Companies have certain things that they don’t want their customers to know about…for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons.
Below are 31 stories of the inside scoops of various industries. Check them out!
Most cheap sex toys are made out of unstable materials (TPE, TPR) that may leech chemicals into your body and may over time start to melt, especially if stored with other toys. These material can also be Porous and a perfect home for bacteria, so black spots might grow on your dildo.
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Home construction. It is so bad. Amazing what people will pay a half mil for. Total rubbish. You won’t believe the number of foundation failures or how many roof trusses have termites pre-installed and for Gods sake never look under the carpet.
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Valet driver here, dont leave your drugs in the car. A kid took a pound out of a customer’s car a few years back and the dude came back FLIPPIN’ out screaming at the manager. When the manager finally asked what was stolen and he told him weed, my manager just said “Oh. Well you can file a police report then”
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General manager of a rental car company here.
Do not, under any circumstances, buy additional roadside assistance or premium roadside assistance.
Essentially every new car comes with 5 years of free roadside assistance from the manufacturer. As long as you weren’t off roading, just give the manufacturer’s RSA hotline the VIN and mileage and you are good to go.
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A certain telephone company with a blue globe logo doesn’t actually have a billing department. You are always routed to Sales. The job is not to fix your billing problem, it’s to upsell you. If you have a legit billing problem, you will be transferred because the rep doesn’t want to deal with anyone that isn’t a sale. Every time you’re transferred, it’s actually to the same department, just a different sales rep. Billing managers are really just Sales Managers.
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Locksmithing.
Live in an apartment building? Does your Superintendent have a Master key for the apartment doors? Then forget about thinking you are safe and secure behind your locked door.
If at any time, a Master key has gone missing, the ONLY way to secure the building is to rekey every lock in the place. And nobody ever wants to absorb that expense. This means that the keying chart for your building has been in use since the building was constructed.
You can remove the deadbolt from a door, and with some very basic knowledge, disassemble the cylinder, and calculate the shear lines where the apartment key and the Master key operate. By deducing the cuts on the apartment key, you can easily calculate the cuts for the Master key. Take these calculations to a locksmith, and in minutes you can have a Master key that will open every door in your building.
If you live in a high-rise, don’t trust the deadbolt to keep you secure. Replace the lock with a high security deadbolt such as a Medeco, and give the building management a copy of your key in case of emergency.
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Doctor here. I’ll see a patient Monday morning in the hospital, work all night and then Tuesday morning in the hospital, and I won’t have slept in the 24 hours in between.
And this is totally normal and accepted practice in medicine.
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A lot of people think military is synonymous with discipline and top-tier job training.
I’ve seen things that would make a McDonald’s worker think that their job is pretty high-class.
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Legacy programmer here! All of the debt from your houses, and your parents’ and landlords’ houses, and increasingly all of your credit card, consumer and student loan debt are ALL being processed on 24 hour cycles on a system backbone that was written well before I was born. And I’m OLD.
I work in mortgage servicing and tinker with the spiderwebs that hold up the economy as we know it. It’s pretty complex, because everything runs on spit and promises and equal parts sunshine and darkness. We find ways to squeeze tiny bits of performance improvements out of an impossible system so that we can immediately put more load on it.
If you want to guarantee yourself years of work in an environment you’ll probably hate, learn to code in COBOL. Most of the people in my dept are within a decade of retirement, if they live that long. Our company pays college kids to learn on the job now because there are no new COBOL programmers.
I hate it. It’s a chore to get up and go in every day. It’s my dream job and I’m lucky to have it.
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I worked in an independent senior citizens centre for five years. I don’t know about other facilities that are independent, but at mine, you were supposed to be mostly to completely independent. There were some tenants that needed a caretaker with them at all times, but the families found that cheaper than moving them to an assisted living facility.
After about two years, we got a new director. We went from 20 rooms filled to all 42 in a few months. Several of these tenants I would hardly call mostly to completely independent. Clearly my boss just wanted to fill the rooms and get his bonus. We had three women move in during the same week that all had dementia. One of them went completely downhill in a period of eight months.
When she first got there, she just seemed forgetful and quick to anger. After a month, she forgot her children were adults and that her husband died. Another month, and she had no idea where she was. She thought the facility was a hotel and would always talk about how horribly she was treated. She caught her apartment on fire. She’d freak out when there were guests in the dining room. Eventually she refused to bathe, and ended up with a severe yeast infection between rolls on her stomach. We had no idea that was going on, we just knew she wasn’t bathing and smelled very foul. She ended her eight month stay stealing other tenant’s outdoor decorations and becoming incontinent. The others caused all kinds of problems, wouldn’t stop harassing staff to the point where it was getting really hard to perform our tasks, other tenants threatened to move out and refused to go to meals so they could avoid them.
My point of this is: Just because a facility says they’ll accept your dementia ridden parents doesn’t mean you should place them there. Sure, it’s cheaper for you. But they don’t get the care they need. There are no nurses in our independent facility. In the five years I worked there, we only had two half hour meetings educating our staff about dementia and how to handle the people suffering from it. There’s no one watching them 24/7. They could seriously harm themselves and others. They need to be somewhere where the staff is trained to handle them at their worst, and properly guide them through the horrible transition.
Please, think twice before putting them in independent facilities.
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I am a welder for a company that builds roller-coasters.
Every single weld is inspected and X-rayed for any defect. So I guess this doesn’t apply but just so everyone can feel a little bit safer, I figured I’d let you internet people know.
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It’s not uncommon for assistants and apprentices to make the art of really famous, well known, expensive artists. The artist might be very involved in the process or barely involved. They can have studios with dozens of assistants churning out all of “their” work, and then just sign their name to it. And I’m not just talking about, sculptures or art installations where assistants might be doing the grunt work. Even paintings could be barely-touched by the actual artist.
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It is hard to pop a balloon with a dart at a carnival to win a prize. The balloon is under-inflated and the tip of the dart is dull…bounces off.
It’s hard to get a basketball into the hoop at the carnival to win a prize. The ball is super inflated so it is hard and easily bounces. The hoop is smaller than a regulation hoop. Got to shoot high and let it come down straight through the hoop.
The largest stuffed animal you could possibly win at a carnival costs approximately 7-10 dollars. You will spend over 100 dollars working your way up to the big prize.
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Teacher here: I hide YOUR secrets. If your kids know it, I know it. Children are tactless and impulsive and they tell me all about your reproductive habits, financial difficulties, domestic problems, and tindr dates. I know so much about moms and dads that I wish I could erase from my brain forever.
But I will never tell! You’re welcome!
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If you’re sitting at a blackjack table and aren’t sure what play to make, ask the dealer. No, seriously. We’re trained to know the official Blackjack strategy guide and are allowed to give you that information (considered common knowledge). If the dealer doesn’t know it off hand, their supervisor should have a copy of it and will help you out.
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That people in the kitchen and in factories also go to work when they feel ill and you most likely have eaten something someone sneezed on. Because there is a line between feeling so sick you can’t get out of bed and coughing and sneezing once in awhile.
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Teacher – it’s that time of year to make class placements for next year. Every year there are two or three teachers in the school (elementary) who are so awful, we cry over which students we have to ‘sacrifice’ to them and hope they are strong enough to survive a year with Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So.
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Many of the books you read – especially romance – aren’t written by the person who’s name is on the cover.
Most romance books are ghostwritten, bought by someone else, and published under a female’s name with a fake bio.
How do I know this?
I’m a ghostwriter.
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After working in the travel industry I can tell you that hotel room rates are often not fixed prices. If guests come to the front desk and ask the price we generally start at the high end. Most people accept this as fact and pay up. However, if a customer is hesitant or threatens to walk out we can sometimes drop the price to keep them there.
Often there is a bottom line price set by the owners- we can’t go any lower than that or we lose money.
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Software development: You will always be pressed for more time and money. Your product will almost always launch with major bugs and issues- you will spend most of your final moments before go live fixing as many of the VISIBLE issues as you can, and subsequent updates actually getting the product to where you envisioned it as you were building.
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Bakery owner here: if you order a custom cake, we will charge you a fair price depending on decoration, size, flavorings, etc. no matter what type event it’s for. We don’t up charge you for weddings.
We will, however, up sell you. You want white cake? that’s fine, but this Genoise sponge is much tastier (and costs .75 more per serving.) You want a lace wrapped bottom? what if I hand piped lace all over it, it would be much more beautiful (and cost about $100-$500 more, depending on cake size.) you get the idea. Basically, if you have a firm cake budget, make sure you let the bakery know when you start your tasting. Take their suggestions if they fit within your budget. they won’t try to upsell you too much unless they’re assholes, and it’ll save a lot of disappointment.
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If your baby is in full-time care (40+ hours a week) the odds are that we know about their milestones (rolling, crawling, walking, talking, etc…) before you do. It’s just because the majority of their waking time is spent with us. We don’t tell you because working hard to provide for your kid doesn’t make you a bad parent, and we don’t want you to feel like you’re missing out.
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It is against Walmart’s company policy for hourly employees to call 911 in the event of an emergency. Rather, they must notify the nearest manager, which could take anywhere from minutes to weeks depending on where the manager is, what they are doing, whether the hourly employee has a walkie, etc. Employees can be, and have been, fired for calling 911 to report an in-store emergency.
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I’m an advertising photographer. Pretty much anything you buy based off the work of my industry won’t be as nice as it looks in the ads.
We put a lot of work into making something that’s worth $5 look like it’s worth $50.
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Accounting. That the appearance of everything is fine is more important than is everything actually fine.
Financial statement sign offs by accountants are becoming more like rubber stamps. Accountants are blessing financial statements that haven’t been properly vetted because of cost constraints engulfing the industry.
It’s only a matter of time before the next Enron/accounting scandal.
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I work in video games. Our job is to make our game as addictive as possible so that we can make the most money out of micro-transactions. (Think mobile phone games) A lot of our game design is by marketing telling us what people will most likely buy in the game by watching data. Sure, it starts free-to-play, but to keep you playing and paying we mine data to make it more “sticky.”
After a while I felt like I was working for a drug dealer and quit recommending our games to people I knew. Sure, people have fun playing the games we make, but I don’t want to hear later about how much money you or your kids wasted on it.
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Has anyone mentioned agriculture yet? If we paid our workers a salary that attracted legal immigrants and citizens, all produce/ornamentals would be priced as high as the stuff marketed as organic. A lot of farm labor is crap work, and it’s the only industry with no overtime pay requirements. 50+ hour weeks are normal. The factory farm I work at starts at sunrise with a minimum 9 hour day, working Saturdays as well. I’m a U.S. citizen with a Horticulture degree so I have it better than most of my illegal immigrant coworkers. I once spent a 10 hour day with a crew bent over in the field just to see what it was like and I had to take the next day off. I try to source all my produce and plants more ethically because of this, even though it’s pricey.
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Whenever you see an advertisement with a quote from someone we just had someone in the office say that so technically we aren’t making it up. Even though we tell them exactly what to say.
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FedEx Office doesn’t recycle.
I’ve personally killed probably close to an acre of forest.
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Every driver of a truck has nodded off at one time or another making them an 80,000 pound death missile.
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Plumber.
I make over half my money using one tool that costs $50, and a skill that can be learned in 20 minutes.
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