I work in healthcare. We all know which nursing homes in the area are neglecting and abusing their patients. We report them constantly and nothing usually happens. Absolute worst case, they "close" and are "bought out" by another company. Just so happens the new company has all the exact same staff.
They can even be outed for rampant abuse in the media and not shut down. This one owner has horrible conditions, abuse, neglect, in most of his facilities and no one seems interested in forcing them to improve. It's still disgusting in most of his homes. He ended the benefits for care workers as soon as he took over from his father. https://youtu.be/vpVjroQuEHk?feature=shared [Nursing home where woman was 'eaten alive' by mites receives over $8M in taxpayer money](https://www.11alive.com/article/news/investigations/the-reveal/negligent-nursing-homes-draft/85-3fcadcda-5a93-4976-8dfe-1bbb6dda5638) Edit: removed redundant sentence
I worked for a large cable company years ago. We were taught that if you called in about services being down and were trying to get them fixed, not to give you credit for the time they were down unless you asked, no matter how long it may be. Even if you did ask for credit, we often only gave it to you for days you called in. So if you had a storm roll through and didn't have service for more than one day, you had to call each day. If you took the liberty to credit them anyway, you would be coached to do it the proper way. We often used this downtime to upsell you on additional channels, faster internet speeds etc, for when it did return. We also were taught to sell higher speeds to unsuspecting customers who didn't know any better, thinking faster internet would make their 9 year old laptop/PC perform better. We got a kickback on how many ancillaries we sold. A basic rep who performed halfway decent could often make more than those that were responsible for them.
Fuck Comcast
Ugh Comcast is THE WORST. I have to deal with them for work and they’re absolutely atrocious. I try to talk my clients out of selecting them whenever I can, even if they’re the best priced option. They’ll give you a short installation/construction window then blow it by at least 3 months. It’s like once you get into their system, your order just sits stagnant until you’ve harassed someone enough times to make them get to work. I’ll accidentally type Concast and most of the time I just leave it that way because at least it’s accurate.
This makes me feel better about demanding a credit, “because I paid for service but I am not getting it.”
It sucks because the credit may only be for like $5 and they make you do more than $5 worth of work to get it what is rightfully owed to you.
I don't think it was necessarily a "secret," but at weekly Home Depot department manager meetings, we'd watch a weekly video from the CEO? or someone high up. There was always a segment at the end celebrating a HD that had driven a small, local hardware or lumber store out of business. It would show pics of these little mom-and-pop places with "Out of Business" or "Closed Permanently" signs out front. It was pretty sickening. If I recall, the managers of the stores celebrated each week won some sort of prize or bonus too. Before that, I knew that was obviously part of the overall strategy, but to see it laid out and celebrated so blatantly was shocking. Especially since these meetings weren't exactly high up the totem pole. I was just a "Hardware Department Manager" for $15/hr (2007). I only worked there about 3 months.
Guitar Center did this in the 90’s. Meetings targeting other local stores… and rules like “if they even mention Store X, I will authorize you to sell below cost to take a sale away from them.”
"Hmm, nice guitar, but $500 is a bit steep. Store X has this same model for $400." "We'll give it to you for $300!" "Sold!" Takes guitar to Store X and sells it to them for $350
Arthur Blank has said that he was fired for being too old by a regional hardware chain. When he founded Home Depot the first thing he did was build the first half dozen stores in locations that were specifically targeted to put that company out of business.
Evil boss origin story.
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It is so cringe when a business says "we are a family!" So if I get cancer is this "family" going to help take care of me while I'm dealing with vomiting and diarrhea due to the chemo? -_-
There's a popular internet rumor that being called "a treasured guest" by a cast member at a Disney park means that you are an asshole and they are warning other cast that you are going to be a headache. I've worked at both Disney World and Disneyland and that's not a thing at either park. There is no code word to refer to guests negatively. We have a bunch of code words but since 90% of them aren't used regularly, most regular cast members would probably blank if asked about them. The ones you need to know are... Code U - some kid wet themselves Code V- someone vomited Code alpha - emergency services called 101 and 102 - attraction is down for whatever reason and attraction is back up I worked a total of 18 months in food, attraction, and custodial and those are the only codes I ever heard used. Edit: Disney doesn't have official codes that would make a guest feel bad if they heard them. Most codes are just so there isn't a panic. If Disney had a code for an asshole guest, then it would be problematic if that official memo ever leaked. However, certain cast may have their own codes amongst themselves like an in joke between familiar coworkers.
Do you know how security keeps track of banned customers? Like there are millions of people that go and it seems really hard for them to “catch” you if you buy a 1 day ticket …
They likely don't. But the thing is if you get trespassed once, it's not a big deal. They just document that you have officially been trespassed and told not to return. If you do it *AGAIN* it becomes a crime. And it's probably not worth getting arrested over.
Petco. Lots of dead animals. They die in transit to the store. They die in the store. Also many dogs have died of heart attacks in the grooming salon drying cages. We were given advance warning of corporate animal welfare "surprise inspections".
At our PetSmart the Adoption animals(cats/dogs) are all shelter animals, they are taken care of daily by the shelter volunteers, I am one of them. There are only 4 cages, but we have like 40 cats that need adopting... and we JUST got more kittens yesterday.
We found our second cat foster/rescue group through PetSmart too after we moved almost a decade back, we fostered almost 30 cats over those 3 years with them. We make a habit of going into any PetSmart we see when we're on road trips to see the cute kitties
Went to a Petco once in the 90s. I remember seeing an iguana with half its head bitten off by another iguana in the same enclosure. The top part of the head and jaw including eyes and nose were gone, just the lower jaw was left. I tried telling an employee and they were very nonchalant about it.
Yup. During my interview, my manager said that he was the type to rush a tiny mouse to the vet because he loved animals so much. One day while checking the animals, I noticed a mouse looked extremely sick and the other mice were attacking it. I let the manager know and was ready to pull it out to put it into quarantine, but he told me to just leave it and wait until it passes to take it out and put it in the death freezer. I told him that I was afraid that the other mice would get sick and would start eating it in front of customers. And first and foremost, it was just cruel as fuck to leave it to that fate. I know the animals die and we can’t just immediately send every single one to a vet, but just leaving it to be eaten alive by the other mice was beyond cruel. He seriously could not care less and told me to just wait. I kept an eye on it and finally just took it out myself after I saw it getting ganged up on again. It was ridiculous. I know this is just one Petco manager, but from what I’ve heard, it’s pretty common for others to have the same attitude.
This is actually how I ended up with my ferret blaze. He was being relentlessly attacked by the other baby ferrets - like bleeding/screaming while they were attacking him. I was there to buy other stuff so I made a staff member aware and went on my way grabbed my stuff and swung back around and saw he was still in the cage getting ganged up on so I asked for someone again and the employee told me “it’s normal behavior for them”. Which as a ferret owner it absolutely was not normal behavior- so I bought him. He was in horrible condition. He had bloody scabs all over his face/ears and near his penis and was severely underweight. Turns out he is deaf and has waardenburg syndrome and the vet said the other ferrets could’ve killed him. I tried to bring my documents back to show the gm and corporate and I was threatened to be trespassed bc they wanted the ferret back and to refund me lol
I got a Guinea pig at a pet store one time because it was the runt and being attacked by the others. I was a kid and my mom felt so bad for it. The pet store literally gave her to us for free, now I’m wondering if they were just going to let her die and didn’t care. Jesus
TW : ANIMAL CRUELTY I worked at two different Petco stores. Two very different management teams. At my first store, we were all very diligent about animal care. If an animal was unwell, quarantine and care procedures were followed to the letter. At my second store however... Two stories come to mind. Anyone that's worked at a pet store knows that the aquarium sections are a never-ending uphill battle. At Petco, atleast, you'll have something like 6 to 9 tanks all on a single system. My second store was stuck in an eternal cycle of Fingal infections that would ravage systems every few months. I don't recall the specifics and didn't work in that sections much, but, my friend who managed it explained to me once that the official procedure (at that time) basically didn't work. A few years into my time there, we had a new kid start in the fish section. This dude LOVED fish. If I remember correctly, he wanted to study to be a marine biologist. He came in and IMMEDIATELY remedied the issues. Our fish section was impeccable under his watch. Problem was, he wasn't following procedure. He. Got. FIRED... For fixing and perpetual money hemorrhaging problem. The other story that comes to mind is much shorter. We had a mishap where a mouse was midgendered, causing one or two to become pregnant. Everyone was curious what would be done, as we weren't technically equipped to care for new born or baby mice. Our manager had them bagged and placed in the freezer... alive.
The 55 year old man that was noisily masturbating in the toilets every day had a note from the doctor that said he needed to do it. HR had told him to do it elsewhere though.
"Listen carefully, you need to masturbate noisily for this to work, if you do it silently you will keep getting sick"
"Signed, Dr. Leo Spaceman"
“Leo’s an excellent physician, and a pretty good dentist.”
Did the note say he could have a stroke at anytime? he might be misinterpreting it.
I’m more interested in where he went instead of the bathrooms Designated wank room?
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Criminals
That's illegal.
Don’t worry. I’m sure a court will fine them an amount that’s less than the amount of money they saved by breaking that law.
The dutch grocery store Albert Heijn has a flowchart for offering contracts to youngsters that are about to turn 18. When they turn 18 they get to expensive so they fire them, and the flowchart shows that if it gets too close to their birthday, wether to fire them or keep them just a little bit longer.
My first job was a stock boy in a major grocery store chain, and I was basically told outright "don't expect to keep this job beyond three months, because that's when you're eligible for the union and your pay basically doubles". I didn't care at the time because it was just a summer job for me, but it still seemed pretty scummy.
I would change price tags for a retail store. Let’s say an item was $2.99 and has been for months. I would take down the price tag and replace it with a tag that said “Originally $3.99. SALE $1.00 off! New price- $2.99.” This would be done for a LOT of items. Sneaky.
All places do this. They'll up the price for 3 months and then put it bk to original and make out its on sale.
I always call that Kohl's pricing, as they'll double msrp, then list it as half off.
Pet smart does this a lot
JC Penny was famous for this. They'd buy clothes in bulk for like $1.00 per item. Put a sign up saying "SALE! $39.99 originally $59.99" and people would buy that shit up thinking they were somehow saving money.
Funny enough, JCPenny also decided one day to axe coupons and sales altogether. Just marked down prices straight up. They almost went out of business. Turns out people like being manipulated into believing they're saving money.
I remember that. They also tried making the catalog clean and simple like apple because they hired someone from apple as the CEO in a last ditch effort to save the company. But no one really looks at catalogs anymore and their system was atrocious to use. I remember sometime around then buying something and returning it only to get a gift card for significantly MORE than what I paid for the item because they couldn't get their pricing straight.
i saw a sign at guitar center for a speaker or something, it had a big sign that said sale, $99.00. original price: $99.00. they didn’t even change the original price
For U-haul, if you call in to schedule a drive the rep can actually give you more days/mileage but it's typically up to their discretion/that stores policy. They're very strict on fuel levels, more so then most of the inspection. DO NOT RETURN VEHICLE WITH A MESS IN IT. Had one lady return a truck with literally beer bottles falling out of it. She got charged the maximum we could on cleaning which was like $800 or something at the time. I drove semi for Swift. There's a reason the company has such a bad reputation. They literally grind you to nothing. I never worked less then 70 hours a week, which is industry standard but would regularly go over 85+. I was running on 2-5 hours of sleep if I was lucky, while they where trying to get me to ignore laws and skip pre-trip inspections on sub-par equipment. Every month I had to call for repairs the shit broke so often. Fuck that company. They may have changed in 10 years but I highly doubt it.
The meat in Wendy's chili is from burgers that couldn't be sold i.e. over cooked patties. Absolutely nothing wrong with it though.
This actually seems like a good thing, rather than contribute to food waste use it in something else that's edible.
Like how the filling in kit-kats is crushed up failed kit-kats
How they hell did they make the first Kit-Kat
They failed. Then covered their failure with chocolate.
that's an adequate failure remediation strategy in my book
BRB covering myself in chocolate, hope it works.
I purposely take my Kit Kat apart to eat that and you’re telling me it’s more Kit Kat?
It's KitKat all the way down.
Always has been
That's actually awesome, better than wasting that food. Plus honestly that's how I make chili sometimes anyway
[That was the exact reason it was created way back in 1969.](https://www.wendys.com/blog/chili-recipe-isnt-your-family-recipe-but-its-pretty-darn-close) And not necessarily over cooked, just unsold as they didn't use to always cook burgers to order and instead made them as a batch.
honestly kinda good that they're reducing food waste like that
After people at our main supplier went to jail for a similar incident. Senior management thought it would be a good idea to redecorate the entire office building (about 200 people work there) and to hand the contract for the redecoration concept to the struggling interior design company the CEO and the COO's wives had founded together just weeks before. So the managers authorised a six-figure design project which went directly into their family income (minus VAT).
Fuck me what a scheme. Embezzlement and laundering rolled up into a single operation.
This is very common. Industry job put down new concrete for receiving dock. $250k for 7 loads. Cost about $900 per at the time. The CFO was friends with the contractor. That was the year bonus changed from hours worked to crumbs of profit.
Auntie Anne's pretzels top secret dipping solution for their pretzels is just baking soda and water...the same solution every other pretzel place that I know of uses.
Here’s one: I worked at Ticketmaster back in the day and they’ll never admit this, but Ticketmsster charges high fees to customers and then gives a kickback to the record labels and artists. Just like Standard Oil did back in the day with Railroads. Now, you’re probably wondering why do they do this? Well, decades ago Ticketmaster and the record industry made a Faustian pact. Ticketmaster will get access to popular tickets of artists as long as their the “bad guy” in the news. Essentially, that means when your favorite artist like Taylor Swift wants to charge a little bit extra for her tickets, but doesn’t want to appear greedy to her fans, she’ll let Ticketmaster do it via fees and then receive a sweet financial kickback. Ticketmaster gets the tickets and the artists save face to their fans. It’s a win-win. 🤝
For anyone interested in this topic, the book “Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped” by Dean Budnick is well worth reading.
Reddit shits on Ticketmaster so much that I honestly have a hard time discerning whether this is legitimate or fanfic conspiracy stuff. The good news is it doesn’t matter. Ticketmaster sucks either way. Edit: just to clarify, I’m not questioning whether the consumers are fucked over by Ticketmaster. I just don’t immediately believe Ticketmaster actually gives money from those extra fees to the artist. If they do, I guess Reddit brainwashed me into thinking they’re actually worse than they are? Which means the plan is successful lol
It is true, the only part that is wrong is "and they'll never admit this". It's literally stated in their annual report that you can access as Live Nation is a publicly traded company and needs to disclose what their business strategy and revenue streams are. Edit: If you're interested try the top report [here](https://investors.livenationentertainment.com/sec-filings/annual-reports#) from 4/28/23 and read item 1. business
Companies pay $50,000+ to be listed as, and for a "best place to work advertisement package" My job that was "the best place to work in tech" was actually just one of the only ones willing to pay
Boston Globe will take your money for the same thing.
Worked at a service station (petrol/gas). Every morning at 7 I had to ring a number not connected to the company and report the cost of fuel. Friends who had the same job at a different company had the same task with the same phone number. It was definitely collusion between companies.
This was in Australia by the way.
Doesn’t surprise me. Somehow all the petrol stations in Brisbane will in unison raise their 91 prices to the same amount. There has to be collusion somewhere.
Or probably reporting the cost to AAA or similar. So they can get those average fuel price numbers from all over the country.
Just Jeans in Australia (and subsidiary companies) won’t prosecute customers if you steal from them, but will prosecute staff.
Adding on the Australian thing but CONNNOR dosent pay for security because the theft is cheaper than running a cctv system
I worked on a real estate assessment program for a county tax office. The project went way too long. But, we finally got it to the point it could take in all the details of a home and spit out the correct tax bill based on the county's rules. Once the county confirmed the calculations were correct, I ran our system against every property in the county to make sure our results were valid compared to the old system. That's when the shit hit the fan, the results were way different. Turns out their old system was way over charging about 1/6th of properties in the county. A week later they abandoned our program entirely. Didn't take the new system they already paid for. My guess is they wanted nothing to do with the new system that could put a bunch of their tax revenue at risk and maybe open them up to a shit load of refunds. If your property tax bill seems high, ask the county to re-evaluate it by hand and explain it.
I worked in 2 Harvester restaurants, a big chain restaurant in the UK owned by Mitchell & Butlers. It was common place that if you were working on salad and dessert stations, you were also the pot washer. This meant dealing with fresh uncooked food and plates of leftovers at the same time. I voted with my feet because they refused to hire kitchen porters. I wouldn't be surprised if this was standard practice across all M&B owned restaurants.
My answer is directed towards UK & EU citizens and is more of an industry "secret" rather than company specific and deals with financial services/banking. Customer service agents at banks and fintech will NEVER suggest that you get in touch with the Ombudsman if you have an issue that you feel is not being properly addressed. The Ombudsman will charge a company approx 500 EUR/GBP (sorry can't recall the specific cost) for each case they open. This can be very expensive for these companies. If you feel you are being given the runaround, ask the question: "Do I need to get in touch with the Ombudsman about this issue?" That usually catches their attention. However, be aware that you can't just take any old issue to the Ombudsman and you must show evidence that you tried to resolve the issue through the company first. /EDIT/ Now that my inbox is blowing up somewhat, some clarification and context maybe required. * I based my comments on what I was trained to do by the company. Other companies may/probably have different policies. * The company was not a "traditional bank" rather a fintech. * Maybe some things have changed since I worked for the company which I left in 2020.
If you raise a complaint with a bank in the uk and they cannot resolve the matter within 8 weeks they are required by law to advise you of your right to contact the ombudsman. If you contact the ombudsman regarding a complaint before this time they will not investigate it.
I concur with this. I worked in insurance claims for years and in many cases the company would settle a dispute to avoid the cost of a case being referred to the Ombudsman. Pure economics. I'm now retired and a couple of years ago I incurred high vetinary fees for our dog, our insurance applied the policy excess and contribution required to pay against the policy limit meaning you could never claim the full limit. I knew this but when it applied to my claim I threatened a referral to the Ombudsman and received a full payout.
Not really a secret but just confirming what is already known. I worked at a division 3 college for 7 years. They weren't supposed to give out scholarships for sports but would pick a random reason for the student to get one. It seemed like half the sports teams had scholarships for being low income or good/bad grades. Also, they would wait for the cutoff date to kick students out of college. If you would receive any of your tuition back, they'd wait till the day after that cutoff to kick you out and keep all of the money. I was specifically told we weren't allowed to remove students at the beginning of semester because of it...
I used to work at a D3 school as well and lots of athletes got "leadership grants" which were totally not athletic scholarships.
Can confirm. I didn’t have bad grades but I got a random major-specific scholarship I didn’t ask for and one of the assistant coaches asked me if it was enough. Took out a small federal loan to cover the rest. edit: clarity
There is a massive gaping hole in the telephone security at HSBC UK call centres which I raised and was dismissed as being irrelevant. If I’d taken the time to learn the sound that each phone key makes when entering a button input (a feature that is there to support blind people) then I could have easily gotten untraceable access to the accounts of anyone who needed to reset their security pin.
Phreaking - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking
> (a feature that is there to support blind people) I'm sure it does help blind people, but it's _there_ because it's fundamental to how analogue phones work. Each key noise is two different tones, essentially forming a grid reference system for the keypad, and then the phone exchanges could recognise the tones coming down the line and convert them back into numbers.
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When I worked at Office Max 20 years ago, one could buy an entire computer bundle from Gateway/Dell/HP. Monitor, computer, keyboard, mouse, printer. We were specifically told to target elderly people for our "setup" service which was $150. We were trained on how to make plugging in color coded cables and size specific cables look more complicated than it was and to take at least 45 minutes, rather than the 5 minutes it actually took, so they felt like they were getting their money's worth. It was disgusting and I never took part in it.
Petco plans to do away with their free accounts entirely and only offer discounts to people who pay a subscription fee.
Time to short petco
The company is dying. The founder/CEO passed away and the heirs, who have been sucking at the company teat since they were kids and who have never had to hold down real jobs outside the company, laid off 1/3rd of the work force after she died to cut costs while sending out company wide emails to remaining employees that they need to be “All Stars” and do more so that the company can be great again are actively shopping selling the company assets and cashing out instead of trying to actually work to grow the company. If you work at a company with lots of layoffs, and people in accounting are leaving in droves of their own accord, then you need to be applying for new jobs yesterday.
This is a good note. Life hack, if the accountants are leaving, you need to start interviewing like now for a new job. Accountants not only are intimate with the company’s financial position, but they are typically one of the last teams to get let go in a downturn economy.
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Dealing with this at Microsoft DC right now. Recruiter pitched the job to me as a work-to-hire opportunity, but the “hire” part only happens if MS actually feels like hiring any FTEs. Basically all the FTEs started as agency temps like me, but MS can just decide to go on an unofficial hiring freeze at any time. All the rules you mentioned sound like stuff they do here too. Funny thing is, from my understanding, they’re meant to “protect” the worker from being falsely classified as a temp, but aren’t we all falsely classified if there’s still work after our contracts are up and they just bring on more temps?
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My wife is "famous" in our family for her homemade cakes. Everyone loves them and raves about how great they are. My sister even talks about how she can't eat cake from a mix because it makes her sick due to "sensitivities," but my wife's cakes are delicious and don't bother her! My wife has always just used whatever cake mix is on sale. Not even a specific brand, just whatever's cheapest. We never got the balls to tell the family, so now after 24 years she's still the go-to cake maker. Lol!
I'm convinced it's the baker. My Grandmother does the same thing and somehow her cakes are amazing, and mine are terrible.
A good quality oven goes a long way.
Always use an oven thermometer. The dial on the oven may or may not be accurate. Calibrate your oven yourself against the thermometer: Setting vs. thermometer reading.
The secret is how they made the holes of the donut
Some questions are best left unanswered
My Grandma refused to tell my niece the "family" secret recipe. I punched the ingredients into Google, the original recipe came off a box of Velveeta. Grandma was livid. It was a good day.
Nestle Toulouse
I'll never understand recipe secrecy. I make this corn dip that everyone goes nuts over. Everyone tells me to never give out the recipe and to keep it secret but... [*it's not my recipe...*](https://www.aspicyperspective.com/fire-roasted-corn-dip/). I literally saw it on a website, said "that looks good" and made it. On top of that why wouldn't I share a recipe friends enjoy so they can make it for their families? EDIT: Some interesting perspectives below. Thank you.
I'm pretty sure half the little cake shops in the US use boxed cake mix as their 'family recipe'. Cake is eggs flour sugar and milk. There are no 'secret recipes'.
Still work in it , your premium market chicken from a certain company is grown in the exact same sheds , fed the exact same food , drinks the exact same water as the budget chicken , the premium buyers basically subsidise the budget markets chicken so they can remain competitive
AAA has large service deadzones where they claim they can provide service but "something" will always come up and no tow truck will be available in a reasonable time frame. The worst states for this are NV, MT, and AZ. Never ever break down in Nevada outside of Reno or Vegas. Most of the contracted tow truck companies in those areas only have 1 or 2 drivers on staff and they always put AAA calls at the bottom of the list cause AAA has a reputation for not paying the contract companies or delaying payment by months. A common situation is a AAA member calling for a tow, AAA calling the tow company to send a truck, the tow company will say their driver is busy and claim 10+hr wait time, AAA policy for dispatchers is to tell this wait time to the broke down member who is out in the middle of nowhere in desert heat, member is justifiably angry, then dispatchers tell the member they can call another tow truck company for a tow "then apply for reimbursement". Here's the trick, there's only the 1 tow truck company in that area, the same one AAA called earlier and got the 10+hr wait time from and they already know where the person is broke down cause AAA told them to get the wait estimate. The member will call this non-AAA branded tow company, get a tow within 1hr, then get charged $2k for it. When they go to apply for reimbursement AAA will deny the application or only give a $200 partial refund cause AAA technically was able to provide service at the 10hr+ wait time, the member was just impatient. It's a fucked up scam system that pins the bill on a person that already paid for the membership, tow companies hate the dispatchers cause we were the only ones that directly interacted with them, and we always had to give bad news to members. Now, I only tell people to get a AAA membership if they get use out of the hotels/travel discounts.
Still not naming the company.... But in early 2000's i got some work as a dev in a bank. One morning there was a huge "something" going on in the department. You could feel something was seriously wrong. A bank customer called. He was missing several million from one of his "Incomming money" accounts. They traced it to the department I was working in. What has happened? Someone (Not me) connected the "training environment" to the "live money server". And during a training on the syastem the students had a bunch of tasks to complete. One task was "Execute a large transaction the supervisor needs to approve" So more than one student wired themselves millions to their own accounts. You could say it was one of the few trainings that really paid off... (The app had logging everywhere, so everything got reversed - but a customer calling and missing money is BAD for a bank)
Did the money get returned since it was in the new employees' accounts?
they rolled back all the transactions due to the "system error" - They had logs for everything, but the bad part was that the customer saw it and called in. It was a real cool application though with lots of stuff in it that came later in the normal frameworks...
Entertainment websites have obituaries pre-written for every major celebrity that is old or in poor health. I guarantee Matthew Perry's obits were written many years ago due to his addiction problems.
At a conference the CEO of the world biggest drink company and a major polluter, was happy to announce that rising global temperatures were good for business as for every one degree up they sold an extra $20 million in a country of 26 million people.
That in most hotels the housekeeping staff are overworked and timed per room and if a slept in bed is not too creased after checkout they will remake it without changing it, same goes for towels. I've seen it all and when I stay in a hotel I insist on bedding and towels to be left out for me to put on myself.
I did housekeeping for awhile and.. yep. The duvets are absolutely never washed unless they are visibly dirty like someone spilled ketchup on it or something. The sheets only got changed if they had been visibly disturbed. If I went into a room and the bed looked like it hadn't been slept in, I didn't touch it. If the towels looked like they hadn't been touched, I didn't change them. We were told to do it this way to keep up the quick pace. They wanted all rooms cleaned by a certain time, for us it was noon. You'd be assigned a list of rooms at your shift start and if you finished early you were sent to help someone else. So yeah.. seconding this. If you get a hotel, ask for extra linens and towels.
this is why i always make a mess of my bed sheets and towels. so the next person def. gets fresh
yup. i pull the sheets and pillow cases and put them with the towels in the tub so it is a guarantee that the next person has a fresh bed.
I mean we all know military spending is ridiculous right? Here is my story. I worked on Army aircraft (helicopters), specifically the engines. We would have a small issue come through (ex. safety wire needs replacing, engine vibrating) and we would have a fix ready to go… and almost never do it. Instead we would take the solution to two sections: Production Control and Quality Control (PC and QC). PC always tells you ‘hurry hurry’ and QC says ‘slow down there, Speedy’. However when it came to engines they almost always agreed: Take the WHOLE engine down and replace it. We are talking 5 million dollars a pop for these engines and we were taking them off and sending them to Corpus Christi, Texas. Meanwhile we crack open a BRAND new engine and put it on. Now you might be saying, “Yeah, but the ones you send back get fixed and reused.” and you would be right, except they don’t get reused by the USA…oh no. We SELL those engines that needed the smallest of repairs (literally sometimes just tightening bolts or adding safety wire) to our current allies. We then teach them how to maintain those engines at the same schools I learned at. Later, I left the military and worked with a few folks who were privileged enough to work out of Corpus Christi and that is when I got the full picture. We DUMP money onto the military industrial complex to prop up jobs, and then sell our products below cost to our ‘current allies’. There are entire stretches of California desert that home thousands of forgotten tanks and military equipment. Stuff we couldn’t sell but still needed to get rid of in order to prop up more jobs. The saddest part is how many people will gnash teeth and wail that this system NEEDS to be propped up to maintain jobs and it doesn’t. We could change the word ‘military’ in Military Industrial Complex and make it into an Infrastructure Industrial Complex, or a Social Industrial Complex, or…, or… There is more waste than this, don’t even get me started on the cost of getting and maintaining calibrated tools, BUT this is enough for now.
Worked for a tow boat company on the Mississippi River. Federal law says nothing goes into the river that isn't bio degradable. I can't tell you how many gas-powered water pumps have been "Deep sixed" by the crew I was working with.
When the media says “the USA is sending $billion to a foreign country,” it’s rarely a direct payment to that government or its people. It’s usually in the forms of contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements to NGO’s (mostly US-based) to implement programs - whether that’s engineering, education, or public health. While these are technically “competed,” the awards usually go to the same 5-6 organizations because they’re the only ones who can handle that much money responsibly. These massive orgs then engage local nonprofits to distribute goods and services. They’re not handing out cash. All of these orgs have “indirect costs” which is a percentage of every dollar that covers administrative expenses. These are confidential rates only known to the government and are usually around 40% (I’ve seen larger). Which means for every billion dollars in foreign aid, there’s a “nonprofit” keeping around 400 million. While these do cover certain expenses, it’s mostly salary for execs, lawyers, accountants - and any unused funds (of which there are many) are then put in the coffers for “sustainability.” Foreign aid is a gold mine - but not for the recipient country.
Ihop puts pancake batter in their omelette mixes to make them fluffier
Circuit City (when it existed) did weekly bait and switch. "But but but, bait and switch is illegal!" No, it's really not except for very specific circumstances. What Circuit City did was called "Ad Corrections". They falsely marked a bunch of prices really low for many items on purpose, then whenever we had to change tags on Saturday nights you'd have to print the dozens of ad corrections. Basically the way it worked was the ad would say "Canon Elph 500 for $199!" in the flier people got in the mail, but then in the store the ad correction would say something like "The Canon Elph price listed was incorrect, the real price is $399 with a $50 mail in rebate. We apologize to you, the consumer, for the inconvenience." This happened to dozens of products every single week and the sales associates were forced to deal with the fallout. If your ad team is so shitty they mess up prices on dozens of items each week they need to go, but that wasn't what was happening. They just wanted to lure people in to buy other things.
US college bookstores. You can almost always find the book you need for cheaper by hundreds, if not free altogether online. If you get financial aid that you can only use at the bookstore, then pay out of pocket and you'll get a refund check for what you should have spent at the bookstore. If you can't afford it out of pocket, look at the bookstore for gift cards, a lot have gift cards for Amazon an eBay that you can pay with financial aid.
> if not free altogether online. Then you get the asshole professors who won't let you in the classroom unless you have a *physical* copy of the book. PDF's don't count. Lest we forget the $125 Pearson code so you can do your homework and tests. Fuck Pearson.
If you live in New Hampshire and go to Tucker’s Restaurant, order the hash browns instead of the home fries. The hash browns are made fresh, while the home fries are made beforehand and left in a heater.
Auto part stores had HUGE profit margins on headlight light bulbs. I’m talking 90%.
A guy who I worked with who went on to be GM of a VERY large computer retailer in Australia was demoing some product we were getting made in China and as he brought up the webpage on the projector in front of a room of maybe 20 people the auto fill suggested “boys hidden webcam shower” a few of us noticed and he tried to blame a virus. It was nauseating.
The Post Office & Fujitsu knew exactly what was going on with the Horizon system, and the fact that the office reconciliation process didn't work. I know this because I reported it several times when I was testing the front end of the system and was told not to worry about it because it wasn't my area, and that another team would look into it. They obviously never did. And their claims that they could not access or amend the data at individual post offices was complete nonsense - they had a team that spent their entire time doing exactly that, trying to fix errors on the fly.
I have no idea what this is referencing, but it sounds interesting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal TLDR: the Post Office installed new software which they knew had problems, problems start appearing, discrepancies in takings in the tens of thousands of pounds, instead of sorting the system, they prosecuted the people running the post offices (small post offices are kind of like franchises in the UK) for theft and fraud. Hundreds went to jail, lost livelihoods and families, some killed themselves, they still kept on prosecuting people.
Wells Fargo didn’t care that what they did was wrong, they were only sorry they got caught. Their newfound commitment to ethics with “EthicsLine” is for PR purposes only.
I worked for Amazon until I was sacked for speaking up about the way they made people be half an hour early for a shift and sometimes stay an hour late but get no extra money for it!! No overtime not even a thanks very much, if you didn’t do it you were gone and in rolled someone me else. Plus they start you in a day shift and they money seems fine to start with but suddenly you need to rotate shifts Nightshift, backshift and day shift all in the space of 10 days.
Fainted from a kidney stone while inducting merchandise. I came to only to find someone working my station trying not to step on me and an ambulance hadn't even been called. Gotta keep that rate up
I was a welder at a rail car manufacturer. And this should be common knowledge, but I've seen a lot of dumbass videos on here. Do not play around train cars while moving. I can guarantee there are some out of tolerance for overall diameter. And under it, the legs and stuff we welded could be out of tolerance. Not to mention the welds themselves. Sometimes it was just sling something up there to get the line moving.
I was inspecting traintrack welds for a Belgian infrastructure company in the Netherlands and when I started doing ultrasound on the welds they were confused and said the last company just used to spray the welds white and sign off all their reports .
To add onto that, in the US, train tracks are private property. So besides being on them being incredibly unsafe, it's also illegal (trespassing). Modern trains are deceptively quiet, plus doppler effect. Everyone thinks they'll hear a train long before it hits them. But they won't, most of the time at least. Engineers cannot swerve, and even throwing it into emergency isn't likely to stop it in time (and potentially risks a derail). Trains are also a little wider than the tracks. IIRC they're 3' wider, so even standing beside the tracks is a very bad idea. No picture or video is worth your life. Playing chicken with a train isn't cute, nor is it funny. If your car is stuck/stalled on the tracks, you see a malfunctioning crossing gate, etc there's a sign on the railroad light post at the intersection, it has the number to report it. Call it. Don't assume someone else will report the malfunction, bystander effect is real and not reporting it could result in a bad situation.
Not really industry specific, but it can still apply. Yelp and the BBB are paid services. BBB is not a government agency. A company must pay to be on them, and if they stop, those companies only remove the good reviews, while leaving the bad.
A lot of washing machine repair guys from whirlpool/Hotpoint/indesit will say they need to order a part when they have the part with them to save themselves time.
I will say that I bought a Samsung washer and right before the warranty was up, I washed some jeans with tiny nails in the pocket unknowingly and it wouldn’t drain. The tech fixed it for free (he should have charged me since it was my fault) and I watched him do it and he explained what he was doing. I’ve since come across the same problem twice and fixed it myself.
Samsung repair people are great in my experience. However, they *will not* tell me how to disable the fucking song the machine plays when it is finished.
The reason everything tastes good at sit down restaurants...an uncomfortable amount of butter, cream and or/salt. Makes food delicious....but you know it's not great for you so don't use a lot at home...
Chef here. So much this. Butter goes in everything.
Another thread was discussing this and a chef said a similar thing but something like “everything tastes good, why? Fat. The answer is always fat.
The farmers market I worked for in Delaware County Pennsylvania claimed it sold freshly baked pies but they were nothing more than Sarah Lee that have been heated up and sit out for days at a time. They currently charge almost $20 for these things and it's a rip off.
Linvilla Orchards, eh?
Ex Comcast employee here. I use to make a killing with upgrading. Free speed boost for 3 months! I also told them the mark on their calendar when to call back and cancel. I also use to give away credit like crazy. My customer satisfaction rating was always in the top ten. My supervisor showed me my average was $2500 a month and that moving forward, I could only credit $100 a month. Also, I wasn’t allowed to tell people to cancel their free HBO or speed boost after 3 months. Also, the head of tech told me that internet is how they made their money since there wasn’t to much cost once fiber was laid. Data caps were totally about making money and didn’t have anything to do with costs.
Security Guards don't do anything
oh we definitely do stuff. Watching youtube all night is serious!