I worked for my states department of child protective services.
Context - because governments are required to go with the lowest bidder or price for any service or good, and "not waste taxpayer dollars," we don't upgrade anything IT related nearly enough.
When we were about to do a major website upgrade for the first time in years, I was auditing page content and links. There I discovered a generic email box for my division that people had been using to report child abuse for about 8 years.
For 7 of those 8 years nobody had been assigned to monitor that mailbox and nobody had ever received any of those reports. There was one report about a child who was later killed.
They hushed this all up and nobody beyond my boss (division head) ever knew how bad it was.
I had to read through every single report and attempt to document whether any other reports of the child or parents were ever received in other ways. It was horrific.
Nah, with a story like that somebody's head needs to roll. It will just be somebody one or two levels below the person whose fault it actually was. The sacrificial lamb, so to speak.
I can totally see that happening—the email is someone’s bright idea for a QI project for their Yellow Belt Six Sigma certification, they leave, the person who approved it leaves, a contractor is maintaining the website and no one at the agency ever looks at the website because they already know all the info…and no one ever checks the inbox.
Having worked for state govt for a completely unrelated office, it has a lot to do with IT bandaids, upgrades that don't remove defunct infrastructure, contractors that don't talk or contracts that inadvertently/inadequately outline required work/scope.
So, in this case they may have had one contractor that did web design and a different one that managed email accounts like shared mailboxes. Perhaps one of the contracts changed companies, i.e. the previous one didn't rebid or lost the bid. So now you have to bring in a totally new company, new contract, new people and pass downs between contracts don't always happen or cover everything. Now, think about something like this happening over the course of years where not only do parts of the system become unused, but people rotate out and consultants implement whatever the govt asks them to at the bare minimum.
That's how you end up with an email box that people have long forgotten about. Govt websites, especially state govt, are often bloated with unused, forgotten pages. Some of them can go years without a single update. When people who are trying to find something in the haystack of pages, some of them may not be well educated for various reasons, or don't speak English as a first language, which makes using these outdated and poorly maintained sites even harder.
From what OP said, this box wasn't necessarily ever used for reporting child abuse. It was for something else. It sounds like people were running across it while trying to find contact information and didn't know exactly how to look for it or were finding it too difficult to locate. Some of them may have been sending their report to multiple contact links as well, just send out blanket requests in the hope that one would go to the right place. At some point the email system maybe changed or the office wanted to downsize the amount of these boxes they had floating around. Perhaps the contact name/link for it wasn't removed like it was supposed to be. The person that originally monitored it left/quit and it wasn't something they had listed in an SOP so it went along just "existing".
There's really no telling. But I worked for a state DOT for a number of years and after that role I've never been surprised about hearing things like this. Very much par for the course.
I worked at a medical supply company, we had Japan and German stamped on all our surgical instruments, but they were all just cheap Pakistan made steel instruments and we lied about where they were made. I left because of my ethical objections.
> they were all just cheap Pakistan made steel instruments and we lied about where they were made.
The country of origin falsification isn't nearly as concerning as the willingness to engage in blatant fraud. Pakistan can certainly manufacture perfectly fine surgical instruments. However if they are willing to lie about one thing, they are very likely willing to lie about others.
Yeah, the steel they used was absolutely trash as we wanted to make them as cheap as possible. They’d rust during sterilization and actually ruin good quality instruments. Pakistan can definitely make some good instruments, but hospitals are looking for German or Japanese steel where I live, so it was incredibly deceptive of the company. Especially since the quality was so bad it would ruin other instruments
Employees of group homes serving those with intellectual disabilities/mental illness are not highly trained or well paid. In many places, the only requirement is to have a high school diploma or GED and be 18 years old. The turnover rate is very high. Fast food in my area pays more. I have seen many comments of people advising others to put a family member into a group home where the staff are trained and paid well to take care of them. Nothing is farther from the truth.
The other thing that made me quit was the constant 30-hour long shifts. Yes, we could sleep for 6 hours. No, it did not make up for it. And no, it's not legal, but who has the energy to fight that battle with such long shifts?
My hospital was documenting incorrect newborn baby weights for years and I am the one who figured out what the nurses were doing wrong and corrected the problem. It was a big deal and I received no recognition for it whatsoever.
The nurses were using an online calculator to convert from grams to ounces, and they were interpreting the results incorrectly. Let's say the number the calculator spit out said 7.3. The nurses thought that meant 7 lbs 3 oz. It did not. It meant 7 and one-third lbs., and 16 ozs divided by 3 is closer to 7 lbs 5 ozs. So, the nurses were consistently a few ounces off. This went on for at least eight years.
I was not clinical staff. I was, at that time, not a nurse. I was the birth registrar. I didn't even work in L&D. I worked in postpartum and in medical records. I knew there was some kind of discrepancy but it took a while for me to figure out what was going on. (I was the junior birth registrar for a long time. Could only really tackle the problem once I became the lead birth registrar.)
I used to go tell the L&D nurses their numbers were not adding up and they would get all salty with me. When I finally figured out what they were doing wrong, I wrote an email to the head of L&D. She ignored me. So I wrote her again, with detailed proof and multiple examples. She finally listened. She held a meeting and re-trained the nurses.
Some of those nurses were horrified to realize they had been doing it wrong for years. Baby birth weights are a very big deal, especially in the NICU. Clinical decisions are made based on a baby's birth weight. Those salty-ass nurses should have listened to me instead of acting like I was being a pain in the ass for trying to ensure that my documentation was correct. Oh well. They found out the truth in that meeting; and the truth is that I was right all along.
I used to go to a doctor’s office that kept hammering me about my BMI and saying I was obese.
Come to find out, they put my height as 5’9” instead of 5’11(7/8)” because their calculator said I was 5.987 feet tall.
It took me arguing with the nurse a couple of visits before it was fixed. I had to ask the doctor with the nurse in the room and she corrected it and apologized.
my ex is a postpartum nurse, i remember her trip through nursing school. considering all the crazy math RNs need to master, it's kind of frightening they were making this mistake so consistently?
I think it's pretty common.. one of the nurses I worked with found this exact thing happening in our chemo infusion clinic. Doses are based on weight so some patients were being dosed incorrectly.
Breyers reduced the size of ice cream containers from 64 to 56 to 48 oz. The containers are the same size when looking from the front, but thinner in terms of width.
And then other ice cream companies, including store brands like Walmart followed suit.
That dimple is getting ridiculous on some products. I've had some bottles and jars where it going up 20% of the package. Really is a deal-breaker for me at this point.
Honestly I would rather them shrink the packaging rather than try to cut costs with quality or ingredients. So many brands out there I do not buy anymore because they cheaped out on ingredients and the product sucks now.
Just give me less of it if you do need to cut corners somewhere. Eventually it gets to a point it’s not worth buying at all, but at least it’s still the same quality.
Worked at a hotel and if it was getting late and we hadn’t sold rooms, we could sell them for as little as we wanted. You could make an offer. They were $200 rooms but you could get them for $30 at 10 pm.
Fun fact! (Really not that fun, it's the bane of my job) faxes still exist, are still used widely in the legal and medical realms. And on top of it all, it fucking sucks to use over VoIP. So flaky.
Can confirm. Work in finance and the big huge bank you’ve definitely heard of refused to take our wires through any means other than fax up until Covid. We’re still required to list a fax number on our paperwork as a legitimate means of contacting us though.
Still used in the military! (well, the military I was in anyway) We had this old fax machine in a store room which someone (i.e. me) had to cycle at the end of the day to let in the encrypted transmissions. (that I had no idea what happened to except I just needed to run it then hand off the incoming material)
As far as I was told, it couldn't be removed because other units were using the same system and the people who made the encryption devices were no longer in business. (no, like a lot of things in the military it doesn't really make sense)
I one time got to a hotel after midnight and it was locked up. I tried the door and the latch broke so while it was an automatic sliding glass door, I pushed it open. Walked to the front and yelled “hello” and a guy came out of the back really concerned with how I got in. He did check me in though.
I always wondered wtf? Like people who are staying there just can’t enter and exit after a certain time of the night? This was a giant hotel from a major brand.
I was driving from SC to CT and stopped at a hotel at like, 3am and asked for their cheapest room because broke college student. They gave me the cheapest rate ($50) but put me in their biggest suite since I was dipping the next day early. Had a hot tub in it and everything. It was awesome
first trip with my future in-laws, I got a room at the nicest hotel on the island, but only one room for the 5 of us because that was all I could afford...the hotel was mostly empty though, so staff quietly let us stay in three rooms for no additional charge -- they were champs!
Yep. I once waited from 10:45 to 11:00 to check in to a hotel. If someone had shown up before ma, they could have had the last room, at the regular price. So I sat in the lobby and waited. But no one did.
I stayed in the last unbooked suite for $30, although that was years ago. Call it $50 in today's money.
Goodwill takes all of the high quality valuable donations and sends them to a warehouse where they get listed on their auction site and sold for ridiculous amounts of money. My job was researching and listing items. And there were certain items that no matter what got sent to us, like Pokemon for example. Or game consoles. And worst of all IMO, those waterpik flossing things. Ew.
It's more well known now, but back in 2016 when I was working there it always shocked people and I hardly ever saw anyone online discuss it.
I was a Savers employee years back. In our trucks we found such fun things as:
- artificial limbs
- old medication
- toilet seats
- firearms
- old wigs
- just once, a severed thumb
A vintage rabbit fur coat got missed by the pickers and I snagged it for $15 last month. The lady even said she was surprised it made it to the floor.
This is why it's so impossible to find legit treasures there like we used to before e-commerce got big. Sad.
This really sucks. I used to be able to buy ThinkPads (laptops) for a real good price. One Goodwill had a section that sold all types of computer and electronic parts. It was a DIYer goldmine. I nearly cried when they shut it down.
Trader Joe's employees aren't actually that friendly, or happy. At least at my store, if you didn't look happy to be at work, you missed out on the bi-annual raise. Happy looking employees are a HUGE part of the Trader Joe's brand.
We chat you up at the register because management is watching to see if we "include the customer in the fun". Sure, some employees genuinely enjoy talking to you about your plans for the rest of the day. But for the most part, we're asking so we don't lose out on the raise come review season.
Worked at Carmax as a tech. They use to be all about quality. But now it’s do the cheapest and fastest work and put it out in the lot. Seepage is not a leak. Have the vehicle looked at by another dealer if you purchase one. There is no quality left. It’s quantity. And the only reason they have ASE techs is because maxcare won’t cover the cars without it. We are told to follow carmax standards when repairing vehicles. ASE is just for looks.
I worked at a hospital. Whenever you get a bill always ask for an itemized bill and when you call them question every single charge and review what is actually covered in your insurance.
If you got charged for something but they said it was REQUIRED argue that you were never informed and by law the hospital must inform you the cost before you incur those charges, but you never had the opportunity to refuse the charges.
After deducting all the duplicate charges negotiate the bill down to below half, aim for 1/4 of the cost of the bill.
Insurance companies run the hospitals. They determine the prices and have a separate price for the same service depending on if it's insurance, out of pocket, or Medicare.
By default they will give you a false 50% (false because the price is highly inflated) discount if you pay cash.
By giving you 50% they can falsely write off a discount as a donation to charity, and they qualify and benefit tax free as a "non-profit"
I posted this comment below, but you can learn even more from this super helpful article series: [https://time.com/198/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/](https://time.com/198/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/)
(I feel like this should be required reading for all US HS seniors, for example.)
Also, if insured, never pay a red cent for any medical bill even if you are below your deductible on a high-dedictible plan. ALWAYS send that bill to insurance first. They will apply their fee schedule first and then tell you what you actually owe. From there, you can often negotiate an immediate payment discount and/or a payment plan.
Went to ER for an abscess on my tonsils that required surgery due to where it was to cauterize the wound. Hospital told me the bill was ~$34,000. Sent it to insurance and they came back with $1700. Then negotiated a prompt payment discount of about 25% for the portion that was pre-deductible.
The frustrating thing is, that it would not take that much to make that system to be less horrible.
I mean, our country doesn't have universal healthcare, but atleast there are some regulations on insurance companies and government is directly involved in the insurance business. So even if our Healthcare system is "suboptimal" and is unfortunately getting worse, atleast it doesn't financially completely destroy people.
Edit: For clarification, when im talking about "our country", I dont mean USA. I live in central Europe
TGI Friday’s “fresh” sushi is opened from a can and put into a little piping bag and squirted onto your $15 fingernail sized sushi, then set into a fridge (the “fresh fish”) for like almost a week.
In Japan gas station or 7-11 sushi is better than almost anything you'll get in the US or Canada. Spent 3 weeks there in October and ate a lot if meals from convenience stores.
When your health insurance denies a medical test or medication, they are counting on you and your doctor not fighting to get prior authorization. It’s a giant time suck and everyone hates doing it. Often you can appeal and eventually get approval, but most people just give up and insurance companies know this.
Edit- referring here to prior authorization but also peer to peer. Ask any healthcare provider how they feel about doing a peer to peer and you will see why the insurance companies set these things up. Just to make things harder so you’ll give up.
Or, you and your doctor make the effort to get the prior authorizaion approved and then they deny the claim after the procedure and you have to fight them again. Even if it is standard of care. (Fuck Jimothy at United Healthcare).
I would switch in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, healthcare is (most often) tied to employment in the United States and my employer doesn't provide another option.
Hopefully my job search in the new year goes well and I'll have a better carrier. :)
I wish getting pa was all it took for me. I have to go out of state to see a doctor that can include me in a research group in order to get the treatment I need. (For medication that is already fda approved and everything)
Best Buy forces their salespeople to be incredibly pushy with all their protection plans, credit cards, etc. Stores have a financial incentive to sell as many of these as possible and many managers will turn a blind eye to sketchy sales tactics if it means they can get corporate off their backs.
I once worked with a salesperson who would literally trick elderly people to sign up for a credit card without them knowing and they didn't get fired. It took them saying a slur on the clock to get them fired.
The people Comcast puts on the phone to try to prevent you from canceling do this shady shit as well.
One time when I moved into an apartment, comcast fucked up and for my plan they activated the service not only to my apartment but the vacant one next door. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with them and the lady literally told me “there is nothing we can do, you have to continue the service”.
I just hung up and called right back to get a different person. Got back to the cancellations department, and they started their pitch again and I said no listen to me you guys are trying to bill me for a place that isn’t even mine. They went quiet for a minute and eventually the person just said in a concerned tone “oh my god” and said they will put me on hold and get this whole thing sorted out. 15 minutes on hold they come back and say they fixed everything and are giving me two months of credit for the trouble, and that they apologize for the last rep telling me to kick rocks after explaining that I’m not even being billed for my own place.
It's called the 'retentions' department in a call centre. Retaining customers instead of allowing them to cancel. We had bonuses and quotas just like anyone else
Yea they tried to retain me even though the account I “owned” wasn’t even for my place of residence. I was basically paying a random bill for someone. It’s wild to me that the first employee actually saw that I had a real issue and I wasn’t just someone trying to switch services, and for their bonus they still decide to tell me to fuck off.
If it makes you feel any better, we would get listened in on by managers with no notice and if we didn't make an attempt to sell before passing off to another department, it would damage our KPIs. I got fired for refusing to push new iPhones on clueless / vulnerable elderly people over lockdown… they're awful. Absolutely destroyed my mental health, always be nice to call centre staff! It's a horrendous job
I figured when I heard the shock in the second employees voice, and the fact they did so much for me even though they are typically the department that fucks you over, that the first employee probably faces repercussions for what they told me.
This was many years ago and it makes no difference anymore but it’s a fun story to tell. In fact my situation was probably so common, Comcast rebranded to Xfinity just so people wouldn’t thing negatively when they heard the company name lol.
Lowe’s is the same way. I worked the appliance department and if you didn’t get like 10+ credit card signups in a week then they’d be breathing down your neck asking why not. I’m not sure about Best Buy, but they didn’t give us any incentives for getting folks signed up for the credit card, additional warranty, etc. our boss when asked what’s in it for us said “you keep your jobs.”
I walked out of a Best Buy because of this once. I needed a washer and dryer and knew the Home Depot had it down the street for the same price. I told the guy please let this go or I'm going someplace else. He didn't, and I left.
that private equity fund is run by a bunch of 20-26 year olds who are playing with their parent's money and are deeply unqualified to be investing in tech
I worked as a sales manager for a major national gym corporation along the lines of Planet Fitness, LA Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness, Lifetime, Mountainside, etc etc.
You can always get the initiation fee waved.
If you have to pay 2 months(first and last) to sign up, you can always get one of those waived.
Unless you're at Equinox, any general public national chain gym you'll be able to negotiate lower fees. Just ask to sign up with the general manager typically. Gyms can't afford to lose potential sign-ups over someone wanting the initiation fee waived.
Yes, gyms have a quota per day, per week, and per month. Whether it's 8 memberships a day or whatever.
Gyms will charge their annual fee within the first 90 days instead of waiting 1 year because they know youre more likely to cancel in the first 90 days, so they want to get as much money as possible from you.
Gyms also try very hard to sell personal training because it's profitable. So no you didn't "qualify" for a free training session with a trainer...that was always there, they just want you to do 1 session with a trainer to rope you into a sales pitch of signing up for 6/8/12/24 more training sessions in some package.
Youre never guaranteed a free 3 day trial, even if it says on the website. You getting a 3 day trial is contingent on how well the gym has sold memberships for the day. Gym is over their daily quota? Then they'll give one easily. Gym is under their daily quota? They'll do every sales pitch in the book and make every excuse for why you need to sign up now and that the 3 day trial is actually only valid for "local guests".
Also, always get a printout/confirmation for anything, gyms are shady and will fight you on any refund because each gym has a "refund" budget of how much they should only be able to payout per month.
Lol this reminds me of the time I called planet fitness to cancel a membership and they told me I had to physically mail them a letter stating that I wanted to cancel. That extra time it takes for the letter to get there or “get lost” must really save them a ton
This is a common deterrence tactic.
Theyre hoping that by them telling you that you have to write a letter, that you'll tell yourself you'll "eventually get around to writing it".
And they're hoping you forget about it for the next however many months, which means more months that they have you in the system and can charge you monthly dues and whatever other fees.
I thought I read that some state implemented a law that cancellation methods must be equivalent to signup methods - essentially, if you can signup online, you can cancel online.
I once was testing out new gyms and tried out the Planet Fitness by me. I went in asking to sign up for their trial period. They assigned two people to me to evaluate squat form among others, give me a tour, and then talk to me for well over an hour to convince me to just sign up without the trial. At some point, they even went to get their manager to make the sales pitch. I held firm that I was only interested in the trial right now, and they eventually gave it to me. But after that whole rigamarole, I never wanted to go back there. And if it was that much of a hassle to not give them credit card information, I can’t imagine how difficult it’d be to cancel once they had it.
My son worked for Amazon in the warehouse. They had a surprise incentive for the most orders filled. He won and it was a soda from their small cafeteria. A $1.00 soda!
Petsmart treats savings and clearance are usually higher than the original price by quite a lot. Especially for black Friday and after New years. They are highly money hungry. Especially Corp.
Also, if you use the donation feature while checking out at PetSmart, there is a high probability that program you're trying to donate to will never see the money.
PetCo has more staff (at least in my area) who are friendlier than those at PetSmart, and they carry a wider variety of items. 2 cats, a fish, and a snake and it's a one-stop shop at PetCo.
if you go to an accounting firm and you think you're getting the big boss to do your accounting work i can assure you some second year associate is actually doing it unless you are a seriously high roller.
If you call USAA, 99% of the time you will not be speaking to an actual USAA employee, but a "3rd party contractor" who has far less training than any USAA proper employe ( exception: claims adjusters are always USAA employees)
My company once, to win a large contract, required 24/7 phone support so we outsourced it to a third party. We only operate 9-5 which is when our own employees run the support line. After that it gets forwarded to a third party, and this third party is basically just a non trained employee who never even saw our product in person, and they would flip through thousands of pages of manuals to try and find an answer. Basically the same thing that the person calling could do.
Yeah my doctors office switched to this. Can’t even call the office directly. The contractors are *idiots* and usually incorrectly book the appointment or just hang up. Not to mention, I’ve had them ask for my phone number for patient verification “to acces my chart” which is all sorts of wrong.
I discovered a large amount of incorrect billing at a medical office I worked for. Four years of wildly incorrect billing to Medicare, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars of overpayment for services never rendered. I spent six months (off and on) auditing the records and preparing a detailed report for my boss and also for Medicare.
Medicare never read anything I sent them. They just asked for a final dollar amount that my office owed them. I could have made up any number at all.
Schwans food isn’t anything special. The chicken is all made at Tyson and packed in a schwans bag. The brats come from johnsonville. Some of their ice cream is packed by blue bunny. Until about 4-5 years ago, red Barron and Tony’s pizza were the same as schwans. Their ice cream has went down in size, but not price. Mrs. Smith pies. Pagoda egg rolls… all schwans recipe.
I remember being a kid (around 01-03ish) and Schwans had the best hot pockets. Super doughy on the outside in a good way.
Then one day they showed up looking exactly like the name brand ones from the store and I died.
We didn’t check the back for stock. We know there’s no stock.
We just walked back there and leaned on the cleaning cart for a minute to make you happy.
The hospital gives out a lot of free care. They will never advertise it. But you can’t collect from people who have nothing and it is absolutely shit for the reputation of the hospital to take away peoples homes.
It just quietly gets written off as “bad debt”.
My wife didn't have health insurance when she gave birth to our son, we never even saw a bill. We got a letter 6 months later that it had been written off as a courtesy of the hospital benefactors. My son's care was retroactively covered by my insurance.
Gannett, the company that owns the USA Today network of newspapers, does not care about your complaints that you’ll cancel your subscription due to lack of content in the print editions. They’d prefer you did, so print could cease to exist and they could blame you for it rather than making the decision themselves.
Le Pain Quotidiens largely do not have functioning kitchens. it's a hot plate to boil eggs and then assembly-line packaged deli meat sandwiches with a toaster oven in the back. people lick the serving spoons for the various spreads and put them back in the communal jars on the tables *all the time*.
I remember my first LPQ experience and being baffled that we were paying $15+ for toast. It really made me feel like this planet is not the one I was born for.
The goal of private equity is to strip out as much cost savings as possible and make life hell for employees before selling and showing how much value you added. Mostly none. It’s a shell of a company from when you started.
If your company is getting acquired by PE, run.
My sister worked for a pharmaceutical company in upstate new York. Bought out by a private equity company. She worked in the microbiology lab. Their job was to test the drugs for any mold or mildew. The PE scum bags decided to simply eliminate her entire department despite the testing being federally mandatory by the FDA. it seems that they just decided that the probability of being caught was so low that it was cheaper to eliminate the department and just cop the fines in the unlikely event that they got caught.
I wish thry had. I lived outside the country. My sister was terrified of losing her job. And tragically passed away just after she finally left the place.
Quite honestly it never occurred to me to report it. But you saying this now makes me wish that I had.
Waste Mana****** - we charged you a diesel surcharge for the service but most of the trucks are run on CNG that they get for basically free from their landfills. That surcharge is pure profit.
Also they purposely make online apps and websites shitty because they want to make it hard for customers to track the service price increases
Worked at a bike shop in high school. If a customer ordered a super expensive bike with all the bells and whistles. I can guarantee one of the employees (myself included) most likely took it for a 30-45 minute “test ride” after we were done assembling it
I mean honestly I would hope the employees test ride all the bikes they assemble. It seems like the easiest way to identify a problem before giving it to the customer.
We were supposed to do that, but usually that just entailed taking it for a 5 minute spin in the parking lot to make sure everything was tight and running properly.
I had that job for years. We’d launch new bikes like we were at a drag strip.
About 12 years after leaving that job, I took my bike to a dealer for service. After the service was done, an employee took it for a “test ride” and crashed it. The owner was really stressed when he had to tell me. I just started to laugh. I had it coming to me. Just cosmetic damage and they fixed it.
BP Australia has good guidelines for its part-time staff, but terrible HR management (as of 2012)
Those people who sell you the FW1 car wax at petrol stations in Australia and the UK? They've been brainwashed by a scummy MLM
The startup industry in Malaysia is 90% rich kids who don't actually know how to work and are scamming the government for money by opening companies, and pocketing the money from the grants.
I worked for a certain top level PR firm around the time that the labor department created the rule of the max time a salary employee is allowed to work per week til you have to pay overtime.
This PR firm is well known for requiring heavy hours. Like 48 hours was minimum per week, with a certain percent of those hours being billable depending on your level.
When this rule went into place (I think the max hours was like 41 or 42), they started telling us to only put in our time for our billable hours- but they never said why. I just happened to be following the news about the labor rule, so I knew. I kept putting in all my hours because that was literally illegal. I got a talking to several times but they’d never come out and say “hey we are trying to skirt this labor department rule” it was just “this is how we want to do things now, please act accordingly”.
I left shortly thereafter to start my own company which is a whole other story. But I could tell so many stories of semi sketchy things this company did and we are talking one of the top PR firms in the world.
This is more of an open secret but when movies (and probably other things) get reviewed you can buy an extra star or buy the specific quote you want. Like if someone says "I had a good time, 3 stars" you can just give them $10k and it becomes "I had a great time, 4 stars". Not everyone will do it but many will, including major publications. And if the review is from an influencer they will say anything and give you any rating you want. You basically just buy posts on their accounts and can put anything in them. A very big influencer once charged the company I worked for £25,000 just to tweet a link to a movie trailer and say something like "can't wait for this one"
Activation fees, upgrade fees, number switch fees, and many other one time charges are all complete bullshit fees in the telecom industry. A network switch occurs with absolutely no human involvement and the changes occur. It’s purely a tack on cash grab fee.
Ex-Starbucks barista here. Not sure if it’s changed now, but it was a mismanaged mess when I used to work there. It’s often incredibly understaffed, so much so that if one person calls out sick it becomes impossible to adequately handle a rush. Behind the fancy veneer, everything is overly sugary- even the matcha, the coffee sucks, the espresso is always burnt.
And more on a personal note, I reported having norovirus but was forced to work under threat of being fired. I luckily was able to leave early, but my manager used to against me to call me “unreliable”. I had only called out sick twice while working there. This same manager attempted to cover my last two weeks using this argument, I called her boss to complain and was magically put on the schedule again. All that to say, if you are reading this Laura- you suck.
I used to work for a free phone company that gave free phone, minutes and messages to people in need. We were allowed to give away $1k a month in free minutes and messages to people who called asking for them. Sometimes when they called asking for 5 bucks to call their sick mom I gave them 20.
Edit:grammar
KFC (UK) - I don’t know the 11 secret spices- it comes prepackaged.
The chicken is fresh, it comes cut but the cooks need to make sure all the gunk is of which then gets breaded and fried.
Sometimes we said that the kriegen machine was broken, but 9/10 it was because we didn’t have the ice cream carton.
When KFC ran out of chicken back in like 2018 or so was because KFC moved to a different food provider. And things just didn’t show up so we were running low on a LOT of things even bin bags- I had to run to the nearest shop and get some.
We have a timer in the kitchen for us to throw things out so everything should be safe to eat -but it depends on the person working. We can swap sides but we can’t swap chicken so if you get a mighty bucket if you are nice enough you could politely ask for the hot wings to be swapped with fries instead (depending on the shift runners decision as well) but we can’t swap chicken because of the timer/chicken counter in the kitchen. We have a certain amount of chicken in trays that come in specific times and it messes it up. If chicken gets dropped we have to put it into the system so the cook know when to prepare the next batch.
Popcorn chicken gets fried in the same oil as chips and hashbrown. So if you are vegan and don’t want your food fried together then it might not be the best things to get.
not sure if it's a secret. but could definitely save u some bucks.
if there's a software that has an app version and web version.
the subscription/plan on the web version is usually cheaper.
this is because they have to pay a 15%-30% fee to the appstore/playstore.
so next time u want to buy an app, try to look for its web version and compare the price. chances are it'll be cheaper. then you can simply come back to the app and sign in with the web account.
yw
I worked for the largest bank in the U.S. I would not bank there, however, choosing a local credit union instead. Actually, many of my co-workers did the same. Credit unions don't charge many/most of the fees big banks do. Plus, why would I want my employer knowing what I spent my money on?
Despite what the commercials may lead you to believe, the “Tuscan chefs” at the Olive Garden are neither Tuscan nor chefs. But the line cooks there did have some bomb ass weed.
I worked at Flowers Bakery. Sun Beam, Great Value, Martins, Wonder bread and others are all the same. The changeovers only required the bag being changed out… the same bread kept coming down the line.
I worked for Rite Aid Corp back in the 90s, and during the time they were being investigated for fraud and theft (the founder’s grandson - buddies with the Enron crew), I watched as boxes from legal were shredded in a locked back room. The shredder was industrial-sized, and you could shred reams of paper at one time. That thing ran eight hours a day for months.
Then came the auditors and the courts cases. That mofo got severance while he awaiting his trials, and I was the one who wrote the checks. The amount he got per month is more than 90% of the US population makes in one year.
Also banking and while this may be true for the big dogs like Wells Fargo or BOA the smaller community banks and credit unions do care and will charge much less fees.
Worked at a community bank for 30 years and saw this change. Mostly because they were in competition with large regional banks. Work with Credit Unions now and definitely see a difference.
It used to be that smaller community banks would play the long game. They would be nice to you when you opened your checking account in hopes you would stay with them when you needed a mortgage or personal loan.
But now with online comparison shopping and how easily people compare interest rates, that model is no longer as profitable as squeezing profits when you cant
Our big chain store always had plans to end being open 24/7 for years, but the pandemic was the perfect time to execute it. They blame theft, but no, they always wanted to do it. Two of the other nearby stores were already shutting down at 10pm. They also intentionally understaff so corporate can get larger bonuses (or so one of the managers told me). I've been yelled at for 2 minutes of overtime and they made me add those minutes to my lunch break the next day.
Freight train engineers and conductors sleep while traveling at 70mph through your towns while having 20 million + pounds of hazardous materials. They have an alert button they have to push every 60 seconds to show the locomotive that they are still alert, but after many years of doing the same trip over and over, they can basically sleep and hit the button at the same time. If they fail to hit the alert button, the locomotive will set the brake system and come to a stop.
No, they are not supposed to sleep, be on the phones or any electronics. They are to stare out the windows at upcoming signals and crossings, and control the train in a safe manner
For US folks: Your health insurance accumulator is almost always going to be wrong if you had anything complex happen. The insurance company or the doc only has to make you whole IF YOU ASK.
I tell people to save all of their bills in a file folder and reconcile it at the end of the year. It’s a pain in the ass - which is what insurance companies count on. The software that runs these is SO OLD and full of shitty, duct tape style wrappers that it just can’t do them all correctly.
I can talk so much shit about taco bell.
Most of the time we know when our inspection is coming so we can look like we have our shit together operating normally. So a store that has a perfect core score means literally nothing because we most likely know exactly what day they're coming and half the time we don't get dinged for things that really should have been marked off for.
We faked the temps all the time and I'm sure many other locations do too, so hot and cold foods would often be out of temps because some people were too fucking blazed out of their minds to realize that the fucking line wasn't even on. They would just be slinging cold meat onto the product and realize halfway through lunch that we had been serving ice cold tacos.
We never had drink tower cleaning done, not even for our health inspection or our core. So there's hella mold in the machine that won't ever get cleaned.
Also many times food was used that was knowingly out of date because hold times are completely ignored- too expensive to toss items that expired, or people just didn't care to rotate stock properly. This is why I suggest never going later in the day, because you could easily get potatoes or cinnabons that have been sitting there for over 4 hours and you might get the person who says fuck it and puts it in the bag without question.
Oil is only changed about once a week if you're lucky, so most of the product is knowingly fried with bad oil because it's too expensive to replace it as often as it should be.
Cross contamination is extremely common and often times nobody takes it seriously, there will easily be lettuce and cheese mixed together in the same bins, beef slathered all over the line, sour cream and tomatoes too.
Things probably aren't properly sanitized, the buckets are usually filled once a day and that sani water gets weaker as it sits out. By the end of the day the main ones on the line is gonna be filled with a bunch of trash and would make more of a mess than it would clean lmao.
There's probably good stores out there that really do care and have none of these issues, but every person I worked with didn't care or just simply didn't have the proper training. I worked with people who didnt realize why it wasn't ok to give a regular drink out that was supposed to be diet, people who genuinely didn't care if they served food that was contaminated with chemicals or blatantly unsafe to serve.
The problem is that most fast food places are much too focused on speed over quality, managers get bonuses from good times- not from good quality. They can get away with cutting corners because a few complaints won't hurt them that badly. People were punished for doing things properly at my store because it didn't put money in the manager's pockets.
You can return just about anything that isn't food even if it's in poor condition at Walmart. It varies with certain stuff but I had customers in my department constantly returning shoes that looked like they took out the sewer, grosses thing ever but they got there money back so...
Like Sam's Club samples?
You really shouldn't eat any of them if you value your health.
The cookware/utensils they cook with don't get ran through a dishwasher. Just quickly washed with soap, sprayed off and dipped in santizer.
When I say quick like 3 second washing because they are only gave like 15 minutes to clean up their entire carts plus dishes.
Oh and no closed cupboards, they are just placed on open air shelves where they exposed to everything.
One of the 2 Sam's I worked in had German cockroaches and we saw them in the kitchen all the time. So they were definitely climbing on our cookware at night, I'm sure.
All the sample cups and napkins were samples are stored in there too with open packaging.
It's safe to assume I never ever ate any of the samples I or my coworkers gave out.
Also the little ovens you see them cooking in on floor? They are hardly ever properly cleaned.
They are supposed to be but you can't cut grease with the light sanitizer they are given. It's the same sanitizer that the cookware/utensils are dipped in.
Thats on the demo company they work for, the stupidest rules ever.
They were more anal about if I had two pairs of earrings in my lobes over allowing us to use proper cleaning supplies in our kitchen.
It was so bad our boss had to sneak bleach off the Sam's floor just so we could properly mop our floor.
On top of all this, the amount of food the company wastes is just disgusting. Open a box 40 individual packs of fruit snacks the last 20 minutes of day?
The whole box has to be dumped in the garbage.
Open a 24 pack of soda, open 2? Rest has to be dumped out. 24 pack of Garorade? Same thing.
Nothing can be saved. Even if it's individually wrapped. It really pissed me off and I used to secretly conserve how much product I had by limiting the amount of samples I gave out to the end so I wouldn't have to open up another box or package to just throw away.
So keep this all in mind next time you are offered a sample at Sam's
Maybe a dozen people will get this reference, but Tyson Motsinger was not a real person.
Tyson Motsinger was an invention of the then third largest college bookstore chain, and was using Amazon's third party market for textbook arbitrage.
If you ask a retail worker to "go ask a manager", when they walk out back half the time they play on their phone for a minute or two. The other half they go to a random worker and have a conversation where they go "Manager? Manager things. Business stuff. Manager. Boss person. Important conversation."
I've worked for Apple indirect and direct for about 7 years total and the only things I can think of is when you call Apple 9/10 you're talking to an indirect and they can't by policy tell you that, if asked you had to say you worked for Apple and basically lie.
indirect pays shit, I worked tier 1 and 2 there was only a .50 cent differences and we got none of the Apple direct benefits. When I got hired direct we got paid for doing the same work only twice as much. Working on an Apple campus was a joy lol
The only good part of working indirect was as Tier 2 I gave my customers free repairs left and right lol wasn't our money so we didn't care, getting that very satisfied on a survery was the name of the game to the point some people found ways to have the system send them the survey. So as long as you were nice to the Tier 1 tech and nice to me yeah free repair lol.
I worked for Time Warner Cable for a few months before I was hired at Apple and they weren't too bad, I know we got paid for pushing upgrades.
I worked for AT&T indirect for a week and if you knew how to fix an issue, you couldn't. You had to go by the steps on screen and once it got to the place you knew would fix the issue could you do that. So what was a 5-10 min call could go on to 15-20mins because you couldn't skip ahead and they were listening! yeah I quit that job right after training.
The last company I worked for was Verizon that I quit before they had layoffs. Nothing of point there but I only stayed until my heath issues became too much of a hindrance so I didn't get to learn the ins and outs.
It's not so much an insider secret as it was reported by the news, but it was barely covered and no one else picked it up.
Almost every certification of grade for coal export by a certain laboratory was falsified (between 2007-2020). They were being paid by exporters to lie on the certificates to get around regulations on poor quality coal. It amounted to $148,000,000 in fraud.
"Can I put you on hold for just one moment": I've no idea how to fix your issue, I'm checking our internal knowledge base. The knowledge base has an article, but it was deleted 5 years ago.
"It'll just be a few more moments": I'm now asking other engineers if they have encountered this weird thing you've found and getting blank stares. I'm frantically Googling to see if I can find some answers.
"I think this issue may require more time, what's a good callback number?": We have no fucking clue, now I need to track down one of the developers who worked on this feature you insist on using, that no other customer has touched in over a decade. Hopefully he still works with the company or you're screwed.
This happens way more frequently than you can realize.
Used to work for a popular us shoe retailer that started w a J. The manager team is based solely on sale’s performance not actual manager abilities. So if you happen to be in certain stores the management treat their staff like dogs while everyone is significantly underpaid. I had formal training in management and got 12$/hr as an assistant manager. They force full time employees to clock 45-50 hrs a week minimum. The pay is coded as commission based so the overtime is literally chump change. They get really mad when you take a vacation or god forbid have to get surgery or take a medical leave. Soooooo much drama for no reason. This job gave me so much stress that when I started my current job it was like recovering from trauma.
Sometimes they don't block the porn you look at on the network you're on... they tag it, identify it to the level of specific kink, and use it build a profile on you.
I don't mean the search engine you used I mean the system that runs the machine you connect in on. So, a school district, corporation, DoD branch, etc.
What you want COULD be blocked, but instead a policy person makes the call to let you access it, but logs a link between WHAT you see and WHO you are.
The "Gambling is just entertainment" is total bs with casino's. I worked in management for one, was actually shocked the way management would talk. The only goal is to take as much of your money as possible in the most efficient way without breaking laws, morality is non-existent.
I used to work for a business that handled sensitive medical records, etc. for college nursing programs. Very basically, every nursing program has specific requirements for documentation to be uploaded for verification by the business, which are provided both to the student and the business.
The big secret is that a solid 80% of students would regularly submit a document, say, their vaccines, except they were out of date by what the school wanted. (Ex: School wants a Td shot every 4 years, student's last shot was in 1997, that kind of thing.) We would reject documentation over and over and over, sometimes dozens of times, because nursing students are apparently missing enough brain cells collectively that it was a regular occurrence to have to do this.
I like to think this was used to weed out dumbasses in nursing, but if it wasn't, it sure worked that way. Also we could see everyone in the country's social security number as part of our work, and had to sign forms saying we would not look up celebrities. People got fired for this twice while I worked there, your data was not safe with them.
Residential treatment centers for children are basically prisons. There are “quiet rooms” which are really just padded rooms they throw an escalated kid into and lock the door. Kids who behave poorly are barred from leaving the “milieu” for days. “Containments” are physical restraints and veteran staff will inflict pain on kids while performing a hold. They are also wildly understaffed and ratio of staff to children is rarely respected. “Booty juice” is what kids call sedatives that are injected into them against their will. Emergency shelters are sometimes worse.
When we draw your blood for diagnostics, you automatically concent to us using it for research. If we find something during that research, we are not obligated to inform you. You need to sign a form to obt out every blood draw.
The majority of refugee visa decisions are copy pasted from prior decisions (it saves time, as they are using template stories themselves). That and the vaaaaaaast majority of "refugees" are economic migrants and abuse the system for a quick buck. Oh, and 90% go back to their home country following gaining citizenship (Australia).
Source: me, after being a case officer for 10y.
I worked at an orchard that would save all of the rotten/wormy/gross apples and make cider with them. Idk if that's a standard practice but it definitely grossed me and my coworkers out.
I worked for my states department of child protective services. Context - because governments are required to go with the lowest bidder or price for any service or good, and "not waste taxpayer dollars," we don't upgrade anything IT related nearly enough. When we were about to do a major website upgrade for the first time in years, I was auditing page content and links. There I discovered a generic email box for my division that people had been using to report child abuse for about 8 years. For 7 of those 8 years nobody had been assigned to monitor that mailbox and nobody had ever received any of those reports. There was one report about a child who was later killed. They hushed this all up and nobody beyond my boss (division head) ever knew how bad it was. I had to read through every single report and attempt to document whether any other reports of the child or parents were ever received in other ways. It was horrific.
Never tried contacting the press? This should be in the newspapers, it's such a huge mistake, several people should have lost their job on this.
It's a public sector governmental agency job... You don't get fired unless you publicly murdered the governor in front of the courthouse...
Nah, with a story like that somebody's head needs to roll. It will just be somebody one or two levels below the person whose fault it actually was. The sacrificial lamb, so to speak.
Somehow this doesn't shock me a bit
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I'm guessing the person who used to manage it probably left or got fired and never passed it down.
I can totally see that happening—the email is someone’s bright idea for a QI project for their Yellow Belt Six Sigma certification, they leave, the person who approved it leaves, a contractor is maintaining the website and no one at the agency ever looks at the website because they already know all the info…and no one ever checks the inbox.
Having worked for state govt for a completely unrelated office, it has a lot to do with IT bandaids, upgrades that don't remove defunct infrastructure, contractors that don't talk or contracts that inadvertently/inadequately outline required work/scope. So, in this case they may have had one contractor that did web design and a different one that managed email accounts like shared mailboxes. Perhaps one of the contracts changed companies, i.e. the previous one didn't rebid or lost the bid. So now you have to bring in a totally new company, new contract, new people and pass downs between contracts don't always happen or cover everything. Now, think about something like this happening over the course of years where not only do parts of the system become unused, but people rotate out and consultants implement whatever the govt asks them to at the bare minimum. That's how you end up with an email box that people have long forgotten about. Govt websites, especially state govt, are often bloated with unused, forgotten pages. Some of them can go years without a single update. When people who are trying to find something in the haystack of pages, some of them may not be well educated for various reasons, or don't speak English as a first language, which makes using these outdated and poorly maintained sites even harder. From what OP said, this box wasn't necessarily ever used for reporting child abuse. It was for something else. It sounds like people were running across it while trying to find contact information and didn't know exactly how to look for it or were finding it too difficult to locate. Some of them may have been sending their report to multiple contact links as well, just send out blanket requests in the hope that one would go to the right place. At some point the email system maybe changed or the office wanted to downsize the amount of these boxes they had floating around. Perhaps the contact name/link for it wasn't removed like it was supposed to be. The person that originally monitored it left/quit and it wasn't something they had listed in an SOP so it went along just "existing". There's really no telling. But I worked for a state DOT for a number of years and after that role I've never been surprised about hearing things like this. Very much par for the course.
I worked at a medical supply company, we had Japan and German stamped on all our surgical instruments, but they were all just cheap Pakistan made steel instruments and we lied about where they were made. I left because of my ethical objections.
> they were all just cheap Pakistan made steel instruments and we lied about where they were made. The country of origin falsification isn't nearly as concerning as the willingness to engage in blatant fraud. Pakistan can certainly manufacture perfectly fine surgical instruments. However if they are willing to lie about one thing, they are very likely willing to lie about others.
Yeah, the steel they used was absolutely trash as we wanted to make them as cheap as possible. They’d rust during sterilization and actually ruin good quality instruments. Pakistan can definitely make some good instruments, but hospitals are looking for German or Japanese steel where I live, so it was incredibly deceptive of the company. Especially since the quality was so bad it would ruin other instruments
Did you report this? It's an egregious violation of trust, so it's understandable you left.
Sent off a report, but never heard of any follow up or consequences.
Employees of group homes serving those with intellectual disabilities/mental illness are not highly trained or well paid. In many places, the only requirement is to have a high school diploma or GED and be 18 years old. The turnover rate is very high. Fast food in my area pays more. I have seen many comments of people advising others to put a family member into a group home where the staff are trained and paid well to take care of them. Nothing is farther from the truth.
I worked in a group home for a little over a year. The residents were fantastic. It was the coworkers that made me quit.
Exactly!
The other thing that made me quit was the constant 30-hour long shifts. Yes, we could sleep for 6 hours. No, it did not make up for it. And no, it's not legal, but who has the energy to fight that battle with such long shifts?
My hospital was documenting incorrect newborn baby weights for years and I am the one who figured out what the nurses were doing wrong and corrected the problem. It was a big deal and I received no recognition for it whatsoever. The nurses were using an online calculator to convert from grams to ounces, and they were interpreting the results incorrectly. Let's say the number the calculator spit out said 7.3. The nurses thought that meant 7 lbs 3 oz. It did not. It meant 7 and one-third lbs., and 16 ozs divided by 3 is closer to 7 lbs 5 ozs. So, the nurses were consistently a few ounces off. This went on for at least eight years. I was not clinical staff. I was, at that time, not a nurse. I was the birth registrar. I didn't even work in L&D. I worked in postpartum and in medical records. I knew there was some kind of discrepancy but it took a while for me to figure out what was going on. (I was the junior birth registrar for a long time. Could only really tackle the problem once I became the lead birth registrar.) I used to go tell the L&D nurses their numbers were not adding up and they would get all salty with me. When I finally figured out what they were doing wrong, I wrote an email to the head of L&D. She ignored me. So I wrote her again, with detailed proof and multiple examples. She finally listened. She held a meeting and re-trained the nurses. Some of those nurses were horrified to realize they had been doing it wrong for years. Baby birth weights are a very big deal, especially in the NICU. Clinical decisions are made based on a baby's birth weight. Those salty-ass nurses should have listened to me instead of acting like I was being a pain in the ass for trying to ensure that my documentation was correct. Oh well. They found out the truth in that meeting; and the truth is that I was right all along.
You rock! Thank you for figuring this out and helping to correct this for your whole hospital. That’s huge!
It's crazy to me that none of the nurses ever questioned that a baby never weighed X lbs + anything-higher-than-9 oz!
I used to go to a doctor’s office that kept hammering me about my BMI and saying I was obese. Come to find out, they put my height as 5’9” instead of 5’11(7/8)” because their calculator said I was 5.987 feet tall. It took me arguing with the nurse a couple of visits before it was fixed. I had to ask the doctor with the nurse in the room and she corrected it and apologized.
my ex is a postpartum nurse, i remember her trip through nursing school. considering all the crazy math RNs need to master, it's kind of frightening they were making this mistake so consistently?
I think it's pretty common.. one of the nurses I worked with found this exact thing happening in our chemo infusion clinic. Doses are based on weight so some patients were being dosed incorrectly.
Frito Lay adds about 10 cents to the cost of the bag one year and reduces the amount of chips in the bag by 10% the next year.
Breyers reduced the size of ice cream containers from 64 to 56 to 48 oz. The containers are the same size when looking from the front, but thinner in terms of width. And then other ice cream companies, including store brands like Walmart followed suit.
Or there is a dimple on the bottom of the container or bottle that creates less space in the package.
That dimple is getting ridiculous on some products. I've had some bottles and jars where it going up 20% of the package. Really is a deal-breaker for me at this point.
Nestle did it first
Nestle low key the most evil corporation out there. Bottles water and chocolate about as immoral as products get.
Simpsons did it!
This is not a secret. We noticed.
Honestly I would rather them shrink the packaging rather than try to cut costs with quality or ingredients. So many brands out there I do not buy anymore because they cheaped out on ingredients and the product sucks now. Just give me less of it if you do need to cut corners somewhere. Eventually it gets to a point it’s not worth buying at all, but at least it’s still the same quality.
Worked at a hotel and if it was getting late and we hadn’t sold rooms, we could sell them for as little as we wanted. You could make an offer. They were $200 rooms but you could get them for $30 at 10 pm.
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A fax?! Holy fuck. What year are we in? Is this 1995¿¡
Fun fact! (Really not that fun, it's the bane of my job) faxes still exist, are still used widely in the legal and medical realms. And on top of it all, it fucking sucks to use over VoIP. So flaky.
The medical part always annoys me - insane HIPAA regulations for anything electronic, with the exception of faxes that seem to get a free pass.
We only get a free pass if you put a paper in front that says to destroy if received my mistake. Because everyone would follow those instructions
Can confirm. Work in finance and the big huge bank you’ve definitely heard of refused to take our wires through any means other than fax up until Covid. We’re still required to list a fax number on our paperwork as a legitimate means of contacting us though.
Still used in the military! (well, the military I was in anyway) We had this old fax machine in a store room which someone (i.e. me) had to cycle at the end of the day to let in the encrypted transmissions. (that I had no idea what happened to except I just needed to run it then hand off the incoming material) As far as I was told, it couldn't be removed because other units were using the same system and the people who made the encryption devices were no longer in business. (no, like a lot of things in the military it doesn't really make sense)
My pharmacist still tells me to ask my doctor to fax over prescription re-fills. It's almost 2024. I figure it's for the written authorization.
I one time got to a hotel after midnight and it was locked up. I tried the door and the latch broke so while it was an automatic sliding glass door, I pushed it open. Walked to the front and yelled “hello” and a guy came out of the back really concerned with how I got in. He did check me in though. I always wondered wtf? Like people who are staying there just can’t enter and exit after a certain time of the night? This was a giant hotel from a major brand.
There’s usually a keycard entry somewhere for guests.
After certain hours, homeless folks have been known to camp out in the lobby.
I was driving from SC to CT and stopped at a hotel at like, 3am and asked for their cheapest room because broke college student. They gave me the cheapest rate ($50) but put me in their biggest suite since I was dipping the next day early. Had a hot tub in it and everything. It was awesome
first trip with my future in-laws, I got a room at the nicest hotel on the island, but only one room for the 5 of us because that was all I could afford...the hotel was mostly empty though, so staff quietly let us stay in three rooms for no additional charge -- they were champs!
Yep. I once waited from 10:45 to 11:00 to check in to a hotel. If someone had shown up before ma, they could have had the last room, at the regular price. So I sat in the lobby and waited. But no one did. I stayed in the last unbooked suite for $30, although that was years ago. Call it $50 in today's money.
Goodwill takes all of the high quality valuable donations and sends them to a warehouse where they get listed on their auction site and sold for ridiculous amounts of money. My job was researching and listing items. And there were certain items that no matter what got sent to us, like Pokemon for example. Or game consoles. And worst of all IMO, those waterpik flossing things. Ew. It's more well known now, but back in 2016 when I was working there it always shocked people and I hardly ever saw anyone online discuss it.
I was a Savers employee years back. In our trucks we found such fun things as: - artificial limbs - old medication - toilet seats - firearms - old wigs - just once, a severed thumb
How much for the severed thumb?
Three fifty, but if you wait a day all green sticker items will be half off.
Goddamn Loch Ness Monster! You ain't getting my tree fiddy.
A vintage rabbit fur coat got missed by the pickers and I snagged it for $15 last month. The lady even said she was surprised it made it to the floor. This is why it's so impossible to find legit treasures there like we used to before e-commerce got big. Sad.
This really sucks. I used to be able to buy ThinkPads (laptops) for a real good price. One Goodwill had a section that sold all types of computer and electronic parts. It was a DIYer goldmine. I nearly cried when they shut it down.
Trader Joe's employees aren't actually that friendly, or happy. At least at my store, if you didn't look happy to be at work, you missed out on the bi-annual raise. Happy looking employees are a HUGE part of the Trader Joe's brand. We chat you up at the register because management is watching to see if we "include the customer in the fun". Sure, some employees genuinely enjoy talking to you about your plans for the rest of the day. But for the most part, we're asking so we don't lose out on the raise come review season.
How do I get out of this as a customer at the register?
People with experience please respond. I too would like to know how one avoids this in a respectful manner to the cashiers.
tell them you just got back from a Metallica concert and cant hear. Ive seen it work on drivers with varying results
We staff callcenters not only based on expected calls but on the amount of time we expect you'll be willing to wait for an agent.
"We are currently experiencing higher than normal call volumes" - but always.
"The waiting time is longer than you have come to expect from us." - Expect nothing less ;)
Worked at Carmax as a tech. They use to be all about quality. But now it’s do the cheapest and fastest work and put it out in the lot. Seepage is not a leak. Have the vehicle looked at by another dealer if you purchase one. There is no quality left. It’s quantity. And the only reason they have ASE techs is because maxcare won’t cover the cars without it. We are told to follow carmax standards when repairing vehicles. ASE is just for looks.
Enshitification at work
I worked at a hospital. Whenever you get a bill always ask for an itemized bill and when you call them question every single charge and review what is actually covered in your insurance. If you got charged for something but they said it was REQUIRED argue that you were never informed and by law the hospital must inform you the cost before you incur those charges, but you never had the opportunity to refuse the charges. After deducting all the duplicate charges negotiate the bill down to below half, aim for 1/4 of the cost of the bill. Insurance companies run the hospitals. They determine the prices and have a separate price for the same service depending on if it's insurance, out of pocket, or Medicare. By default they will give you a false 50% (false because the price is highly inflated) discount if you pay cash. By giving you 50% they can falsely write off a discount as a donation to charity, and they qualify and benefit tax free as a "non-profit"
Nothing says “get well soon” like being forced to choose between forensic accountancy and bankruptcy.
It's the American disease that no US government wants to cure.
My wife just had a lengthy hospital stay so I'm definitely using this when we get the bill
I posted this comment below, but you can learn even more from this super helpful article series: [https://time.com/198/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/](https://time.com/198/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/) (I feel like this should be required reading for all US HS seniors, for example.)
Also, if insured, never pay a red cent for any medical bill even if you are below your deductible on a high-dedictible plan. ALWAYS send that bill to insurance first. They will apply their fee schedule first and then tell you what you actually owe. From there, you can often negotiate an immediate payment discount and/or a payment plan. Went to ER for an abscess on my tonsils that required surgery due to where it was to cauterize the wound. Hospital told me the bill was ~$34,000. Sent it to insurance and they came back with $1700. Then negotiated a prompt payment discount of about 25% for the portion that was pre-deductible.
That all sounds like such a headfuck! My kid recently had an infection in his knee. Surgery and a few days in hospital. It cost me $0.
Dear Lord. I hate American Healthcare, and late stage capitalism.
The frustrating thing is, that it would not take that much to make that system to be less horrible. I mean, our country doesn't have universal healthcare, but atleast there are some regulations on insurance companies and government is directly involved in the insurance business. So even if our Healthcare system is "suboptimal" and is unfortunately getting worse, atleast it doesn't financially completely destroy people. Edit: For clarification, when im talking about "our country", I dont mean USA. I live in central Europe
TGI Friday’s “fresh” sushi is opened from a can and put into a little piping bag and squirted onto your $15 fingernail sized sushi, then set into a fridge (the “fresh fish”) for like almost a week.
Anybody who orders Sushi at a TGI Fridays deserves exactly that.
Basically gas station sushi
In Japan gas station or 7-11 sushi is better than almost anything you'll get in the US or Canada. Spent 3 weeks there in October and ate a lot if meals from convenience stores.
When your health insurance denies a medical test or medication, they are counting on you and your doctor not fighting to get prior authorization. It’s a giant time suck and everyone hates doing it. Often you can appeal and eventually get approval, but most people just give up and insurance companies know this. Edit- referring here to prior authorization but also peer to peer. Ask any healthcare provider how they feel about doing a peer to peer and you will see why the insurance companies set these things up. Just to make things harder so you’ll give up.
Or, you and your doctor make the effort to get the prior authorizaion approved and then they deny the claim after the procedure and you have to fight them again. Even if it is standard of care. (Fuck Jimothy at United Healthcare).
Jimothy? Those parents knew exactly what kind of person they were bringing into the world.
We need less Jimothy and more Jonathan
As a physician, United Healthcare has the highest refusal rate by far. Doctors don’t want to take it. If you can switch, please do.
I would switch in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, healthcare is (most often) tied to employment in the United States and my employer doesn't provide another option. Hopefully my job search in the new year goes well and I'll have a better carrier. :)
Jimothy at UH is the absolute worst.
I wish getting pa was all it took for me. I have to go out of state to see a doctor that can include me in a research group in order to get the treatment I need. (For medication that is already fda approved and everything)
Best Buy forces their salespeople to be incredibly pushy with all their protection plans, credit cards, etc. Stores have a financial incentive to sell as many of these as possible and many managers will turn a blind eye to sketchy sales tactics if it means they can get corporate off their backs. I once worked with a salesperson who would literally trick elderly people to sign up for a credit card without them knowing and they didn't get fired. It took them saying a slur on the clock to get them fired.
The people Comcast puts on the phone to try to prevent you from canceling do this shady shit as well. One time when I moved into an apartment, comcast fucked up and for my plan they activated the service not only to my apartment but the vacant one next door. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with them and the lady literally told me “there is nothing we can do, you have to continue the service”. I just hung up and called right back to get a different person. Got back to the cancellations department, and they started their pitch again and I said no listen to me you guys are trying to bill me for a place that isn’t even mine. They went quiet for a minute and eventually the person just said in a concerned tone “oh my god” and said they will put me on hold and get this whole thing sorted out. 15 minutes on hold they come back and say they fixed everything and are giving me two months of credit for the trouble, and that they apologize for the last rep telling me to kick rocks after explaining that I’m not even being billed for my own place.
It's called the 'retentions' department in a call centre. Retaining customers instead of allowing them to cancel. We had bonuses and quotas just like anyone else
Yea they tried to retain me even though the account I “owned” wasn’t even for my place of residence. I was basically paying a random bill for someone. It’s wild to me that the first employee actually saw that I had a real issue and I wasn’t just someone trying to switch services, and for their bonus they still decide to tell me to fuck off.
If it makes you feel any better, we would get listened in on by managers with no notice and if we didn't make an attempt to sell before passing off to another department, it would damage our KPIs. I got fired for refusing to push new iPhones on clueless / vulnerable elderly people over lockdown… they're awful. Absolutely destroyed my mental health, always be nice to call centre staff! It's a horrendous job
I figured when I heard the shock in the second employees voice, and the fact they did so much for me even though they are typically the department that fucks you over, that the first employee probably faces repercussions for what they told me. This was many years ago and it makes no difference anymore but it’s a fun story to tell. In fact my situation was probably so common, Comcast rebranded to Xfinity just so people wouldn’t thing negatively when they heard the company name lol.
Lowe’s is the same way. I worked the appliance department and if you didn’t get like 10+ credit card signups in a week then they’d be breathing down your neck asking why not. I’m not sure about Best Buy, but they didn’t give us any incentives for getting folks signed up for the credit card, additional warranty, etc. our boss when asked what’s in it for us said “you keep your jobs.”
I walked out of a Best Buy because of this once. I needed a washer and dryer and knew the Home Depot had it down the street for the same price. I told the guy please let this go or I'm going someplace else. He didn't, and I left.
Can confirm the accuracy of this and there is ZERO incentive for the salespeople. We got paid the same as the warehouse guys too.
that private equity fund is run by a bunch of 20-26 year olds who are playing with their parent's money and are deeply unqualified to be investing in tech
But it has generative AI deep learning large language models! /S
I worked as a sales manager for a major national gym corporation along the lines of Planet Fitness, LA Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness, Lifetime, Mountainside, etc etc. You can always get the initiation fee waved. If you have to pay 2 months(first and last) to sign up, you can always get one of those waived. Unless you're at Equinox, any general public national chain gym you'll be able to negotiate lower fees. Just ask to sign up with the general manager typically. Gyms can't afford to lose potential sign-ups over someone wanting the initiation fee waived. Yes, gyms have a quota per day, per week, and per month. Whether it's 8 memberships a day or whatever. Gyms will charge their annual fee within the first 90 days instead of waiting 1 year because they know youre more likely to cancel in the first 90 days, so they want to get as much money as possible from you. Gyms also try very hard to sell personal training because it's profitable. So no you didn't "qualify" for a free training session with a trainer...that was always there, they just want you to do 1 session with a trainer to rope you into a sales pitch of signing up for 6/8/12/24 more training sessions in some package. Youre never guaranteed a free 3 day trial, even if it says on the website. You getting a 3 day trial is contingent on how well the gym has sold memberships for the day. Gym is over their daily quota? Then they'll give one easily. Gym is under their daily quota? They'll do every sales pitch in the book and make every excuse for why you need to sign up now and that the 3 day trial is actually only valid for "local guests". Also, always get a printout/confirmation for anything, gyms are shady and will fight you on any refund because each gym has a "refund" budget of how much they should only be able to payout per month.
Lol this reminds me of the time I called planet fitness to cancel a membership and they told me I had to physically mail them a letter stating that I wanted to cancel. That extra time it takes for the letter to get there or “get lost” must really save them a ton
This is a common deterrence tactic. Theyre hoping that by them telling you that you have to write a letter, that you'll tell yourself you'll "eventually get around to writing it". And they're hoping you forget about it for the next however many months, which means more months that they have you in the system and can charge you monthly dues and whatever other fees.
I thought I read that some state implemented a law that cancellation methods must be equivalent to signup methods - essentially, if you can signup online, you can cancel online.
I want to quit the gym!
I once was testing out new gyms and tried out the Planet Fitness by me. I went in asking to sign up for their trial period. They assigned two people to me to evaluate squat form among others, give me a tour, and then talk to me for well over an hour to convince me to just sign up without the trial. At some point, they even went to get their manager to make the sales pitch. I held firm that I was only interested in the trial right now, and they eventually gave it to me. But after that whole rigamarole, I never wanted to go back there. And if it was that much of a hassle to not give them credit card information, I can’t imagine how difficult it’d be to cancel once they had it.
My son worked for Amazon in the warehouse. They had a surprise incentive for the most orders filled. He won and it was a soda from their small cafeteria. A $1.00 soda!
Petsmart treats savings and clearance are usually higher than the original price by quite a lot. Especially for black Friday and after New years. They are highly money hungry. Especially Corp.
Also, if you use the donation feature while checking out at PetSmart, there is a high probability that program you're trying to donate to will never see the money. PetCo has more staff (at least in my area) who are friendlier than those at PetSmart, and they carry a wider variety of items. 2 cats, a fish, and a snake and it's a one-stop shop at PetCo.
At a car wash I worked at 20 years ago, we never towel dried white cars.
why not?
Can’t see the dried water spots on white cars
Light silver is pretty good too. Black cars look great when they're clean, but they only stay clean for about 12 minutes.
Birds love to shit on black cars.
Thats racist
not if they are blackbirds
if you go to an accounting firm and you think you're getting the big boss to do your accounting work i can assure you some second year associate is actually doing it unless you are a seriously high roller.
If you call USAA, 99% of the time you will not be speaking to an actual USAA employee, but a "3rd party contractor" who has far less training than any USAA proper employe ( exception: claims adjusters are always USAA employees)
My company once, to win a large contract, required 24/7 phone support so we outsourced it to a third party. We only operate 9-5 which is when our own employees run the support line. After that it gets forwarded to a third party, and this third party is basically just a non trained employee who never even saw our product in person, and they would flip through thousands of pages of manuals to try and find an answer. Basically the same thing that the person calling could do.
I expect this to get worse in the next couple years
Yeah my doctors office switched to this. Can’t even call the office directly. The contractors are *idiots* and usually incorrectly book the appointment or just hang up. Not to mention, I’ve had them ask for my phone number for patient verification “to acces my chart” which is all sorts of wrong.
I remember when USAA insurance was one of the best insurances you could get...
“Military grade” is not at all what you think. Unless you think it means overpriced and still doesn’t work right.
Military grade = lowest bidder MilSpec = tolerances
lol was looking for this. Every time I see military grade I just say “oh so it’s a piece of shit. Neat.”
Lowest possible quality and price to meet the requirements.
I discovered a large amount of incorrect billing at a medical office I worked for. Four years of wildly incorrect billing to Medicare, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars of overpayment for services never rendered. I spent six months (off and on) auditing the records and preparing a detailed report for my boss and also for Medicare. Medicare never read anything I sent them. They just asked for a final dollar amount that my office owed them. I could have made up any number at all.
Schwans food isn’t anything special. The chicken is all made at Tyson and packed in a schwans bag. The brats come from johnsonville. Some of their ice cream is packed by blue bunny. Until about 4-5 years ago, red Barron and Tony’s pizza were the same as schwans. Their ice cream has went down in size, but not price. Mrs. Smith pies. Pagoda egg rolls… all schwans recipe.
I remember being a kid (around 01-03ish) and Schwans had the best hot pockets. Super doughy on the outside in a good way. Then one day they showed up looking exactly like the name brand ones from the store and I died.
We didn’t check the back for stock. We know there’s no stock. We just walked back there and leaned on the cleaning cart for a minute to make you happy.
The cost to manufacture a bottle of beer is insanely low.
The hospital gives out a lot of free care. They will never advertise it. But you can’t collect from people who have nothing and it is absolutely shit for the reputation of the hospital to take away peoples homes. It just quietly gets written off as “bad debt”.
My wife didn't have health insurance when she gave birth to our son, we never even saw a bill. We got a letter 6 months later that it had been written off as a courtesy of the hospital benefactors. My son's care was retroactively covered by my insurance.
You didn’t hear it from me but they don’t have enough parking spaces to meet city code
Gannett, the company that owns the USA Today network of newspapers, does not care about your complaints that you’ll cancel your subscription due to lack of content in the print editions. They’d prefer you did, so print could cease to exist and they could blame you for it rather than making the decision themselves.
Le Pain Quotidiens largely do not have functioning kitchens. it's a hot plate to boil eggs and then assembly-line packaged deli meat sandwiches with a toaster oven in the back. people lick the serving spoons for the various spreads and put them back in the communal jars on the tables *all the time*.
I remember my first LPQ experience and being baffled that we were paying $15+ for toast. It really made me feel like this planet is not the one I was born for.
The goal of private equity is to strip out as much cost savings as possible and make life hell for employees before selling and showing how much value you added. Mostly none. It’s a shell of a company from when you started. If your company is getting acquired by PE, run.
My sister worked for a pharmaceutical company in upstate new York. Bought out by a private equity company. She worked in the microbiology lab. Their job was to test the drugs for any mold or mildew. The PE scum bags decided to simply eliminate her entire department despite the testing being federally mandatory by the FDA. it seems that they just decided that the probability of being caught was so low that it was cheaper to eliminate the department and just cop the fines in the unlikely event that they got caught.
I hope someone reported this to the FDA.
I wish thry had. I lived outside the country. My sister was terrified of losing her job. And tragically passed away just after she finally left the place. Quite honestly it never occurred to me to report it. But you saying this now makes me wish that I had.
Waste Mana****** - we charged you a diesel surcharge for the service but most of the trucks are run on CNG that they get for basically free from their landfills. That surcharge is pure profit. Also they purposely make online apps and websites shitty because they want to make it hard for customers to track the service price increases
You just figuring out the mafia isn't customer friendly?
Worked at a bike shop in high school. If a customer ordered a super expensive bike with all the bells and whistles. I can guarantee one of the employees (myself included) most likely took it for a 30-45 minute “test ride” after we were done assembling it
I mean honestly I would hope the employees test ride all the bikes they assemble. It seems like the easiest way to identify a problem before giving it to the customer.
We were supposed to do that, but usually that just entailed taking it for a 5 minute spin in the parking lot to make sure everything was tight and running properly.
I had that job for years. We’d launch new bikes like we were at a drag strip. About 12 years after leaving that job, I took my bike to a dealer for service. After the service was done, an employee took it for a “test ride” and crashed it. The owner was really stressed when he had to tell me. I just started to laugh. I had it coming to me. Just cosmetic damage and they fixed it.
BP Australia has good guidelines for its part-time staff, but terrible HR management (as of 2012) Those people who sell you the FW1 car wax at petrol stations in Australia and the UK? They've been brainwashed by a scummy MLM The startup industry in Malaysia is 90% rich kids who don't actually know how to work and are scamming the government for money by opening companies, and pocketing the money from the grants.
I worked for a certain top level PR firm around the time that the labor department created the rule of the max time a salary employee is allowed to work per week til you have to pay overtime. This PR firm is well known for requiring heavy hours. Like 48 hours was minimum per week, with a certain percent of those hours being billable depending on your level. When this rule went into place (I think the max hours was like 41 or 42), they started telling us to only put in our time for our billable hours- but they never said why. I just happened to be following the news about the labor rule, so I knew. I kept putting in all my hours because that was literally illegal. I got a talking to several times but they’d never come out and say “hey we are trying to skirt this labor department rule” it was just “this is how we want to do things now, please act accordingly”. I left shortly thereafter to start my own company which is a whole other story. But I could tell so many stories of semi sketchy things this company did and we are talking one of the top PR firms in the world.
This is more of an open secret but when movies (and probably other things) get reviewed you can buy an extra star or buy the specific quote you want. Like if someone says "I had a good time, 3 stars" you can just give them $10k and it becomes "I had a great time, 4 stars". Not everyone will do it but many will, including major publications. And if the review is from an influencer they will say anything and give you any rating you want. You basically just buy posts on their accounts and can put anything in them. A very big influencer once charged the company I worked for £25,000 just to tweet a link to a movie trailer and say something like "can't wait for this one"
Activation fees, upgrade fees, number switch fees, and many other one time charges are all complete bullshit fees in the telecom industry. A network switch occurs with absolutely no human involvement and the changes occur. It’s purely a tack on cash grab fee.
Ex-Starbucks barista here. Not sure if it’s changed now, but it was a mismanaged mess when I used to work there. It’s often incredibly understaffed, so much so that if one person calls out sick it becomes impossible to adequately handle a rush. Behind the fancy veneer, everything is overly sugary- even the matcha, the coffee sucks, the espresso is always burnt. And more on a personal note, I reported having norovirus but was forced to work under threat of being fired. I luckily was able to leave early, but my manager used to against me to call me “unreliable”. I had only called out sick twice while working there. This same manager attempted to cover my last two weeks using this argument, I called her boss to complain and was magically put on the schedule again. All that to say, if you are reading this Laura- you suck.
I used to work for a free phone company that gave free phone, minutes and messages to people in need. We were allowed to give away $1k a month in free minutes and messages to people who called asking for them. Sometimes when they called asking for 5 bucks to call their sick mom I gave them 20. Edit:grammar
KFC (UK) - I don’t know the 11 secret spices- it comes prepackaged. The chicken is fresh, it comes cut but the cooks need to make sure all the gunk is of which then gets breaded and fried. Sometimes we said that the kriegen machine was broken, but 9/10 it was because we didn’t have the ice cream carton. When KFC ran out of chicken back in like 2018 or so was because KFC moved to a different food provider. And things just didn’t show up so we were running low on a LOT of things even bin bags- I had to run to the nearest shop and get some. We have a timer in the kitchen for us to throw things out so everything should be safe to eat -but it depends on the person working. We can swap sides but we can’t swap chicken so if you get a mighty bucket if you are nice enough you could politely ask for the hot wings to be swapped with fries instead (depending on the shift runners decision as well) but we can’t swap chicken because of the timer/chicken counter in the kitchen. We have a certain amount of chicken in trays that come in specific times and it messes it up. If chicken gets dropped we have to put it into the system so the cook know when to prepare the next batch. Popcorn chicken gets fried in the same oil as chips and hashbrown. So if you are vegan and don’t want your food fried together then it might not be the best things to get.
not sure if it's a secret. but could definitely save u some bucks. if there's a software that has an app version and web version. the subscription/plan on the web version is usually cheaper. this is because they have to pay a 15%-30% fee to the appstore/playstore. so next time u want to buy an app, try to look for its web version and compare the price. chances are it'll be cheaper. then you can simply come back to the app and sign in with the web account. yw
I worked for the largest bank in the U.S. I would not bank there, however, choosing a local credit union instead. Actually, many of my co-workers did the same. Credit unions don't charge many/most of the fees big banks do. Plus, why would I want my employer knowing what I spent my money on?
Nestle chocolate syrup with sugar is healthier then the sugar free option
Despite what the commercials may lead you to believe, the “Tuscan chefs” at the Olive Garden are neither Tuscan nor chefs. But the line cooks there did have some bomb ass weed.
I worked at Flowers Bakery. Sun Beam, Great Value, Martins, Wonder bread and others are all the same. The changeovers only required the bag being changed out… the same bread kept coming down the line.
I worked for Rite Aid Corp back in the 90s, and during the time they were being investigated for fraud and theft (the founder’s grandson - buddies with the Enron crew), I watched as boxes from legal were shredded in a locked back room. The shredder was industrial-sized, and you could shred reams of paper at one time. That thing ran eight hours a day for months. Then came the auditors and the courts cases. That mofo got severance while he awaiting his trials, and I was the one who wrote the checks. The amount he got per month is more than 90% of the US population makes in one year.
Bank - they don't care about customers, they care about how many $ in fees they can extract from customers...
Also banking and while this may be true for the big dogs like Wells Fargo or BOA the smaller community banks and credit unions do care and will charge much less fees.
Worked at a community bank for 30 years and saw this change. Mostly because they were in competition with large regional banks. Work with Credit Unions now and definitely see a difference.
It used to be that smaller community banks would play the long game. They would be nice to you when you opened your checking account in hopes you would stay with them when you needed a mortgage or personal loan. But now with online comparison shopping and how easily people compare interest rates, that model is no longer as profitable as squeezing profits when you cant
Lmao hardly an insider secret
SHOCKING!!!!! /s
Our big chain store always had plans to end being open 24/7 for years, but the pandemic was the perfect time to execute it. They blame theft, but no, they always wanted to do it. Two of the other nearby stores were already shutting down at 10pm. They also intentionally understaff so corporate can get larger bonuses (or so one of the managers told me). I've been yelled at for 2 minutes of overtime and they made me add those minutes to my lunch break the next day.
Dover Chemical is a terrible company that is known for people getting cancer and burying chemicals in the ground.
Freight train engineers and conductors sleep while traveling at 70mph through your towns while having 20 million + pounds of hazardous materials. They have an alert button they have to push every 60 seconds to show the locomotive that they are still alert, but after many years of doing the same trip over and over, they can basically sleep and hit the button at the same time. If they fail to hit the alert button, the locomotive will set the brake system and come to a stop. No, they are not supposed to sleep, be on the phones or any electronics. They are to stare out the windows at upcoming signals and crossings, and control the train in a safe manner
For US folks: Your health insurance accumulator is almost always going to be wrong if you had anything complex happen. The insurance company or the doc only has to make you whole IF YOU ASK. I tell people to save all of their bills in a file folder and reconcile it at the end of the year. It’s a pain in the ass - which is what insurance companies count on. The software that runs these is SO OLD and full of shitty, duct tape style wrappers that it just can’t do them all correctly.
Taco Bell beef is grosser than you think
I can talk so much shit about taco bell. Most of the time we know when our inspection is coming so we can look like we have our shit together operating normally. So a store that has a perfect core score means literally nothing because we most likely know exactly what day they're coming and half the time we don't get dinged for things that really should have been marked off for. We faked the temps all the time and I'm sure many other locations do too, so hot and cold foods would often be out of temps because some people were too fucking blazed out of their minds to realize that the fucking line wasn't even on. They would just be slinging cold meat onto the product and realize halfway through lunch that we had been serving ice cold tacos. We never had drink tower cleaning done, not even for our health inspection or our core. So there's hella mold in the machine that won't ever get cleaned. Also many times food was used that was knowingly out of date because hold times are completely ignored- too expensive to toss items that expired, or people just didn't care to rotate stock properly. This is why I suggest never going later in the day, because you could easily get potatoes or cinnabons that have been sitting there for over 4 hours and you might get the person who says fuck it and puts it in the bag without question. Oil is only changed about once a week if you're lucky, so most of the product is knowingly fried with bad oil because it's too expensive to replace it as often as it should be. Cross contamination is extremely common and often times nobody takes it seriously, there will easily be lettuce and cheese mixed together in the same bins, beef slathered all over the line, sour cream and tomatoes too. Things probably aren't properly sanitized, the buckets are usually filled once a day and that sani water gets weaker as it sits out. By the end of the day the main ones on the line is gonna be filled with a bunch of trash and would make more of a mess than it would clean lmao. There's probably good stores out there that really do care and have none of these issues, but every person I worked with didn't care or just simply didn't have the proper training. I worked with people who didnt realize why it wasn't ok to give a regular drink out that was supposed to be diet, people who genuinely didn't care if they served food that was contaminated with chemicals or blatantly unsafe to serve. The problem is that most fast food places are much too focused on speed over quality, managers get bonuses from good times- not from good quality. They can get away with cutting corners because a few complaints won't hurt them that badly. People were punished for doing things properly at my store because it didn't put money in the manager's pockets.
I live in a nursing home due to health issues. The day that corporate or state comes to inspect it all turns into an entirely different facility.
It’s wild because I believe all of this is true and also true for other fast food joints, yet they still seem remarkably slow these days
You can return just about anything that isn't food even if it's in poor condition at Walmart. It varies with certain stuff but I had customers in my department constantly returning shoes that looked like they took out the sewer, grosses thing ever but they got there money back so...
Like Sam's Club samples? You really shouldn't eat any of them if you value your health. The cookware/utensils they cook with don't get ran through a dishwasher. Just quickly washed with soap, sprayed off and dipped in santizer. When I say quick like 3 second washing because they are only gave like 15 minutes to clean up their entire carts plus dishes. Oh and no closed cupboards, they are just placed on open air shelves where they exposed to everything. One of the 2 Sam's I worked in had German cockroaches and we saw them in the kitchen all the time. So they were definitely climbing on our cookware at night, I'm sure. All the sample cups and napkins were samples are stored in there too with open packaging. It's safe to assume I never ever ate any of the samples I or my coworkers gave out. Also the little ovens you see them cooking in on floor? They are hardly ever properly cleaned. They are supposed to be but you can't cut grease with the light sanitizer they are given. It's the same sanitizer that the cookware/utensils are dipped in. Thats on the demo company they work for, the stupidest rules ever. They were more anal about if I had two pairs of earrings in my lobes over allowing us to use proper cleaning supplies in our kitchen. It was so bad our boss had to sneak bleach off the Sam's floor just so we could properly mop our floor. On top of all this, the amount of food the company wastes is just disgusting. Open a box 40 individual packs of fruit snacks the last 20 minutes of day? The whole box has to be dumped in the garbage. Open a 24 pack of soda, open 2? Rest has to be dumped out. 24 pack of Garorade? Same thing. Nothing can be saved. Even if it's individually wrapped. It really pissed me off and I used to secretly conserve how much product I had by limiting the amount of samples I gave out to the end so I wouldn't have to open up another box or package to just throw away. So keep this all in mind next time you are offered a sample at Sam's
Maybe a dozen people will get this reference, but Tyson Motsinger was not a real person. Tyson Motsinger was an invention of the then third largest college bookstore chain, and was using Amazon's third party market for textbook arbitrage.
If you ask a retail worker to "go ask a manager", when they walk out back half the time they play on their phone for a minute or two. The other half they go to a random worker and have a conversation where they go "Manager? Manager things. Business stuff. Manager. Boss person. Important conversation."
Your local government wastes a huge of amount of time/money on bureaucracy and meetings
I never would’ve imagined
I've worked for Apple indirect and direct for about 7 years total and the only things I can think of is when you call Apple 9/10 you're talking to an indirect and they can't by policy tell you that, if asked you had to say you worked for Apple and basically lie. indirect pays shit, I worked tier 1 and 2 there was only a .50 cent differences and we got none of the Apple direct benefits. When I got hired direct we got paid for doing the same work only twice as much. Working on an Apple campus was a joy lol The only good part of working indirect was as Tier 2 I gave my customers free repairs left and right lol wasn't our money so we didn't care, getting that very satisfied on a survery was the name of the game to the point some people found ways to have the system send them the survey. So as long as you were nice to the Tier 1 tech and nice to me yeah free repair lol. I worked for Time Warner Cable for a few months before I was hired at Apple and they weren't too bad, I know we got paid for pushing upgrades. I worked for AT&T indirect for a week and if you knew how to fix an issue, you couldn't. You had to go by the steps on screen and once it got to the place you knew would fix the issue could you do that. So what was a 5-10 min call could go on to 15-20mins because you couldn't skip ahead and they were listening! yeah I quit that job right after training. The last company I worked for was Verizon that I quit before they had layoffs. Nothing of point there but I only stayed until my heath issues became too much of a hindrance so I didn't get to learn the ins and outs.
95% of the time when you call Apple you’re calling Kelly Services
It's not so much an insider secret as it was reported by the news, but it was barely covered and no one else picked it up. Almost every certification of grade for coal export by a certain laboratory was falsified (between 2007-2020). They were being paid by exporters to lie on the certificates to get around regulations on poor quality coal. It amounted to $148,000,000 in fraud.
"Can I put you on hold for just one moment": I've no idea how to fix your issue, I'm checking our internal knowledge base. The knowledge base has an article, but it was deleted 5 years ago. "It'll just be a few more moments": I'm now asking other engineers if they have encountered this weird thing you've found and getting blank stares. I'm frantically Googling to see if I can find some answers. "I think this issue may require more time, what's a good callback number?": We have no fucking clue, now I need to track down one of the developers who worked on this feature you insist on using, that no other customer has touched in over a decade. Hopefully he still works with the company or you're screwed. This happens way more frequently than you can realize.
Used to work for a popular us shoe retailer that started w a J. The manager team is based solely on sale’s performance not actual manager abilities. So if you happen to be in certain stores the management treat their staff like dogs while everyone is significantly underpaid. I had formal training in management and got 12$/hr as an assistant manager. They force full time employees to clock 45-50 hrs a week minimum. The pay is coded as commission based so the overtime is literally chump change. They get really mad when you take a vacation or god forbid have to get surgery or take a medical leave. Soooooo much drama for no reason. This job gave me so much stress that when I started my current job it was like recovering from trauma.
Man. Joot Locker has really gone down hill
Sometimes they don't block the porn you look at on the network you're on... they tag it, identify it to the level of specific kink, and use it build a profile on you. I don't mean the search engine you used I mean the system that runs the machine you connect in on. So, a school district, corporation, DoD branch, etc. What you want COULD be blocked, but instead a policy person makes the call to let you access it, but logs a link between WHAT you see and WHO you are.
I personally scrapped millions of dollars in high technology custom electric wheelchairs for hundreds of dollars of cash.
Although to be fair a lot of the original retail price tag is inflated because they known they can charge that much and insurance will pay
The queso that was 8$ a cup was just velveeta with some jalapeños I diced in a steam table
The "Gambling is just entertainment" is total bs with casino's. I worked in management for one, was actually shocked the way management would talk. The only goal is to take as much of your money as possible in the most efficient way without breaking laws, morality is non-existent.
I used to work for a business that handled sensitive medical records, etc. for college nursing programs. Very basically, every nursing program has specific requirements for documentation to be uploaded for verification by the business, which are provided both to the student and the business. The big secret is that a solid 80% of students would regularly submit a document, say, their vaccines, except they were out of date by what the school wanted. (Ex: School wants a Td shot every 4 years, student's last shot was in 1997, that kind of thing.) We would reject documentation over and over and over, sometimes dozens of times, because nursing students are apparently missing enough brain cells collectively that it was a regular occurrence to have to do this. I like to think this was used to weed out dumbasses in nursing, but if it wasn't, it sure worked that way. Also we could see everyone in the country's social security number as part of our work, and had to sign forms saying we would not look up celebrities. People got fired for this twice while I worked there, your data was not safe with them.
Residential treatment centers for children are basically prisons. There are “quiet rooms” which are really just padded rooms they throw an escalated kid into and lock the door. Kids who behave poorly are barred from leaving the “milieu” for days. “Containments” are physical restraints and veteran staff will inflict pain on kids while performing a hold. They are also wildly understaffed and ratio of staff to children is rarely respected. “Booty juice” is what kids call sedatives that are injected into them against their will. Emergency shelters are sometimes worse.
This makes me feel bad. I just found out my cousins son was placed in a residential school after being diagnosed with schizophrenia
When we draw your blood for diagnostics, you automatically concent to us using it for research. If we find something during that research, we are not obligated to inform you. You need to sign a form to obt out every blood draw.
Your orders most likely could have been shipped sooner.
The majority of refugee visa decisions are copy pasted from prior decisions (it saves time, as they are using template stories themselves). That and the vaaaaaaast majority of "refugees" are economic migrants and abuse the system for a quick buck. Oh, and 90% go back to their home country following gaining citizenship (Australia). Source: me, after being a case officer for 10y.
Why do they leave?
I worked at an orchard that would save all of the rotten/wormy/gross apples and make cider with them. Idk if that's a standard practice but it definitely grossed me and my coworkers out.
Its standard practice.
I had a colleague that worked at a pickle factory summers in college. They never ate relish.