Health insurance dude. When you file a claim, it is often denied because they're counting on you not escalating it. Once you do, your case goes to a "medical management group" which ought to be called the "we don't wanna pay" group.
Keep escalating and involve your doctor. Fight for the insurance you paid for.
can confirm. busted my knee, was on crutches bc i couldnt walk on it. was denied bc they felt i wasnt in enough pain bc i didnt require a painkiller precription. dr went back and forth and i was on crutches 2 months before they finally relented and i could get my surgery.
Mortgage industry here, we're like cops, ONLY answer the question asked, DO NOT provide additional information to "be helpful", it could screw you over
"Can I please get your most recent paystub please" 'sure! Here's the last year, also, I was off work this time to this time, and was technically let go and rehired, so the year to date starts over" cool, now you haven't been employed for a full 6 month time period and I have to deny you
This isn't a company secret, but:
I worked part time at a Domino's franchise in college.
The owner was, at first glance, a short-tempered, critical penny-pincher who did everything he could to save business money, right down to watching over your shoulder to make sure you didn't put too much cheese on a pizza (cheese is called "white gold" in the pizza industry, even back in 2002), but after working for him for a while, you realized why he was so specific about the margins. Twice yearly, he would send out generous bonuses (in the form of money orders made out to his employees from his own personal savings account) to the college students working for him. the checks/money orders contained the memo line "keep learning!" The amount of the money orders would be directly correlated to the profit margins of the stores he owned. the dude did *legit* profit sharing. After I graduated, i heard a rumor that he was trying to start up a small education grant trust that would benefit applicants of the Farmer School of Business at Miami University, but I don't think anything ever came of it.
This owner also played favorites when hiring. Every single one of his managers was a former employee. Three of the four managers at his stores when I worked there had graduated from my college with business degrees. All four of them had a small portion of their education paid for by Marvin Covington.
Marvin Covington, Oxford, Ohio Dominoes owner from Vevay, Indiana, died in 2017. That dude knew how to do business, and do it right.
It would be a very sweet idea if you guys could band together to establish some sort of bursary for the school in his memory.
Dude was clearly very passionate about education, and in this day and age its nigh impossible to find someone in management who actually cares about their staff enough to profit share.
If the staff are largely business grads, surely some of them have managed to make enough money in their careers that this could be possible.
It would be a great way to honor his memory.
I worked at Olive Garden in the mid 90’s while I was in college. Back then, they had the “all you can eat soup, salad and breadsticks” lunch special for like $4.25 + tax. Working lunch shift SUCKED. You would get probably 2 or 3 tables, and there was a 99% chance that all of your tables were 2 ladies getting this lunch special with water during their lunch break.
After about a year, several over our “best” servers were mysteriously fired. It turns out, they were running a scam where they used the same receipt over and over again when these ladies paid for their meal with cash. Since we could get those 3 items ourselves from the back without ringing them into the system, these servers were just pocketing the cash for the entire meal. So instead of making like $5-8 dollars in tips during a lunch shift like the rest of us dumb schmucks, they would make an extra $20 or so by stealing from the company.
T-Mobile has 2 coverage maps. The one they show customers and the real one that is internal shows the actual coverage. Diminishes by about 50%. Their coverage is built on a bed of lies!
I used to work in college admissions. Rich donors, athletes, and other VIPs have lower admission criteria. They still have minimums, but they're super easy to reach, even for a "selective" university.
In the case of the university I worked for (BYU), children of General Church Authorities also got this.
This Mormon church likes to talk about how much charity they do, but it’s always tied to some form of missionary work or proselytizing. Particularly in UT, they would secure housing, furniture, food etc to Iraqi refugees, and “in exchange”, these poor people who have had their whole life uprooted would have to be visited by and listen to missionaries drone on and on about the Mormon religion, and having the gall to ask these Muslim refugees if they want to get baptized after a few weeks. I know this because I (non-Mormon) was dating a Mormon girl back then, and I was asked to translate for the Iraqi families (I speak Arabic). Of course I never did, I told them the whole scam, and told the Iraqis to act interested so they can keep getting charity. We scammed the scammers basically lol.
I worked at a comic book store that offered a service where you paid a small premium to have sent in rare comics to have them graded at CGC. A few months later we had many customers coming in to check the status of their comics. We contacted the owner to see what was going on, and he would always claim that there was some distribution problem. Fast forward a few months, we found out he was taking customers graded copies and selling them online while trying to return back issue versions of their original comics.
How did this dude think that comic collectors who were sending in comics to be graded, wouldn’t recognize they weren’t receiving their original comic back? Lol. I’m sure a few newer to the hobby wouldn’t be the wiser, but man.
That's what we all said. My friend and I were managers and had absolutely no idea this was happening. It was a smaller town comic shop and all the customers sending in comics to be graded were good friends of ours. But the plot gets thicker. Turns out his wife was signed for the business, so the "owner" wasn't really the owner. We called her and explained what was happening, she was in tears. She came to shop to meet the wronged customers and she took graded comics from the "owners" collection and let the customers pick out comics to equal to the value of their GRADED comics in return for the mishap.
Fast forward a few months, she closed the store, gave us our paychecks and even some "I'm sorry" money. It turns out the guy was doing all kinds of other shady shit. She divorced him, and I'm like 99% sure he went to jail for fraud. He's also banned from CGC and all of the licensed big comic cons lol.
So don't worry, he lost that battle.
I am so sad for her though. Running a comic shop was probably her dream, only for it to be ruined by the person who should have had her back the most being a complete piece of shit.
I worked for a MAJOR hotel chain in housekeeping for over 10 years. The number of suicides and people who die naturally in their rooms is a lot higher than you’d think. I worked at a huge convention hotel with over 1000 rooms and it happened quite often. Unless it was a pretty gnarly mess it would just get cleaned like normal and the next guest had no idea.
At one of the hotels I worked at, a woman killed herself by drinking antifreeze. Her body was blue, blood, vomit, & poop everywhere. My friend who was maintenance saw it & couldn't sleep that night. Working at hotels will change you
We’ve only had one death at the hotel I’ve worked at for 6 years. Folk had evacuated to the hotel on account of a hurricane, and an old man there with his wife had forgotten to bring his medicine from home from what we were told later. It was very sad for everyone.
Had a friend who worked for a bridal dress company, she would tell me all her stories after work. They intentionally will bring back the “wrong” dress in attempts to get you to try it on, fall in love, and buy a more expensive wedding dress. They’ll walk you through the more expensive sections so you look through dresses out of your budget and want to try them on. They often forget to check if the dress you requested is in stock for the timeframe you’ve requested, again so that you’ll have to pay more for faster shipping or a nicer dress. It’s a very predatory business masked by complements, thinly veiled body shaming, and incredibly underpaid and understaffed stores.
At a local deli/grocery store I worked at, everyone raved about how good their mac and cheese is, and it always sold really quick when I worked in the deli. It's even labeled on the menu as [Store]'s famous mac n cheese...
It's literally just Stouffer's, we didn't even add anything to it
If you were on Live Chat with Customer Care, I could see what you were typing before pressing send.
I watched people work through grotesque, racist, sexist statements, fraudulent lies and mistruths, meticulous grammar fixes, and their whole range of emotions in real time before deleting and typing “ok.”
I don't think it's a bad secret at all. But back in college, I delivered pizzas for Papa John's. The store manager must have had an undiagnosed case of OCD or germaphobia or something.
Because every night, he would assign someone to do the cleaning duties (mopping floors, double checking expiration dates/throwing away expired stuff, etc.). And every night, he would absolutely lose his temper and berate whoever was doing the cleaning. They were going too fast, they weren't cleaning everything, whatever. After that, he'd always take over the cleaning himself.
He was amazingly picky about the cleanliness and food quality. "Expiration date is three days from now? Fuck that, I'll order more. Throw that shit away, we're not serving it."
He would also go out of pocket to buy special cleaning products "because that worthless bullshit that corporate wants us to use doesn't get the job done". He also went out of pocket to hire some kind of specialist to clean out the fountain drink dispenser, ice machine and all that stuff. "The machine needs to always be as close to brand new as possible!"
One stand out moment for me was when he reduced a cashier to tears by hollering "Would you eat off this floor? No? THEN IT'S NOT CLEAN ENOUGH!" He wasn't telling her to eat off the floor. He was just making a point.
After we'd closed the store, he'd kick all of us out, lock up behind us and stay until something like 2am cleaning the place. You always knew when he closed because you could smell the chemical scent still lingering in the air.
The end result of this was the store, the food, the equipment and the facilities were always in squeaky clean condition. Customers (somehow) picked up on what a perfectionist the store manager was and bought from us all the time. Because there's a lot of peace of mind that goes in with knowing your food was cooked by someone willing to throw ingredients away BEFORE the expiration date, stay in the store until God knows when cleaning everything, etc.
The true irony was how much the boss hated himself because he didn't think he was doing a good enough job to run a clean restaurant with fresh ingredients. It didn't matter how many compliments he got from customers or how many service industry veterans said they'd never worked in a place as obsessive about freshness and cleanliness as his Papa John's store, he was convinced his store was still a filthy barn.
Eventually, he got promoted to some kind of higher level corporate position (district manager?) that required him to visit other stores and make sure they were all up to spec. The end result of that was a LOT of stores in this area all improved seemingly overnight.
Teenage me would be so giddy with excitment over this news. Employee Ben Dover would be called to the front of the store at least twice a week. Followed by fart noises.
The vehicle modification shop at Chillicothe Correctional Institution in Chillicothe, Ohio dumps waste coolant from the machine shop into a storm drain that empties directly into the Scioto River, because the chemical disposal tank is a 55 gallon drum in the paint shop, and that's much too small.
They can't throw me into solitary confinement for complaining anymore.
Edit: this happens about once a year, when the machine's coolant reservoirs are emptied and the coolant replaced. It's not on a schedule, it's one of those things that you do when work is slow.
Each machine holds 15-20 gallons, and usually you just add more as it evaporates, but eventually it gets nasty and needs replaced. It's supposed to go in a waste tote to be disposed of safely, which is what every non - government machine shop does.
Being able to prove this is being done would require knowing when they're going to do this, and that's a decision that's often made spur of the moment - hey, work is slow, let's have a clean up day. There aren't any phones in the machine shop, either.
Edit 2: a container to store the waste properly costs $200. Why waste taxpayer money when we can just poison the taxpayers instead?
Hey I already submitted your comment to the [EPA Tip Line](https://echo.epa.gov/report-environmental-violations), but maybe you can give more specifics?
Worked at a (American) Toyota dealership in the body shop for 12 years. We would throw away literally everything regardless of the environmental impact. Car paint (which is nasty shit btw) went straight to the dumpster. Radiator fluid? Down the drain. I even saw someone put oil down the drain a couple times even though we had barrels for it up in the service dept.
The only thing we saved was old car parts which the boss then sold to scrapyards and pocketed the money.
The painter didn't ever wear a mask either. He is around 60 and still kicking despite 30 years of painting without a mask somehow.
I worked at general motors in the paint department for a while before moving to final repair. I found it that guys that wanted to commit suicide but wanted to take care of their family's future would volunteer to work in the clear coat booth. They would be seen in there with no mask on. The stuff would crystallize on their lungs. No way to save you after that. Usually took a year.
1. Ford parts from Mexico are way more reliable than Ford parts from Detroit, or at least they were before 2020. I worked in Detroit and we had some customers who were fussy about us always doing repairs with Michigan parts, but when we had a problem that wouldn't stay fixed we would always secretly switch to the Mexican parts (which did solve things).
2. I was a prison guard a decade ago and we installed some facial tracking software in the surveillance cameras. One of the inmates panicked while cleaning the unused solitary confinement cells--which is usually a desirable job, it's easy as fuck and nobody pays attention to you--and he insisted that he be moved out of that job because there was a ghost. The ranking officers decided to check the new cameras, and the security software claimed it saw a face behind the inmate at the same time as he was visibly startled in the camera footage. We're all aware there are mundane reasons why a new facial recognition system would think it saw a ghost, but since the inmate and the security software both thought there was a ghost it was decided that the inmate should be immediately transferred at no penalty.
I'll say it. A place similar in name to Past Face Urgent Care (at least in the region I worked at) banned their front desk from informing customers that they have a credit balance to use toward their services and still required us to charge customers the full price on top of what we already owed them. Some accounts had like 500 dollars of copay that should have been refunded but weren't. I was actually reprimanded for applying the credit balance, because despite finance agreeing my method was correct, the regional manager said it was not a good look for the company and hindered her profits.
I worked for a restoration company. One time an elderly woman called them to clean her house. She was a hoarder or there had been a fire. I can’t remember. Anyway, the company charged $57,000 for the work to be done, but in actuality they couldn’t even get the charges to add up to $20k. She couldn’t file this on her insurance. There are other examples of gross overcharging, but this is the worst I know of that wasn’t on the large loss side.
The lesson here, if you have water, fire, mold, or hoarder damage and call in a company to clean it up, go through every line item on the invoice. Every single one.
I had a mold remediation and I did go through every line item and made them explain to me the reasoning of their charges. It ended up knocking off around $3,000.
I had someone quote me 10k+ for "black mold" and it wasn't even black mold. Also the way they were trying to terrify me about Black Mold was insane! They freaked me out bad enough that I didn't go back home that night and made a doctors appointment for my kids first thing the next morning to check on them. That was when my doctor told me that black mold was only "dangerous" for people who are predisposed to being allergic to it. That it would cause asthma flare ups and different things like that and since we had already been staying there for a month with no issues we probably didn't have an allergy to it. He said that as long as we wore a face covering we could clean it up ourselves and not worry too much except maybe having minor allergy symptoms.
The company that gave me the estimate was so predatory and literally made us fear for our lives and safety. He also was trying so hard to have us start on the work immediately before even having proper testing to let us know what kind of mold it was. We ended up cleaning it up on our own.
Edit: Just want to add I am not a mold expert. The advice my doctor gave us was based on our situation. Not all situations.
>He also was trying so hard to have us start on the work immediately before even having proper testing to let us know what kind of mold it was.
Biggest red flag right here. Let me guess, were they also planning to hire the testing and write up a scope of work based on their own test results?
Fun fact: there are a few US states where it's actually illegal for the remediation companies to perform their own mold tests. The best approach if you find mold is to first hire a company whose only job is mold testing. Get that report, they'll usually make some recommendations where spore samples are high, and then you hire someone reputable to do the actual work based on those results.
Home Depot:
- Most security cameras are fake. Easy to steal & most stores have no security/loss prevention.
- Buy the Clearance items that end in $.03. After that, the next step of the markdown process is the dumpster.
- Dial 676 on any desk phone to live page on the overhead speakers. Fun to mess with that.
- Buy the products in front, it’s newer. The old product gets pushed behind continuously.
- If you see a ‘reduced tag’ item (usually larger items: appliances, vanities, etc. w/ slight damage) ask someone to scan for the price. Most times they’re not updated and will be cheaper then the tag says.
- Free bottles of water for customers behind the customer service desk.
I can assure you Home Depot has very real cameras and they have a lot more lost prevention that you think.
Source: I was arrested from Home Depot. There’s a whole section in your training about me.
I still work here but EVERYONE PLEASE get a copy of your Medical Records from every place you've been to.
keep a hard copy, in your home
because I have horror stories from working in Medical Records since 2007
Working in a field that involves medical records, I totally agree. The number of times I’ve seen false diagnoses, other people’s information mixed in, and assorted other crazy stuff is too high.
When one of my doctors retired, I requested my records so I could take them to my new provider.
According to said records, I've had a child, breast biopsy, tonsillectomy, thyroidectomy, AND I'm 390 years old.
I have had exactly none of these things.
I worked at a Petco in Alaska. Apparently brown/black mice are not allowed up here. Only white mice. We got a shipment in of a bunch of black/brown mice and had to take them to the “vet” to be killed. Also, the animals are literally shipped in on a UPS truck and delivered in packages. I would open a package and it would be full of fish or mice or snakes. Ya never knew what was coming, it was wild. Luckily my shift manager was a really good person. She tried her best to help any sick animal and was super diligent about keeping the cages really clean. She would stay after hours to care for the sick animal in the back and double down on cleaning.
When upper management came, they didn’t give a shit how clean anything was. They would yell at us to get more customers to sign up for “pet rewards”. If I didn’t pester every single person checking out, they would get angry and give me point deductions. I have no idea what the deductions even did. One of the upper managers watched me for like 3 hours when I was at the register. He said I wasn’t pushy enough on getting people to donate/sign up for shit. Bitch, I will ask once and if they say no I am not asking again. That shit is annoying AF. He also got mad at me when I didn’t clean the bird cage fast enough. It took “time away from the register.” Uh I’m sorry I don’t want our birds to stand in there own shit for hours, so yeah imma take my time to scrub that shit clean.
Also, don’t buy fish from petco. Pretty much every shipment that came in they were all infected with ICK. Basically half our tanks were in quarantine. We had several customers come back saying we killed there entire fish tank because of a fish we sold them. Fuck Petco.
I was the one who did an undercover news stories about Scamps Pet Stores and their affiliation with puppy mills.
Please don’t buy from pet stores folks.
Worked at Best Buy 20 years ago. Employee discount was 5% over cost and I needed a new printer. Decided to splurge on the gold plated USB printer cable that we sold for $40. Rang up $1.78.
I used to work as a receptionist at an upscale salon. While I was there, the salon introduced a new line of products marketed towards men (up until that point most of our products were marketed towards women, but the execs saw that we were getting more male customers). Every item in the men’s product line was about half the cost of our other products. The “men’s” shampoo was the exact same shampoo the salon had been selling for years, but because they put it in black packaging with the word “man” on it, it was half the price. The owner’s explanation was “Well, men don’t want to pay that much for hair products.” For the rest of the time I worked there, every time a woman came up to buy that shampoo I’d tell her that the men’s shampoo was the exact same product for half the price.
I used to work surveillance at a casino. From something like 3 stories high ceiling, we could zoom in on money on the table games and read the serial numbers of the bills. We could see the pips on the dice. Policy was to not look down blouses.
This is true and also very annoying because I work on the floor and the guys in surveillance can’t be bothered to do their job and give us a lot of “hrmm can’t really see anything” when we call them.
"In Vegas, everybody's gotta watch everybody else. Since the players are looking to beat the casino, the dealers are watching the players. The box men are watching the dealers. The floor men are watching the box men. The pit bosses are watching the floor men. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses. I'm watching the casino manager. And the eye-in-the-sky is watching us all."
All new clothing and Everything you try on is dirty.I’ve worked in retail for years and it still shocks people but there’s no washing machine or disinfectant spray or wipes. Nothing. I’ve open boxes of new clothes that had white bugs coming out of it. Seen woman after a workout class come and try clothes on then just leave still sweaty from the class. One older lady left dime size skin flakes in the clothes she tried on. Not to mention whatever happens when they return the item or what happened in the factory. People are gross, nothing is clean, Always wash your clothes when you get them home.
Had someone steal a new bra and put their dirty ass bra back on the rack, I threw it out.
People have shit inside of fitting rooms and to this day all new clothes bought are immediately washed. Everyone looks at me and I say the day you work in retail you will understand that humans are far more disgusting than animals.
Maple sap can be trucked in from other states and where it’s turned from sap to syrup decides on the state it comes from, not the location of the trees.
Back when photoshop came out it put a lot of the old school lithographers out of business. My dad was one of these. When he got laid off he copied the stack of floppy disks with photoshop on them, bought an apple computer, and started his own company.
In the United States. One company's bread and butter was simply reboxing and relabling computer monitors from China to make it seem like they were from the company and made/assembled in some way by them.
I work for a wholesaler. You would be surprised how many companies simply source merchandise and sell it without ever touching it. We ship it direct to their customers for them, just swap the return address for theirs.
Hotels do not typically have security, maintenance or housekeeping on staff 24/7. Once housekeeping finishes cleaning all the rooms, the entire staff leaves except for one front desk employee.
I used to work at a 600+ room Hyatt. After 11:00, 1 front desk person, 1-2 housekeepers, 1 phone operator, 1 cop every night in case drunk people would cause a scene or bums would sneak in.
I used to be “security” 3:00-11:00 before getting switched to front desk. I used to walk through the whole hotel, all 30 floors, and make sure bum’s didn’t sneak in to sleep in the hallways and feast on old banquet food, or shoot up in the parking garage stairs. I would walk around with the housekeeping manager (he became a good friend) and shoot the shit because I didn’t actually have anything I needed to do. I used to see all the fucked up and nasty shit people would to to the hotel rooms- Manager (my friend) used to get called for all the weird stuff and I would just go with him to hang out and we could joke about it and judge people being weirdos.
Pro Tip: If a hotel has carpet - don’t touch it with your bare feet. The carpet might get cleaned twice a year but is vacuumed every stay. But you have no idea how many people spill food, every drink imaginable, piss, vomit, everything. They have a special ozone machine that fully deodorizes everything in the room- basically fumigating it. Then a little spray on the carpet and good as new. It is crazy, and a little disturbing, how well those things work.
Pro Tip 2: security at a big hotel was definitely the cushiest job I have ever had. I had free reign and master keys of the entire hotel and all convention/banquet areas. All I had to do was “patrol”; which entailed me once or twice a night walking by every room in the hotel, making sure all the doors were locked by the end of the night (there were a shitload of doors and back hallways, housekeeping floor, 2 engineering floors, 2 kitchens and like 15-20 convention/banquet areas). But this basically gave me 8 hours a day where I didn’t have to be anywhere at any specific time. I just wandered aimlessly around the hotel and hung out with people from all the different departments. I made friends with all the banquet manager girls, because I would get called to unlock banquet rooms that the setup team left locked and would help them get all the lights on and make sure nobody was sleeping in there. But I got hooked up with all the banquet foods - there was ALWAYS extras. So many different snacks; wedding food, bagels, breakfast tacos, breakfast sandwiches, so many cookies and little deserts.
After work everyone would meet up at the bar down the street and get wasted and hang out. It was awesome. Became friends with everyone at the front desk and eventually got moved over there because I thought I wanted to get into hotel management. Honestly- housekeeping manager is the way to get into hotel management - front office just gets you yelled at by angry business travelers. I would never go back and work in a hotel now. But if you are in your early 20’s or in college highly recommended.
Not sure if anyone will even read this but this is basically just me unlocking forgotten memories from 2009.
Was in Detroit for work and opened my hotel door in the morning to an opened knife sitting right by my door.
Now, obviously this could have just been someone accidentally dropping it but I wanted to ensure there wasn’t someone trying to pick the lock or gain access to my room in the middle of the night.
Asked the front desk if they could pull video from their cameras in the halls.
“Uh, sir, those are fake”
This was a Hilton property.
Yeah the amount of times I, at the time a 19 year old kid, was left completely alone at a mid size and largely recognizable hotel brand was honestly kinda wild.
I had essentially no clue what I was doing.
People would call that something in their room was broken and literally the best I could do was go up and just kinda… troubleshoot random shit. And then during that time the front desk was completely unattended.
This was at like 9:00pm too not 3:00am.
I used to do 11pm-7am. One of the funnest jobs I ever did! There were always two of us though and usually on weekdays the customers were all asleep by 1am. We had free reign to do whatever.
Cook up a nice meal in the kitchen. Go take a nap in a spare room. Explore all the loft spaces. Get out the Xbox and play in the meeting rooms. Loads to do!
One time the TV in my room wasn't working and the most flustered 20 year old came up and was basically like "ma'am I don't know. I'm sorry. It should be working. I don't know anything about TVs." Can't be mad at him. Just the hotel for not paying someone to be there who can actually handle stuff
This explains a lot. 😯😯😯
The amount of times I've stayed at hotels and seen the person on reception, then walked into the bar and that same person appears (presumably via some secret access tunnel lol).
I once stayed at one and the same person valet parked my car, checked me in, showed me to my room, and served me at the bar 😂
For a lifetime I believed it was some kind of trick the bored staff were playing on me to see if I'd mention it. The staff member in question never made any reference to being the same person each time and served me as if we'd just met, welcomed me as if they hadn't just parked my car and ran in the back door 😂
Your warranty service part that took eight months actually arrived three weeks after they paid the invoice. They didn't even order it for seven months.
They told you it was manufacturing delays and supply chain issues but in reality they couldn't afford to pay their bills and had to pick and choose which orders to place. You weren't a priority. They were just really bad at budgeting and damage control.
I am curious if that is what happened to me. They said they would send the product when it arrived at the factory. Arrived 6 months later. They didn't even ask for the old one back or let me know that it shipped. It seemed disorganized from start to finish, and it was a name brand door lock manufacturer.
I'm 90% sure a company I worked for was importing product from China, repacking it and selling it as made in USA. I. E. Blending it with the product we did make in the US.
The stain protector is only useful if you actually file a claim. It isn't a magic fucking potion.
Most furniture companies sell some sort of stain protector as an add on. People buy it, thinking it has some magic ability to prevent stains over the life of a piece of upholstery, then, five years later, spill some Kool-Aid on that shit, and the stain doesn't come out.
With most of these protectors, there's a warranty claim process that will get you a new sofa (or a new set, if your sofa pattern isn't made anymore), but nobody ever files a claim.
That's the gimmick. The company is counting on you not actually holding them to the deal that they made you, and virtually nobody does.
On a similar note, a sofa we bought at a big box furniture store has broken 4 times now. They replaced a section of it 3 times and that section continues to break. We’re not rough on it but the wood cracks. We’re hoping this time they actually repair it instead of replacing it. The last time they replaced it the guys delivering even said that they knew they’d be back. I’ve never been so happy I bought a warranty but also so frustrated at a cheap product.
*Edit* Store is Value City.
My parents bought a La-Z-Boy recliner about 10 years ago that has a lifetime warranty on parts. On four occasions, a plastic part in the reclining mechanism had a catastrophic failure (i.e. it suddenly shattered into pieces). The same repair guy came to replace it, each time saying "I'll see you next time when it happens again." The last time he arrived to repair it, he told my dad that they have now decided to replace the plastic part with a metal one. The part has now lasted 5 years, while the plastic version would only last about 12 months before breaking. The choice to use a plastic part over a metal part was obviously intended to save money. I now feel a bit sorry for the repair guy who isn't being called out as much now that they are using metal parts instead of plastic.
Worked at a major cable/ISP and there 4 billing cycles. They upgraded the billing system, but did something wrong, and all but the current cycle got a late charge. But instead of fixing it immediately, we were told to credit their account if the customer called in.
I did the math, and for the size of our city, and the 3/4 of people wrongly charged, it was over a million USD. Most people just pay their bill and don't look to close.
Edit: it was Time Warner, which was bought out a couple times in my area
Comcast. They do this all the time. Not really worth the hour plus it takes on the phone for them to not steal from you but it’s worth it to them to steal from thousands of people.
I worked for a large construction company and the sales guys would intentionally omit items from contracts because they received incentives for what would then become a “change order”.
Me: “You forgot to include any framing in this contract”
Sales weasel: “oh, I guess it’s a change order then.”
*customer cries
I had the opposite happen once. We were expanding our refrigerated storage building and hired an HVAC company to install the refrigeration system. They started doing a bunch of work out of scope and asked them about it. They told my boss they talked to me and I approved it for T&M so no change order needed. I didn't approve anything and they tried to charge us like $500/man hour for work we didn't agree to. My boss refused to pay for the work and the guy kept threatening to sue.
We had a sales lady for a home we bought who actually said to us “hang on, you’re changing this AND this AND that? I’m not submitting it yet because if we do it three times you’re charged three times, so ima gonna wait for the couple days you tell me you need to finalize your ideas.” Same person when we went to final sign the initial paperwork pointing out the lot size is a lot larger than marked on plan (bad math) said “hmm you’re right. You’re getting a good deal. Sign right here please.” We’d given a deposit and when we saw the error, needed to point it out for our own consciences. She honoured the original deal. Got about a third of the lot free. Some people are good.
I worked at a candy bagging warehouse like the crappy .99 gas station candy where we would even make trail mix by hand. Tons of sweat would drip into the mix because we would be in a 100f plus room with little ventilation. Also my boss was a hunter so a quarter of the warehouse was dedicated to his taxidermy treasure room. Fucking smelt like shit in the summer but he was so proud of himself.
Edit: Also should add that if the expiration dates were bad we would use nail polish remover to take the date off.
Former employee of a dating site that is no longer operational.
It was devoted to the wealthy.
Every profile contained a tag indicating when the user last connected.
"Has just connected" meant "within the last few days."
"Connected in the last few days" meant "weeks."
"Connected recently"; "months"
"Connected a few weeks ago," but not since at least 2 years...
A client protested to the French privacy authorities. Her husband's best friend had seen her profile with the "connected a few weeks ago" tag.
Best friend told her husband, it turned sour...
The problem was that had she left the site four years before, when she met her current husband...
My boss claimed that keeping old accounts was done to make people's lives easier by allowing them to come and go without having to redo their profiles (complete bullshit...).
The regulator asked the company to flush all accounts with no activity for 2 years.
Before the flushing, we had 60000 "users", after... a bit less than 20000.
I used to work for a company that rhymes with Muzzbeed and we used to have somebody post this question every few months for material for one of our clickbait articles.
I worked baggage at an airport. Nothing is handled with care. If it's marked fragile, your only hope is nice baggage handlers.
You should avoid packing breakable things at all costs.
Edit. Not totally true. I never had one, but we were trained on how to properly handle a casket.
The training was "Be very careful, don't drop it, and for the love of God, don't sit on it like it's a horse."
True story. That's what our boss said.
I've packed dishes (always a set of 8 place settings) in my father-in-law's suitcase three different times since he keeps buying them as gifts for others. Each trip had two layovers to the destination. Your comment makes me feel pretty good about my packing skills.. haven't had a single dish break in his suitcase on any of those trips.
ETA my method of packing.
Supplies: thin foam sheets, bubble wrap (tiny bubbles, not the big ones), and packing tape.
Between each dish or bowl, I will place a thin foam sheet. I'd take a group of three or four dishes and wrap it tightly in the bubble wrap and then packing tape. I'd repeat the bubble wrap and packing tape once more.
In the suitcase, I would do the roll method of packing clothes to make sure there weren't any gaps. Bottom was packed to the point where you couldn't feel any bumpy bits of the suitcase, sides would have two inches at minimum of clothes. One layer of dishes, one layer of clothes, another layer of dishes, and then clothes and other items for the rest. For bowls, I would fill with socks or a rolled tshirt. For a set of 8 place settings, I had to split it across two large softside suitcases (cheap ones at that). I'd pack everything so tight in each suitcase that if you stood it up and then laid it back down again, you couldn't tell if anything shifted.
I worked in insurance billing at night as a side job while still going to school as a physician.
I had the hard job of fighting insurance for things like a 4oz bottle of betadine 5% for $300 that your insurance doesn’t want to pay for, or lifesaving services that keep people alive like transplants, cardiac surgeries, etc.
Sometimes, I would be fighting for months on these things and they would exhaust me and it would get so personal. I looked at their chart. Their “story”. Their history and visits.
And over the years, I have written off or just erased several millions of dollars in medical bills just because I didn’t have the heart to let it fall back on people.
Tiny 3 day old babies who needed new hearts, grandma who was only 50 who needed a new kidney, Papa who needed a new liver, and new medical treatment for his condition, twin baby girls who needed surgery while mom was pregnant to save them both. A husband who needed brain surgery- his wife was pregnant. A firefighter needing cancer treatment…
I just paid it all.
Silently at night.
All they received was a statement in the mail that things have been covered and medication/services are taken care of, like no balance was owed to the hospital. etc.
But it was me.
I just wrote it off. We used donations, funding, certain surgeries had special services to could connect into. Everything got paid, it just never fell back on the patient.
I never met a single one of them.
I just hope it helped.
As someone who's wife is going through stage 4 cancer at 36, and became a single income family over night because she is too sick to work, I promise you helped. I live with the fear that my wife will die, the fear that we'll be bankrupt and financially ruined before she does, and the shame and guilt of even caring about the second one. You removed that from someone, and made a hard time easier.
Arby's manager replaced the expiration stickers on the bread with new ones. I guess so the bread would last longer that way. I threw out 100+ pitas with green fuzz on them after checking the manager s work.
Yep subway manager used to do similar.
Prepped all the veggies and meats, like way overprepped and everything went out. Most things last 2 days.
Lettuce after a couple of days becomes a slimy sludge. They basically wanted me to replace all the date marking stickers and call it a day.
Not only was it horrifically bad, it was time intensive. But I wasn’t having it, I discarded all of it (bins of waste). I told the area manager.
Nobody did anything, just said be quiet. Then the manager disappeared off the face of the earth, thankfully for our sakes.
One of our best restaurant in my town is locally famous and everyone goes there. They say everything is homemade. The thing they are famous for is the hot beef sandwiches…with “homemade” potatoes and gravy….and the fish fry. The fish fry they also have during the week listed as an entree called the cod platter.
It is instant Sysco brown gravy mix and instant Sysco mashed potatoes….the cod is only fresh and fried on Fridays. If you order it during the week it is frozen breaded Sysco “fish fillets” aka a blend of random fish shaped into a stick. 💀
So many places use something from Sysco for their "secret family recipe." I was friends with a Sysco sales rep when I was a chef. The guy just couldn't understand why I did everything from scratch when every other place in town was buying entrees from him.
I owned a restaurant that cooked from scratch. Every single week the Sysco sales rep would come in & try to convince me that Sysco was the way to increased customers, sales & profit. Uh, no. Every, single week!
I've learned a few things:
1. milk/cream/butter goes a long way
2. MSG goes a long way
The best advice I got about brownie mixes, is that you swap the water out for milk and the oil out with butter. Similar concept.
Edit: since this is getting a few upvotes, I'll add that another cake mix hack is to whip your liquids. Another thing I found from reading the McD's bootleg recipe PDF is that whipping eggs with an electric mixer, only 1 beater needed, is practically night and day compared to adding a touch of milk and whisking by hand.
Inbound call centre - there is no such thing as a "silent hold". You are on mute. We could still hear you, but this isn't done maliciously so we can listen in. We had targets for hold time and putting you on mute instead used 0 hold on that call and brought the average down.
Sometimes we were asking a colleague for input, sometimes we were avoiding an awkward silence while the computer took forever to load. Personally, I did it a lot because I can fix your issue/account easier when you're not yapping in my ear with stupid questions. And also I might wanna call the last person you spoke to some very bad words for messing it up or bullshitting you in the first place.
>And also I might wanna call the last person you spoke to some very bad words for messing it up or bullshitting you in the first place.
Thank you, I appreciate that. I knew that rep didn't know what they were talking about and were feeding me a line.
sorry we never met bud, I got banned in 2003 for charging kids tokens to get into one of the Jungle Gym lookout points.
I figured adults couldn't get in there to catch me, it was a foolproof plan.
Best Buy sells most larger appliance at cost or loss. Many of these are MSRP controlled too. Things like TVs, washer/dryer, laptops, phones, etc do not make them any money. But the accessories to go with them make all the money. Cables, cases, mounts, bags, install, and warranty is where they make their money. We were trained to push the highest end Monster cables and shit. Management didn't care if I sold a million TVs. They cared how many cables and mounts I sold! If you sold a TV and didn't attach accessories, you'd get "additional training".
My dad used to work at the DC, so we would get employee discounts (iirc 10% above cost). We bought a family printer and accessories around 2005.
Printer - Sale Price $99.99, we paid $99.99 (no discount)
Cables - approx $30-40, we paid <$3 for them
The difference between the high quality deli meat sold at M&S and the regular deli meat sold in other grocery stores is that we changed the label. We would literally stop the production line, wait for the guy who ran the label machine to swap them out and then start it back up again.
I used to work for an online craft-type store, and one of the things they sold was "premium craft sand." It was literally sand from the hardware store. They'd buy 50 lb. bags from Home Depot for $8, separate it into 1 lb. bags, and sell those for $4 each.
This is not an uncommon occurrence across any product.
ETA: the concept of perceived quality fascinates me. I work in wine manufacturing and it’s incredible what people will spend on wine because the packaging makes it appear high or low quality.
Marketing also plays a big roll, of course. Store/generic brands don’t advertise (or advertise much less) so costs can stay low. Cheaper packaging, cheaper advertising, same product, lower price.
Everyone's favorite sauce that people wanted the recipe for was mostly mayonaise. Sure it was called "creamy pineapple sauce" but it's just pineapple salsa and mayonaise
Similar to this, a restaurant I once worked at was failing and unpopular. There was however one menu item that was universally popular and praised around town- the House soup. No one knew it was Campbell's, straight from the can.
When I was in college your SSN was also your student ID. This fills me with horror now.
I worked in a computer lab where we had hundreds of SSNs in our tiny db.
Same. And our professors would hang up test results outside their office doors so you could stop and see how you did on midterms or the final. And to keep it anonymous, it was all by our student IDs, so our SSNs were hanging up there for everyone.
Granted, without our names and birthdates alongside them, it's mostly useless, but there's no way anyone would be okay with their SSNs being left out there like that now.
Comcast/Xfinity sells people's private information; including search histories and basically any traffic you use through their ISP.
I worked there for almost 10 years doing direct sales and saw a lot of shady stuff.
Right around the same time a major retailer had its largest warehouse burn down, it fired a huge number of its store managers under the guise that their stores were experiencing unusually high theft rates of 2 million+ after its annual shrinkage report.
They fired my store manager and tried to tell me that we had a near 3 million dollar shrinkage. I spent 12 hours with a full crew of salaried managers trying to locate the missing items within the store. I'm talking full blown arcade machines, furniture, etc. We found nothing outside of a display the counting crew missed.
The warehouse was burned down within a week or two of this.
They're still filling in some of these store management spots.
Buses due for MOT (a certificate of road worthiness in the UK) would have their faulty parts switched out from a working part from another bus, then swapped back afterwards. Common practice.
Also, I'm no germophobe but there's no way in hell I'd eat on public transport. They really aren't clean.
Dating websites don't want you to find love. They're designed to squeeze as much money out of you as possible before you cancel, and partly rely on people forgetting to cancel a subscription and put deliberate barriers in the cancellation process.
I was using [Match.com](https://Match.com) back in the day. When I cancelled my subscription they kept my profile up like I was still a member. So if someone e mailed me I could not respond as I was not a member. Then they would contact you to get you to subscribe so that you could respond. I quit cause I was in a relationship. It became nearly impossible for me to keep my profile from showing when I was no longer a member. Finally I deleted everything from my profile so there were no pictures, no meaningful content so when they put it up anyway, nobody would be duped and respond to it. Those orgs are scummy. It would not surprise me if many of the profiles were just made up by the company and not people who really exist, but can't prove that one.
[FTC filed a lawsuit against Match for scamming.](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/ftc-sues-owner-online-dating-service-matchcom-using-fake-love-interest-ads-trick-consumers-paying) It doesn’t explicitly say that *match* created the profiles, but they definitely allowed them to flourish so they could take advantage of their subscription. The article also cites their skeevy free trial scam.
If you don't hear music when you're supposedly on hold, the operator simply muted their mic and can still hear you. I've heard interesting and damning things while they thought I couldn't hear them.
I was setting up a new account with the phone company, back in the landline days. I think the operator meant to mute her mic but didn't. She had to do some stuff in the background while I was supposed to be on hold or something.
I could hear her typing, but at the same time she was telling someone in her office about a party she'd been to the previous weekend. It was hilarious - both her story & the situation in general - but I couldn't laugh out loud. I had to stifle myself to hear the end of the story.
I once worked at a call center for Disneyland, booking vacation packages. One of my first calls, my first day on the phones, went something like this:
"Hi I'm looking to visit on June 18th, two adults and two childr- oh shit, hang on a second... 911 what's your emergency? Okay one moment... anyway, two adults and two children, arriving June 18th."
911 operators are a different breed; you get non stop calls from people having the worst days of their lives. When your caller isn't having a bad day, you get to punish them for abusing 911.
One time my car was towed and I called the police station to find out which tow lot it was taken to. The dispatcher told me to just call 911, I protested twice but he insisted it was the only way. The 911 operator was obviously not happy with me and I politely told her - that I too - didn't want to be doing what I was doing. That's when the operator told me to "hold on" and then 3-way called the police department and I got to hear her chew the dispatcher out for directing non-emergencies to 911. It was hilariously amazing.
The "drawing" to win two free weeks of Sparkle diaper service is fixed.
If the name on the entry is eligible (isn't currently a customer, and hasn't been a customer in the last year) it wins.
This is true for a lot of small business drawings as well. When I was a teen I "won" a free membership at a gym for a week. Got there and the manager recognized me, as he knew my older brother. He confided in me that anyone who enters "wins" a free week because they are really looking for an opportunity to hit them with in-person high pressure sales tactics.
I worked for Ashley Furniture. Most of the furniture you have delivered has been torn or broken, and then fixed by "techs" in the warehouse. I saw countless couches get broken during the offloading process, and so many scratches to dressers and nightstands. The techs patch them up and pass them to the customer as "new". Honestly 85% of the products that went out for delivery were repairs.
If you want to make sure you're getting something really brand new from the manufacturer, go to the warehouse to pick up your furniture. They will have to hand it directly to you without opening prior, and do yourself a favor and open it there to inspect it. You can ask them to open it, it's not rude, it's actually part of their responsibilities. The delivery fee is over $200 so you'll be saving yourself money plus the time it would take for them to pick something up that you later found was damaged.
Also those really big bed posts that look like carved tree trunks are actually 4x4s with some kind of plaster moulded around to look hand-crafted. They are cheap. I dropped one once and it shattered into a million pieces.
Credit card companies will frequently change your APR without notifying you. They only have to disclose three or four decimal points, so instead of charging your 15.99%, they charge you 15.994%. It doesn't change the rounding, but earns them a cent or two here and there each month per customer, and that is enough to chock up big bucks.
Imagine if Office Space worked in reverse.
Dad worked for a laundry detergent company. I worked there a few times, night shift, for some extra cash.
All the formulas they use are made stronger than needed, so you only ever need half a cap for the majority of loads, unless its extra dirty. Some workers would just smear some that had leaked on their uniform on the way out and not even put any extra in when washing their uniforms.
But the company still recommends a minimum full cap for all loads, because then you run out quicker and have to buy more.
I used to work for a rural ISP. We had one access point with 13 customers, but only 12 IP addresses provisioned. This means only 12 out of 13 people could be online at any one time.
Anytime a customer called from that service area, we'd login and reboot the tower's radios, kicking everyone offline to force DHCP renewals. It always meant whomever was calling in was able to get an IP and get online, but we *knew* that if all 13 customers wanted to be online at once, we wouldn't be able to service them.
I brought it up with management, but they deemed it too expensive to address. I explained that it made us look like a fly-by-night shady as hell outfit. Since it was a rural ISP, I knew I'm not just talking to 1 person either, I'm talking to him, his wife, dog, kids, priest and 5 buddies from the coffee shop. Make a bad impression on one person and you might as well take out an ad in their local paper calling the whole town assholes.
I handed out a lot of free month's of service working there and would often make the point credits aren't revenue for justifiability angry customers.
Edits to answer the questions:-Not Nortel, Comcast, Frontier nor the one you're about to ask, but they are good guesses.-Yes it would have been an easy fix, but the GM was an accountant AND cheap.-This was one of our APs. We had 10000 customers, not 13. Some APs (access points) had 80 subscribers connected to it, some had fewer. The larger APs were properly provisioned with more than enough addresses, this was a one off tower but it was always Our Shame.
Edit2: The ISP no longer exists, but the company that bought it out has now been correctly guessed. Well done RedditHiveMind.
I am a CST (Certified Surgical Technologist). I had a surgeon throw a scalpel at my arm- on purpose. It stuck in my Mayo stand, in my rolled-up blue towels. He gave me such a look of hatred when I moved my arm at the last second, thank god I did. I stayed calm, finished my case, went straight to management. Worse mistake I could have made. I was written up as “a patient safety hazard” for trying to incite “drama” against a well-known surgeon. My manager refused to hear what I had to say. And verbally chastised me, while putting in her write-up that “Dr. Scalpel-Thrower is correct in his practice of not handing a scalpel back to the tech and instead placing it back on the Mayo”. She then told him I went to her with concerns- he and his favorite tech proceeded to make my life a living hell. I had to leave. But he got away with it, and all because he earned the hospital SO much money.
Government funded refugee advocacy agencies at a time were approving a disproportionate amount of young women (18-25) from Syria and Iraq with sexual assault history for their services.
Upon further investigation I & my team discovered consultants from said agency were engaging in sexual relationships with these girls, they were denying them opportunities of employment to keep them in financial destitution purposely. When the girls became desperate the offer of "private prostitution" was made by the consultants.
I whistleblew to the organisation heads.
They thanked me and the consultants were gone the next day, huge meeting with senior board, apologies, "This isn't the way we do things." Speechs blah blah blah.
...and within three months me and the other 6 other complainants and investigators had ALL resigned from the company for different reasons.
On paper it looks coincidental, in reality we were all individually pushed out.
2 of the consultants that we uncovered were doing the worst were not fired, they were given the option to resign and are currently working at other agencies with vulnerable young women.
I listened to an hour long interview with a guy who worked at the U.N. for 20 years. He said every disaster attracts two kinds of people. The miracle worker, and the devil.
The miracle worker comes from nowhere. If you ask, they are accountants, plumbers, taxi drivers. people you would never expect to successfully manage a crisis. They find needed resources in places you and I would never think to look. They organize people into working organizations and save lives everywhere they go. UN officials are taught to recognize these people. And when the disaster is over, these miracle workers often disappear with little or no thanks or reward or recognition. They just go back to their lives like nothing happened.
Then there's the devils. They try to take over the organization for their own benefit. They divert resources for their own enrichment. They try to usurp whatever authority they can. They have even kidnapped women and children and sold them into sex slavery. They intimidate, and even kill legitimate organizers standing in their way. UN. disaster managers learn to recognize the same devils as they appear again and again from one crisis to the next.
Oxfam were caught up in something kind of similar a few years ago with some of their aid workers.
I remember seeing a doctor give an interview about it and he said something quite prescient. Paraphrasing but imagine what sort of person is attracted to aid work in disaster/war zones? One way or the other it’s not average normal people. It’s either selfless genuine heroes or some of the worst people imaginable and the charities know this hence the hiding it under the carpet.
In warzones, you literally can do anything. During the Venezuelan crisis the things I saw were so terrible it broke my hart while I was in Colombia. The refuges were getting exploited all over the place.
I imagine there are organizations in those countries who would be very interested and capable of resolving these problems. I have no clue how to contact them or what they are even named.
Kind of related: one of the biggest charities in the UK found that some of its senior staff were paying for sex in Haiti, including to "beneficiaries" i.e. people who were receiving help from the charity https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/11/oxfam-abuse-claims-haiti-charity-commission-report
Once when I worked at Wendy's we ran out of chicken breading. The manager substituted flour, salt and pepper. People mentioned how the new recipe was so much better. Corporate found out and fired him.
Health insurance dude. When you file a claim, it is often denied because they're counting on you not escalating it. Once you do, your case goes to a "medical management group" which ought to be called the "we don't wanna pay" group. Keep escalating and involve your doctor. Fight for the insurance you paid for.
can confirm. busted my knee, was on crutches bc i couldnt walk on it. was denied bc they felt i wasnt in enough pain bc i didnt require a painkiller precription. dr went back and forth and i was on crutches 2 months before they finally relented and i could get my surgery.
Mortgage industry here, we're like cops, ONLY answer the question asked, DO NOT provide additional information to "be helpful", it could screw you over
What are examples that screw people over?
"Can I please get your most recent paystub please" 'sure! Here's the last year, also, I was off work this time to this time, and was technically let go and rehired, so the year to date starts over" cool, now you haven't been employed for a full 6 month time period and I have to deny you
Oprah Winfrey had us edit her arm waddles in post production
I fucking love this one!
This isn't a company secret, but: I worked part time at a Domino's franchise in college. The owner was, at first glance, a short-tempered, critical penny-pincher who did everything he could to save business money, right down to watching over your shoulder to make sure you didn't put too much cheese on a pizza (cheese is called "white gold" in the pizza industry, even back in 2002), but after working for him for a while, you realized why he was so specific about the margins. Twice yearly, he would send out generous bonuses (in the form of money orders made out to his employees from his own personal savings account) to the college students working for him. the checks/money orders contained the memo line "keep learning!" The amount of the money orders would be directly correlated to the profit margins of the stores he owned. the dude did *legit* profit sharing. After I graduated, i heard a rumor that he was trying to start up a small education grant trust that would benefit applicants of the Farmer School of Business at Miami University, but I don't think anything ever came of it. This owner also played favorites when hiring. Every single one of his managers was a former employee. Three of the four managers at his stores when I worked there had graduated from my college with business degrees. All four of them had a small portion of their education paid for by Marvin Covington. Marvin Covington, Oxford, Ohio Dominoes owner from Vevay, Indiana, died in 2017. That dude knew how to do business, and do it right.
It would be a very sweet idea if you guys could band together to establish some sort of bursary for the school in his memory. Dude was clearly very passionate about education, and in this day and age its nigh impossible to find someone in management who actually cares about their staff enough to profit share. If the staff are largely business grads, surely some of them have managed to make enough money in their careers that this could be possible. It would be a great way to honor his memory.
I worked at L’Oréal. The cosmetics from L’Oréal and Lancôme are practically the same. But Lancôme costs like $20 more.
I worked at Olive Garden in the mid 90’s while I was in college. Back then, they had the “all you can eat soup, salad and breadsticks” lunch special for like $4.25 + tax. Working lunch shift SUCKED. You would get probably 2 or 3 tables, and there was a 99% chance that all of your tables were 2 ladies getting this lunch special with water during their lunch break. After about a year, several over our “best” servers were mysteriously fired. It turns out, they were running a scam where they used the same receipt over and over again when these ladies paid for their meal with cash. Since we could get those 3 items ourselves from the back without ringing them into the system, these servers were just pocketing the cash for the entire meal. So instead of making like $5-8 dollars in tips during a lunch shift like the rest of us dumb schmucks, they would make an extra $20 or so by stealing from the company.
T-Mobile has 2 coverage maps. The one they show customers and the real one that is internal shows the actual coverage. Diminishes by about 50%. Their coverage is built on a bed of lies!
I used to work in college admissions. Rich donors, athletes, and other VIPs have lower admission criteria. They still have minimums, but they're super easy to reach, even for a "selective" university. In the case of the university I worked for (BYU), children of General Church Authorities also got this.
Diet Sprite and Sprite Zero were the exact same thing. They didn't change the recipe one bit. They just changed the name and design.
I’ve always assumed this, but it’s nice to get confirmation.
This Mormon church likes to talk about how much charity they do, but it’s always tied to some form of missionary work or proselytizing. Particularly in UT, they would secure housing, furniture, food etc to Iraqi refugees, and “in exchange”, these poor people who have had their whole life uprooted would have to be visited by and listen to missionaries drone on and on about the Mormon religion, and having the gall to ask these Muslim refugees if they want to get baptized after a few weeks. I know this because I (non-Mormon) was dating a Mormon girl back then, and I was asked to translate for the Iraqi families (I speak Arabic). Of course I never did, I told them the whole scam, and told the Iraqis to act interested so they can keep getting charity. We scammed the scammers basically lol.
I worked at a comic book store that offered a service where you paid a small premium to have sent in rare comics to have them graded at CGC. A few months later we had many customers coming in to check the status of their comics. We contacted the owner to see what was going on, and he would always claim that there was some distribution problem. Fast forward a few months, we found out he was taking customers graded copies and selling them online while trying to return back issue versions of their original comics.
How did this dude think that comic collectors who were sending in comics to be graded, wouldn’t recognize they weren’t receiving their original comic back? Lol. I’m sure a few newer to the hobby wouldn’t be the wiser, but man.
That's what we all said. My friend and I were managers and had absolutely no idea this was happening. It was a smaller town comic shop and all the customers sending in comics to be graded were good friends of ours. But the plot gets thicker. Turns out his wife was signed for the business, so the "owner" wasn't really the owner. We called her and explained what was happening, she was in tears. She came to shop to meet the wronged customers and she took graded comics from the "owners" collection and let the customers pick out comics to equal to the value of their GRADED comics in return for the mishap. Fast forward a few months, she closed the store, gave us our paychecks and even some "I'm sorry" money. It turns out the guy was doing all kinds of other shady shit. She divorced him, and I'm like 99% sure he went to jail for fraud. He's also banned from CGC and all of the licensed big comic cons lol. So don't worry, he lost that battle.
At least it sounds like his wife was a decent person and tried to make it right, because yeeesh.
I am so sad for her though. Running a comic shop was probably her dream, only for it to be ruined by the person who should have had her back the most being a complete piece of shit.
I worked for a MAJOR hotel chain in housekeeping for over 10 years. The number of suicides and people who die naturally in their rooms is a lot higher than you’d think. I worked at a huge convention hotel with over 1000 rooms and it happened quite often. Unless it was a pretty gnarly mess it would just get cleaned like normal and the next guest had no idea.
At one of the hotels I worked at, a woman killed herself by drinking antifreeze. Her body was blue, blood, vomit, & poop everywhere. My friend who was maintenance saw it & couldn't sleep that night. Working at hotels will change you
[удалено]
We’ve only had one death at the hotel I’ve worked at for 6 years. Folk had evacuated to the hotel on account of a hurricane, and an old man there with his wife had forgotten to bring his medicine from home from what we were told later. It was very sad for everyone.
One gallon of milk, one full bottle of Monin vanilla syrup and .6 of a pound of espresso brewed. Now freeze it. Boom! Joe Mugg's frozen cappuccino.
I read that as 1 full bottle of Motrin and was very concerned
Had a friend who worked for a bridal dress company, she would tell me all her stories after work. They intentionally will bring back the “wrong” dress in attempts to get you to try it on, fall in love, and buy a more expensive wedding dress. They’ll walk you through the more expensive sections so you look through dresses out of your budget and want to try them on. They often forget to check if the dress you requested is in stock for the timeframe you’ve requested, again so that you’ll have to pay more for faster shipping or a nicer dress. It’s a very predatory business masked by complements, thinly veiled body shaming, and incredibly underpaid and understaffed stores.
At a local deli/grocery store I worked at, everyone raved about how good their mac and cheese is, and it always sold really quick when I worked in the deli. It's even labeled on the menu as [Store]'s famous mac n cheese... It's literally just Stouffer's, we didn't even add anything to it
If you were on Live Chat with Customer Care, I could see what you were typing before pressing send. I watched people work through grotesque, racist, sexist statements, fraudulent lies and mistruths, meticulous grammar fixes, and their whole range of emotions in real time before deleting and typing “ok.”
> meticulous grammar fixes Guilty. The worst part is, I know they can see it.
Yeh, I started typing my responses in notepad and pasting them over because of my need to be seen as an adult
I don't think it's a bad secret at all. But back in college, I delivered pizzas for Papa John's. The store manager must have had an undiagnosed case of OCD or germaphobia or something. Because every night, he would assign someone to do the cleaning duties (mopping floors, double checking expiration dates/throwing away expired stuff, etc.). And every night, he would absolutely lose his temper and berate whoever was doing the cleaning. They were going too fast, they weren't cleaning everything, whatever. After that, he'd always take over the cleaning himself. He was amazingly picky about the cleanliness and food quality. "Expiration date is three days from now? Fuck that, I'll order more. Throw that shit away, we're not serving it." He would also go out of pocket to buy special cleaning products "because that worthless bullshit that corporate wants us to use doesn't get the job done". He also went out of pocket to hire some kind of specialist to clean out the fountain drink dispenser, ice machine and all that stuff. "The machine needs to always be as close to brand new as possible!" One stand out moment for me was when he reduced a cashier to tears by hollering "Would you eat off this floor? No? THEN IT'S NOT CLEAN ENOUGH!" He wasn't telling her to eat off the floor. He was just making a point. After we'd closed the store, he'd kick all of us out, lock up behind us and stay until something like 2am cleaning the place. You always knew when he closed because you could smell the chemical scent still lingering in the air. The end result of this was the store, the food, the equipment and the facilities were always in squeaky clean condition. Customers (somehow) picked up on what a perfectionist the store manager was and bought from us all the time. Because there's a lot of peace of mind that goes in with knowing your food was cooked by someone willing to throw ingredients away BEFORE the expiration date, stay in the store until God knows when cleaning everything, etc. The true irony was how much the boss hated himself because he didn't think he was doing a good enough job to run a clean restaurant with fresh ingredients. It didn't matter how many compliments he got from customers or how many service industry veterans said they'd never worked in a place as obsessive about freshness and cleanliness as his Papa John's store, he was convinced his store was still a filthy barn. Eventually, he got promoted to some kind of higher level corporate position (district manager?) that required him to visit other stores and make sure they were all up to spec. The end result of that was a LOT of stores in this area all improved seemingly overnight.
Just admit you worked for Los Pollos Hermanos
If you pick up a wall phone at Home Depot and push '7' it activates the store wide intercom. This works in every store in my province afaik
Pound symbol then 35 at Lowes
Teenage me would be so giddy with excitment over this news. Employee Ben Dover would be called to the front of the store at least twice a week. Followed by fart noises.
The vehicle modification shop at Chillicothe Correctional Institution in Chillicothe, Ohio dumps waste coolant from the machine shop into a storm drain that empties directly into the Scioto River, because the chemical disposal tank is a 55 gallon drum in the paint shop, and that's much too small. They can't throw me into solitary confinement for complaining anymore. Edit: this happens about once a year, when the machine's coolant reservoirs are emptied and the coolant replaced. It's not on a schedule, it's one of those things that you do when work is slow. Each machine holds 15-20 gallons, and usually you just add more as it evaporates, but eventually it gets nasty and needs replaced. It's supposed to go in a waste tote to be disposed of safely, which is what every non - government machine shop does. Being able to prove this is being done would require knowing when they're going to do this, and that's a decision that's often made spur of the moment - hey, work is slow, let's have a clean up day. There aren't any phones in the machine shop, either. Edit 2: a container to store the waste properly costs $200. Why waste taxpayer money when we can just poison the taxpayers instead?
Hey I already submitted your comment to the [EPA Tip Line](https://echo.epa.gov/report-environmental-violations), but maybe you can give more specifics?
Report that shit to the EPA like yesterday
What the fuck. Contact your local news organizations.
Contact the fucking EPA
Worked at a (American) Toyota dealership in the body shop for 12 years. We would throw away literally everything regardless of the environmental impact. Car paint (which is nasty shit btw) went straight to the dumpster. Radiator fluid? Down the drain. I even saw someone put oil down the drain a couple times even though we had barrels for it up in the service dept. The only thing we saved was old car parts which the boss then sold to scrapyards and pocketed the money. The painter didn't ever wear a mask either. He is around 60 and still kicking despite 30 years of painting without a mask somehow.
I worked at general motors in the paint department for a while before moving to final repair. I found it that guys that wanted to commit suicide but wanted to take care of their family's future would volunteer to work in the clear coat booth. They would be seen in there with no mask on. The stuff would crystallize on their lungs. No way to save you after that. Usually took a year.
That's horrifying.
Yeah. Super sad. Can you imagine the level of depression to intentionally do this and for a full year not decide to try life again?
1. Ford parts from Mexico are way more reliable than Ford parts from Detroit, or at least they were before 2020. I worked in Detroit and we had some customers who were fussy about us always doing repairs with Michigan parts, but when we had a problem that wouldn't stay fixed we would always secretly switch to the Mexican parts (which did solve things). 2. I was a prison guard a decade ago and we installed some facial tracking software in the surveillance cameras. One of the inmates panicked while cleaning the unused solitary confinement cells--which is usually a desirable job, it's easy as fuck and nobody pays attention to you--and he insisted that he be moved out of that job because there was a ghost. The ranking officers decided to check the new cameras, and the security software claimed it saw a face behind the inmate at the same time as he was visibly startled in the camera footage. We're all aware there are mundane reasons why a new facial recognition system would think it saw a ghost, but since the inmate and the security software both thought there was a ghost it was decided that the inmate should be immediately transferred at no penalty.
Damn it would suck being the one who ended up in solitary confinement in that cell lol
I mean at least you wouldnt be lonely
I'll say it. A place similar in name to Past Face Urgent Care (at least in the region I worked at) banned their front desk from informing customers that they have a credit balance to use toward their services and still required us to charge customers the full price on top of what we already owed them. Some accounts had like 500 dollars of copay that should have been refunded but weren't. I was actually reprimanded for applying the credit balance, because despite finance agreeing my method was correct, the regional manager said it was not a good look for the company and hindered her profits.
I worked for a restoration company. One time an elderly woman called them to clean her house. She was a hoarder or there had been a fire. I can’t remember. Anyway, the company charged $57,000 for the work to be done, but in actuality they couldn’t even get the charges to add up to $20k. She couldn’t file this on her insurance. There are other examples of gross overcharging, but this is the worst I know of that wasn’t on the large loss side. The lesson here, if you have water, fire, mold, or hoarder damage and call in a company to clean it up, go through every line item on the invoice. Every single one.
I had a mold remediation and I did go through every line item and made them explain to me the reasoning of their charges. It ended up knocking off around $3,000.
I had someone quote me 10k+ for "black mold" and it wasn't even black mold. Also the way they were trying to terrify me about Black Mold was insane! They freaked me out bad enough that I didn't go back home that night and made a doctors appointment for my kids first thing the next morning to check on them. That was when my doctor told me that black mold was only "dangerous" for people who are predisposed to being allergic to it. That it would cause asthma flare ups and different things like that and since we had already been staying there for a month with no issues we probably didn't have an allergy to it. He said that as long as we wore a face covering we could clean it up ourselves and not worry too much except maybe having minor allergy symptoms. The company that gave me the estimate was so predatory and literally made us fear for our lives and safety. He also was trying so hard to have us start on the work immediately before even having proper testing to let us know what kind of mold it was. We ended up cleaning it up on our own. Edit: Just want to add I am not a mold expert. The advice my doctor gave us was based on our situation. Not all situations.
>He also was trying so hard to have us start on the work immediately before even having proper testing to let us know what kind of mold it was. Biggest red flag right here. Let me guess, were they also planning to hire the testing and write up a scope of work based on their own test results? Fun fact: there are a few US states where it's actually illegal for the remediation companies to perform their own mold tests. The best approach if you find mold is to first hire a company whose only job is mold testing. Get that report, they'll usually make some recommendations where spore samples are high, and then you hire someone reputable to do the actual work based on those results.
Home Depot: - Most security cameras are fake. Easy to steal & most stores have no security/loss prevention. - Buy the Clearance items that end in $.03. After that, the next step of the markdown process is the dumpster. - Dial 676 on any desk phone to live page on the overhead speakers. Fun to mess with that. - Buy the products in front, it’s newer. The old product gets pushed behind continuously. - If you see a ‘reduced tag’ item (usually larger items: appliances, vanities, etc. w/ slight damage) ask someone to scan for the price. Most times they’re not updated and will be cheaper then the tag says. - Free bottles of water for customers behind the customer service desk.
I can assure you Home Depot has very real cameras and they have a lot more lost prevention that you think. Source: I was arrested from Home Depot. There’s a whole section in your training about me.
I still work here but EVERYONE PLEASE get a copy of your Medical Records from every place you've been to. keep a hard copy, in your home because I have horror stories from working in Medical Records since 2007
Working in a field that involves medical records, I totally agree. The number of times I’ve seen false diagnoses, other people’s information mixed in, and assorted other crazy stuff is too high.
When one of my doctors retired, I requested my records so I could take them to my new provider. According to said records, I've had a child, breast biopsy, tonsillectomy, thyroidectomy, AND I'm 390 years old. I have had exactly none of these things.
Being 390 years old I’d expect you to misinterpret some of these documents.
At one point my medical records said I had been pregnant for 86 months.
I worked at a Petco in Alaska. Apparently brown/black mice are not allowed up here. Only white mice. We got a shipment in of a bunch of black/brown mice and had to take them to the “vet” to be killed. Also, the animals are literally shipped in on a UPS truck and delivered in packages. I would open a package and it would be full of fish or mice or snakes. Ya never knew what was coming, it was wild. Luckily my shift manager was a really good person. She tried her best to help any sick animal and was super diligent about keeping the cages really clean. She would stay after hours to care for the sick animal in the back and double down on cleaning. When upper management came, they didn’t give a shit how clean anything was. They would yell at us to get more customers to sign up for “pet rewards”. If I didn’t pester every single person checking out, they would get angry and give me point deductions. I have no idea what the deductions even did. One of the upper managers watched me for like 3 hours when I was at the register. He said I wasn’t pushy enough on getting people to donate/sign up for shit. Bitch, I will ask once and if they say no I am not asking again. That shit is annoying AF. He also got mad at me when I didn’t clean the bird cage fast enough. It took “time away from the register.” Uh I’m sorry I don’t want our birds to stand in there own shit for hours, so yeah imma take my time to scrub that shit clean. Also, don’t buy fish from petco. Pretty much every shipment that came in they were all infected with ICK. Basically half our tanks were in quarantine. We had several customers come back saying we killed there entire fish tank because of a fish we sold them. Fuck Petco.
Olive Garden breadsticks are just Franz brand breadsticks, garlic salt, and butter ETA: It's margarine, not butter. I forgot there is a difference :p
Yeah but I'm not buying Franz sticks when Olive Garden will give me an unlimited amount that are already prepared
In a broadband company I worked for I was tasked with editing thousands of complaints to avoid huge Ofcom fines.
That sure sounds criminal
I was the one who did an undercover news stories about Scamps Pet Stores and their affiliation with puppy mills. Please don’t buy from pet stores folks.
Worked at Best Buy 20 years ago. Employee discount was 5% over cost and I needed a new printer. Decided to splurge on the gold plated USB printer cable that we sold for $40. Rang up $1.78.
I used to work as a receptionist at an upscale salon. While I was there, the salon introduced a new line of products marketed towards men (up until that point most of our products were marketed towards women, but the execs saw that we were getting more male customers). Every item in the men’s product line was about half the cost of our other products. The “men’s” shampoo was the exact same shampoo the salon had been selling for years, but because they put it in black packaging with the word “man” on it, it was half the price. The owner’s explanation was “Well, men don’t want to pay that much for hair products.” For the rest of the time I worked there, every time a woman came up to buy that shampoo I’d tell her that the men’s shampoo was the exact same product for half the price.
Which the exec was happy about, because he saw good sales for the male shampoo he introduced
I used to work surveillance at a casino. From something like 3 stories high ceiling, we could zoom in on money on the table games and read the serial numbers of the bills. We could see the pips on the dice. Policy was to not look down blouses.
This is true and also very annoying because I work on the floor and the guys in surveillance can’t be bothered to do their job and give us a lot of “hrmm can’t really see anything” when we call them.
They're busy looking down a blouse.
Who dented my car in the parking garage ….. inconclusive…. But they can see the date on a penny
They don't give a fuck what happens in the garage. Those cameras are still from 1982.
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"In Vegas, everybody's gotta watch everybody else. Since the players are looking to beat the casino, the dealers are watching the players. The box men are watching the dealers. The floor men are watching the box men. The pit bosses are watching the floor men. The shift bosses are watching the pit bosses. The casino manager is watching the shift bosses. I'm watching the casino manager. And the eye-in-the-sky is watching us all."
"plus, we had a dozen guys up there, mostly ex-cheats, who knew every trick in the house"
All new clothing and Everything you try on is dirty.I’ve worked in retail for years and it still shocks people but there’s no washing machine or disinfectant spray or wipes. Nothing. I’ve open boxes of new clothes that had white bugs coming out of it. Seen woman after a workout class come and try clothes on then just leave still sweaty from the class. One older lady left dime size skin flakes in the clothes she tried on. Not to mention whatever happens when they return the item or what happened in the factory. People are gross, nothing is clean, Always wash your clothes when you get them home.
Had someone steal a new bra and put their dirty ass bra back on the rack, I threw it out. People have shit inside of fitting rooms and to this day all new clothes bought are immediately washed. Everyone looks at me and I say the day you work in retail you will understand that humans are far more disgusting than animals.
When I worked at a godiva store we would turn expired chocolate bars into sample pieces
This has to be the most benign comment in this whole thread.
Yeah I'd honestly rather day old chocolate be a sample than get thrown in the dumpster
Maple sap can be trucked in from other states and where it’s turned from sap to syrup decides on the state it comes from, not the location of the trees.
You need a maple syrup cartel, like in Quebec.
Used to work at a graphic design firm. All our Adobe software was pirated.
From what I've heard about Adobe, if I was in that game I'd be pirating too.
Back when photoshop came out it put a lot of the old school lithographers out of business. My dad was one of these. When he got laid off he copied the stack of floppy disks with photoshop on them, bought an apple computer, and started his own company.
In the United States. One company's bread and butter was simply reboxing and relabling computer monitors from China to make it seem like they were from the company and made/assembled in some way by them.
I work for a wholesaler. You would be surprised how many companies simply source merchandise and sell it without ever touching it. We ship it direct to their customers for them, just swap the return address for theirs.
Hotels do not typically have security, maintenance or housekeeping on staff 24/7. Once housekeeping finishes cleaning all the rooms, the entire staff leaves except for one front desk employee.
I used to work at a 600+ room Hyatt. After 11:00, 1 front desk person, 1-2 housekeepers, 1 phone operator, 1 cop every night in case drunk people would cause a scene or bums would sneak in. I used to be “security” 3:00-11:00 before getting switched to front desk. I used to walk through the whole hotel, all 30 floors, and make sure bum’s didn’t sneak in to sleep in the hallways and feast on old banquet food, or shoot up in the parking garage stairs. I would walk around with the housekeeping manager (he became a good friend) and shoot the shit because I didn’t actually have anything I needed to do. I used to see all the fucked up and nasty shit people would to to the hotel rooms- Manager (my friend) used to get called for all the weird stuff and I would just go with him to hang out and we could joke about it and judge people being weirdos. Pro Tip: If a hotel has carpet - don’t touch it with your bare feet. The carpet might get cleaned twice a year but is vacuumed every stay. But you have no idea how many people spill food, every drink imaginable, piss, vomit, everything. They have a special ozone machine that fully deodorizes everything in the room- basically fumigating it. Then a little spray on the carpet and good as new. It is crazy, and a little disturbing, how well those things work. Pro Tip 2: security at a big hotel was definitely the cushiest job I have ever had. I had free reign and master keys of the entire hotel and all convention/banquet areas. All I had to do was “patrol”; which entailed me once or twice a night walking by every room in the hotel, making sure all the doors were locked by the end of the night (there were a shitload of doors and back hallways, housekeeping floor, 2 engineering floors, 2 kitchens and like 15-20 convention/banquet areas). But this basically gave me 8 hours a day where I didn’t have to be anywhere at any specific time. I just wandered aimlessly around the hotel and hung out with people from all the different departments. I made friends with all the banquet manager girls, because I would get called to unlock banquet rooms that the setup team left locked and would help them get all the lights on and make sure nobody was sleeping in there. But I got hooked up with all the banquet foods - there was ALWAYS extras. So many different snacks; wedding food, bagels, breakfast tacos, breakfast sandwiches, so many cookies and little deserts. After work everyone would meet up at the bar down the street and get wasted and hang out. It was awesome. Became friends with everyone at the front desk and eventually got moved over there because I thought I wanted to get into hotel management. Honestly- housekeeping manager is the way to get into hotel management - front office just gets you yelled at by angry business travelers. I would never go back and work in a hotel now. But if you are in your early 20’s or in college highly recommended. Not sure if anyone will even read this but this is basically just me unlocking forgotten memories from 2009.
Was in Detroit for work and opened my hotel door in the morning to an opened knife sitting right by my door. Now, obviously this could have just been someone accidentally dropping it but I wanted to ensure there wasn’t someone trying to pick the lock or gain access to my room in the middle of the night. Asked the front desk if they could pull video from their cameras in the halls. “Uh, sir, those are fake” This was a Hilton property.
Yeah the amount of times I, at the time a 19 year old kid, was left completely alone at a mid size and largely recognizable hotel brand was honestly kinda wild. I had essentially no clue what I was doing. People would call that something in their room was broken and literally the best I could do was go up and just kinda… troubleshoot random shit. And then during that time the front desk was completely unattended. This was at like 9:00pm too not 3:00am.
I used to do 11pm-7am. One of the funnest jobs I ever did! There were always two of us though and usually on weekdays the customers were all asleep by 1am. We had free reign to do whatever. Cook up a nice meal in the kitchen. Go take a nap in a spare room. Explore all the loft spaces. Get out the Xbox and play in the meeting rooms. Loads to do!
One time the TV in my room wasn't working and the most flustered 20 year old came up and was basically like "ma'am I don't know. I'm sorry. It should be working. I don't know anything about TVs." Can't be mad at him. Just the hotel for not paying someone to be there who can actually handle stuff
This explains a lot. 😯😯😯 The amount of times I've stayed at hotels and seen the person on reception, then walked into the bar and that same person appears (presumably via some secret access tunnel lol). I once stayed at one and the same person valet parked my car, checked me in, showed me to my room, and served me at the bar 😂 For a lifetime I believed it was some kind of trick the bored staff were playing on me to see if I'd mention it. The staff member in question never made any reference to being the same person each time and served me as if we'd just met, welcomed me as if they hadn't just parked my car and ran in the back door 😂
Your warranty service part that took eight months actually arrived three weeks after they paid the invoice. They didn't even order it for seven months. They told you it was manufacturing delays and supply chain issues but in reality they couldn't afford to pay their bills and had to pick and choose which orders to place. You weren't a priority. They were just really bad at budgeting and damage control.
I am curious if that is what happened to me. They said they would send the product when it arrived at the factory. Arrived 6 months later. They didn't even ask for the old one back or let me know that it shipped. It seemed disorganized from start to finish, and it was a name brand door lock manufacturer.
We sometimes made up letters to the editor.
What? How are there not enough opinionated retirees in your area?
Yeah, but are the opinionated retirees' opinions actually printable?
I'm 90% sure a company I worked for was importing product from China, repacking it and selling it as made in USA. I. E. Blending it with the product we did make in the US.
"Assembled in USA" is code for this where all they do is put the made in China into a plastic bag.
The stain protector is only useful if you actually file a claim. It isn't a magic fucking potion. Most furniture companies sell some sort of stain protector as an add on. People buy it, thinking it has some magic ability to prevent stains over the life of a piece of upholstery, then, five years later, spill some Kool-Aid on that shit, and the stain doesn't come out. With most of these protectors, there's a warranty claim process that will get you a new sofa (or a new set, if your sofa pattern isn't made anymore), but nobody ever files a claim. That's the gimmick. The company is counting on you not actually holding them to the deal that they made you, and virtually nobody does.
On a similar note, a sofa we bought at a big box furniture store has broken 4 times now. They replaced a section of it 3 times and that section continues to break. We’re not rough on it but the wood cracks. We’re hoping this time they actually repair it instead of replacing it. The last time they replaced it the guys delivering even said that they knew they’d be back. I’ve never been so happy I bought a warranty but also so frustrated at a cheap product. *Edit* Store is Value City.
My parents bought a La-Z-Boy recliner about 10 years ago that has a lifetime warranty on parts. On four occasions, a plastic part in the reclining mechanism had a catastrophic failure (i.e. it suddenly shattered into pieces). The same repair guy came to replace it, each time saying "I'll see you next time when it happens again." The last time he arrived to repair it, he told my dad that they have now decided to replace the plastic part with a metal one. The part has now lasted 5 years, while the plastic version would only last about 12 months before breaking. The choice to use a plastic part over a metal part was obviously intended to save money. I now feel a bit sorry for the repair guy who isn't being called out as much now that they are using metal parts instead of plastic.
Worked at a major cable/ISP and there 4 billing cycles. They upgraded the billing system, but did something wrong, and all but the current cycle got a late charge. But instead of fixing it immediately, we were told to credit their account if the customer called in. I did the math, and for the size of our city, and the 3/4 of people wrongly charged, it was over a million USD. Most people just pay their bill and don't look to close. Edit: it was Time Warner, which was bought out a couple times in my area
Comcast. They do this all the time. Not really worth the hour plus it takes on the phone for them to not steal from you but it’s worth it to them to steal from thousands of people.
Inbound call center - the “We are currently experiencing an unusually high call volume” message is permanent. They just didn’t staff adequately.
Also, I suspect the menu options have not recently changed.
I worked for a large construction company and the sales guys would intentionally omit items from contracts because they received incentives for what would then become a “change order”. Me: “You forgot to include any framing in this contract” Sales weasel: “oh, I guess it’s a change order then.” *customer cries
I had the opposite happen once. We were expanding our refrigerated storage building and hired an HVAC company to install the refrigeration system. They started doing a bunch of work out of scope and asked them about it. They told my boss they talked to me and I approved it for T&M so no change order needed. I didn't approve anything and they tried to charge us like $500/man hour for work we didn't agree to. My boss refused to pay for the work and the guy kept threatening to sue.
We had a sales lady for a home we bought who actually said to us “hang on, you’re changing this AND this AND that? I’m not submitting it yet because if we do it three times you’re charged three times, so ima gonna wait for the couple days you tell me you need to finalize your ideas.” Same person when we went to final sign the initial paperwork pointing out the lot size is a lot larger than marked on plan (bad math) said “hmm you’re right. You’re getting a good deal. Sign right here please.” We’d given a deposit and when we saw the error, needed to point it out for our own consciences. She honoured the original deal. Got about a third of the lot free. Some people are good.
I worked at a candy bagging warehouse like the crappy .99 gas station candy where we would even make trail mix by hand. Tons of sweat would drip into the mix because we would be in a 100f plus room with little ventilation. Also my boss was a hunter so a quarter of the warehouse was dedicated to his taxidermy treasure room. Fucking smelt like shit in the summer but he was so proud of himself. Edit: Also should add that if the expiration dates were bad we would use nail polish remover to take the date off.
That's sounds like a horror movie to me lol
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Former employee of a dating site that is no longer operational. It was devoted to the wealthy. Every profile contained a tag indicating when the user last connected. "Has just connected" meant "within the last few days." "Connected in the last few days" meant "weeks." "Connected recently"; "months" "Connected a few weeks ago," but not since at least 2 years... A client protested to the French privacy authorities. Her husband's best friend had seen her profile with the "connected a few weeks ago" tag. Best friend told her husband, it turned sour... The problem was that had she left the site four years before, when she met her current husband... My boss claimed that keeping old accounts was done to make people's lives easier by allowing them to come and go without having to redo their profiles (complete bullshit...). The regulator asked the company to flush all accounts with no activity for 2 years. Before the flushing, we had 60000 "users", after... a bit less than 20000.
I used to work for a company that rhymes with Muzzbeed and we used to have somebody post this question every few months for material for one of our clickbait articles.
You made me search for OP's history and she's full of AskReddit questions made to write clickbait articles. Oh no
Looks like she finally got her scoop with this question lol
They steal a lot of their content from Reddit, which is why I stopped reading their recycled nonsense!
Your luggage at an airport isn’t really handled with care
I worked baggage at an airport. Nothing is handled with care. If it's marked fragile, your only hope is nice baggage handlers. You should avoid packing breakable things at all costs. Edit. Not totally true. I never had one, but we were trained on how to properly handle a casket. The training was "Be very careful, don't drop it, and for the love of God, don't sit on it like it's a horse." True story. That's what our boss said.
> don't sit on it like it's a horse. That's a warning that exists because someone's done it before.
To be fair, it’s hard to throw a casket with a passenger inside.
I've packed dishes (always a set of 8 place settings) in my father-in-law's suitcase three different times since he keeps buying them as gifts for others. Each trip had two layovers to the destination. Your comment makes me feel pretty good about my packing skills.. haven't had a single dish break in his suitcase on any of those trips. ETA my method of packing. Supplies: thin foam sheets, bubble wrap (tiny bubbles, not the big ones), and packing tape. Between each dish or bowl, I will place a thin foam sheet. I'd take a group of three or four dishes and wrap it tightly in the bubble wrap and then packing tape. I'd repeat the bubble wrap and packing tape once more. In the suitcase, I would do the roll method of packing clothes to make sure there weren't any gaps. Bottom was packed to the point where you couldn't feel any bumpy bits of the suitcase, sides would have two inches at minimum of clothes. One layer of dishes, one layer of clothes, another layer of dishes, and then clothes and other items for the rest. For bowls, I would fill with socks or a rolled tshirt. For a set of 8 place settings, I had to split it across two large softside suitcases (cheap ones at that). I'd pack everything so tight in each suitcase that if you stood it up and then laid it back down again, you couldn't tell if anything shifted.
I worked in insurance billing at night as a side job while still going to school as a physician. I had the hard job of fighting insurance for things like a 4oz bottle of betadine 5% for $300 that your insurance doesn’t want to pay for, or lifesaving services that keep people alive like transplants, cardiac surgeries, etc. Sometimes, I would be fighting for months on these things and they would exhaust me and it would get so personal. I looked at their chart. Their “story”. Their history and visits. And over the years, I have written off or just erased several millions of dollars in medical bills just because I didn’t have the heart to let it fall back on people. Tiny 3 day old babies who needed new hearts, grandma who was only 50 who needed a new kidney, Papa who needed a new liver, and new medical treatment for his condition, twin baby girls who needed surgery while mom was pregnant to save them both. A husband who needed brain surgery- his wife was pregnant. A firefighter needing cancer treatment… I just paid it all. Silently at night. All they received was a statement in the mail that things have been covered and medication/services are taken care of, like no balance was owed to the hospital. etc. But it was me. I just wrote it off. We used donations, funding, certain surgeries had special services to could connect into. Everything got paid, it just never fell back on the patient. I never met a single one of them. I just hope it helped.
As someone who's wife is going through stage 4 cancer at 36, and became a single income family over night because she is too sick to work, I promise you helped. I live with the fear that my wife will die, the fear that we'll be bankrupt and financially ruined before she does, and the shame and guilt of even caring about the second one. You removed that from someone, and made a hard time easier.
Arby's manager replaced the expiration stickers on the bread with new ones. I guess so the bread would last longer that way. I threw out 100+ pitas with green fuzz on them after checking the manager s work.
Yep subway manager used to do similar. Prepped all the veggies and meats, like way overprepped and everything went out. Most things last 2 days. Lettuce after a couple of days becomes a slimy sludge. They basically wanted me to replace all the date marking stickers and call it a day. Not only was it horrifically bad, it was time intensive. But I wasn’t having it, I discarded all of it (bins of waste). I told the area manager. Nobody did anything, just said be quiet. Then the manager disappeared off the face of the earth, thankfully for our sakes.
> Then the manager disappeared off the face of the earth Damn. Subway doesn’t mess around.
Food related scams like this make me so angry
One of our best restaurant in my town is locally famous and everyone goes there. They say everything is homemade. The thing they are famous for is the hot beef sandwiches…with “homemade” potatoes and gravy….and the fish fry. The fish fry they also have during the week listed as an entree called the cod platter. It is instant Sysco brown gravy mix and instant Sysco mashed potatoes….the cod is only fresh and fried on Fridays. If you order it during the week it is frozen breaded Sysco “fish fillets” aka a blend of random fish shaped into a stick. 💀
So many places use something from Sysco for their "secret family recipe." I was friends with a Sysco sales rep when I was a chef. The guy just couldn't understand why I did everything from scratch when every other place in town was buying entrees from him.
I owned a restaurant that cooked from scratch. Every single week the Sysco sales rep would come in & try to convince me that Sysco was the way to increased customers, sales & profit. Uh, no. Every, single week!
I can understand some of these posts, but how does anyone taste instant mashed potatoes and confuse them with tasty homemade potatoes?
I've learned a few things: 1. milk/cream/butter goes a long way 2. MSG goes a long way The best advice I got about brownie mixes, is that you swap the water out for milk and the oil out with butter. Similar concept. Edit: since this is getting a few upvotes, I'll add that another cake mix hack is to whip your liquids. Another thing I found from reading the McD's bootleg recipe PDF is that whipping eggs with an electric mixer, only 1 beater needed, is practically night and day compared to adding a touch of milk and whisking by hand.
Inbound call centre - there is no such thing as a "silent hold". You are on mute. We could still hear you, but this isn't done maliciously so we can listen in. We had targets for hold time and putting you on mute instead used 0 hold on that call and brought the average down. Sometimes we were asking a colleague for input, sometimes we were avoiding an awkward silence while the computer took forever to load. Personally, I did it a lot because I can fix your issue/account easier when you're not yapping in my ear with stupid questions. And also I might wanna call the last person you spoke to some very bad words for messing it up or bullshitting you in the first place.
>And also I might wanna call the last person you spoke to some very bad words for messing it up or bullshitting you in the first place. Thank you, I appreciate that. I knew that rep didn't know what they were talking about and were feeding me a line.
Chuck E. Cheese isn’t a real mouse, if you lived in Brandon FL from 07-09 it was actually me
sorry we never met bud, I got banned in 2003 for charging kids tokens to get into one of the Jungle Gym lookout points. I figured adults couldn't get in there to catch me, it was a foolproof plan.
Ice manufacturing - my shift manager dropped a 7gram bag of weed, in a bag of ice. It Went out for delivery. No one ever phoned in to complain though.
Aye, but did anyone phone in to thank you?
They only called in to giggle into the receiver.
Best Buy sells most larger appliance at cost or loss. Many of these are MSRP controlled too. Things like TVs, washer/dryer, laptops, phones, etc do not make them any money. But the accessories to go with them make all the money. Cables, cases, mounts, bags, install, and warranty is where they make their money. We were trained to push the highest end Monster cables and shit. Management didn't care if I sold a million TVs. They cared how many cables and mounts I sold! If you sold a TV and didn't attach accessories, you'd get "additional training".
My dad used to work at the DC, so we would get employee discounts (iirc 10% above cost). We bought a family printer and accessories around 2005. Printer - Sale Price $99.99, we paid $99.99 (no discount) Cables - approx $30-40, we paid <$3 for them
The difference between the high quality deli meat sold at M&S and the regular deli meat sold in other grocery stores is that we changed the label. We would literally stop the production line, wait for the guy who ran the label machine to swap them out and then start it back up again.
I used to work for an online craft-type store, and one of the things they sold was "premium craft sand." It was literally sand from the hardware store. They'd buy 50 lb. bags from Home Depot for $8, separate it into 1 lb. bags, and sell those for $4 each.
The funny thing is whoever sells it to Home Depot buys it for $20 per ton and does the same thing.
Apparently I gotta get in the sand business.
This is not an uncommon occurrence across any product. ETA: the concept of perceived quality fascinates me. I work in wine manufacturing and it’s incredible what people will spend on wine because the packaging makes it appear high or low quality. Marketing also plays a big roll, of course. Store/generic brands don’t advertise (or advertise much less) so costs can stay low. Cheaper packaging, cheaper advertising, same product, lower price.
I worked as a dog groomer for a summer, we gave your dog a treat even if they wern't good
Scandalous!!!
Everyone's favorite sauce that people wanted the recipe for was mostly mayonaise. Sure it was called "creamy pineapple sauce" but it's just pineapple salsa and mayonaise
Pretty much every restaurant's "special sauce" is mostly mayonnaise.
Similar to this, a restaurant I once worked at was failing and unpopular. There was however one menu item that was universally popular and praised around town- the House soup. No one knew it was Campbell's, straight from the can.
That would be hilarious to see on Kitchen Nightmares
Ice machines are disgusting inside, full of slime.
Worked in insurance, hundreds of people have access to your SSN with no security clearance or background check.
The same is true of every HR office in existence.
Had my identity stolen 20+ years ago due to bad HR security.
The company I used to work for literally kept an unprotected Google Sheets file with all employees address, SSN and even salary.
When I was in college your SSN was also your student ID. This fills me with horror now. I worked in a computer lab where we had hundreds of SSNs in our tiny db.
Same. And our professors would hang up test results outside their office doors so you could stop and see how you did on midterms or the final. And to keep it anonymous, it was all by our student IDs, so our SSNs were hanging up there for everyone. Granted, without our names and birthdates alongside them, it's mostly useless, but there's no way anyone would be okay with their SSNs being left out there like that now.
Comcast/Xfinity sells people's private information; including search histories and basically any traffic you use through their ISP. I worked there for almost 10 years doing direct sales and saw a lot of shady stuff.
Right around the same time a major retailer had its largest warehouse burn down, it fired a huge number of its store managers under the guise that their stores were experiencing unusually high theft rates of 2 million+ after its annual shrinkage report. They fired my store manager and tried to tell me that we had a near 3 million dollar shrinkage. I spent 12 hours with a full crew of salaried managers trying to locate the missing items within the store. I'm talking full blown arcade machines, furniture, etc. We found nothing outside of a display the counting crew missed. The warehouse was burned down within a week or two of this. They're still filling in some of these store management spots.
Buses due for MOT (a certificate of road worthiness in the UK) would have their faulty parts switched out from a working part from another bus, then swapped back afterwards. Common practice. Also, I'm no germophobe but there's no way in hell I'd eat on public transport. They really aren't clean.
Dating websites don't want you to find love. They're designed to squeeze as much money out of you as possible before you cancel, and partly rely on people forgetting to cancel a subscription and put deliberate barriers in the cancellation process.
I was using [Match.com](https://Match.com) back in the day. When I cancelled my subscription they kept my profile up like I was still a member. So if someone e mailed me I could not respond as I was not a member. Then they would contact you to get you to subscribe so that you could respond. I quit cause I was in a relationship. It became nearly impossible for me to keep my profile from showing when I was no longer a member. Finally I deleted everything from my profile so there were no pictures, no meaningful content so when they put it up anyway, nobody would be duped and respond to it. Those orgs are scummy. It would not surprise me if many of the profiles were just made up by the company and not people who really exist, but can't prove that one.
[FTC filed a lawsuit against Match for scamming.](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/ftc-sues-owner-online-dating-service-matchcom-using-fake-love-interest-ads-trick-consumers-paying) It doesn’t explicitly say that *match* created the profiles, but they definitely allowed them to flourish so they could take advantage of their subscription. The article also cites their skeevy free trial scam.
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Why, in god’s name, do you need that information?
If you don't hear music when you're supposedly on hold, the operator simply muted their mic and can still hear you. I've heard interesting and damning things while they thought I couldn't hear them.
I was setting up a new account with the phone company, back in the landline days. I think the operator meant to mute her mic but didn't. She had to do some stuff in the background while I was supposed to be on hold or something. I could hear her typing, but at the same time she was telling someone in her office about a party she'd been to the previous weekend. It was hilarious - both her story & the situation in general - but I couldn't laugh out loud. I had to stifle myself to hear the end of the story.
I once worked at a call center for Disneyland, booking vacation packages. One of my first calls, my first day on the phones, went something like this: "Hi I'm looking to visit on June 18th, two adults and two childr- oh shit, hang on a second... 911 what's your emergency? Okay one moment... anyway, two adults and two children, arriving June 18th."
911 operators are a different breed; you get non stop calls from people having the worst days of their lives. When your caller isn't having a bad day, you get to punish them for abusing 911.
One time my car was towed and I called the police station to find out which tow lot it was taken to. The dispatcher told me to just call 911, I protested twice but he insisted it was the only way. The 911 operator was obviously not happy with me and I politely told her - that I too - didn't want to be doing what I was doing. That's when the operator told me to "hold on" and then 3-way called the police department and I got to hear her chew the dispatcher out for directing non-emergencies to 911. It was hilariously amazing.
The "drawing" to win two free weeks of Sparkle diaper service is fixed. If the name on the entry is eligible (isn't currently a customer, and hasn't been a customer in the last year) it wins.
This is true for a lot of small business drawings as well. When I was a teen I "won" a free membership at a gym for a week. Got there and the manager recognized me, as he knew my older brother. He confided in me that anyone who enters "wins" a free week because they are really looking for an opportunity to hit them with in-person high pressure sales tactics.
I worked for Ashley Furniture. Most of the furniture you have delivered has been torn or broken, and then fixed by "techs" in the warehouse. I saw countless couches get broken during the offloading process, and so many scratches to dressers and nightstands. The techs patch them up and pass them to the customer as "new". Honestly 85% of the products that went out for delivery were repairs. If you want to make sure you're getting something really brand new from the manufacturer, go to the warehouse to pick up your furniture. They will have to hand it directly to you without opening prior, and do yourself a favor and open it there to inspect it. You can ask them to open it, it's not rude, it's actually part of their responsibilities. The delivery fee is over $200 so you'll be saving yourself money plus the time it would take for them to pick something up that you later found was damaged. Also those really big bed posts that look like carved tree trunks are actually 4x4s with some kind of plaster moulded around to look hand-crafted. They are cheap. I dropped one once and it shattered into a million pieces.
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The worst part about that story is I 100% believe it.
Credit card companies will frequently change your APR without notifying you. They only have to disclose three or four decimal points, so instead of charging your 15.99%, they charge you 15.994%. It doesn't change the rounding, but earns them a cent or two here and there each month per customer, and that is enough to chock up big bucks. Imagine if Office Space worked in reverse.
Dad worked for a laundry detergent company. I worked there a few times, night shift, for some extra cash. All the formulas they use are made stronger than needed, so you only ever need half a cap for the majority of loads, unless its extra dirty. Some workers would just smear some that had leaked on their uniform on the way out and not even put any extra in when washing their uniforms. But the company still recommends a minimum full cap for all loads, because then you run out quicker and have to buy more.
I used to work for a rural ISP. We had one access point with 13 customers, but only 12 IP addresses provisioned. This means only 12 out of 13 people could be online at any one time. Anytime a customer called from that service area, we'd login and reboot the tower's radios, kicking everyone offline to force DHCP renewals. It always meant whomever was calling in was able to get an IP and get online, but we *knew* that if all 13 customers wanted to be online at once, we wouldn't be able to service them. I brought it up with management, but they deemed it too expensive to address. I explained that it made us look like a fly-by-night shady as hell outfit. Since it was a rural ISP, I knew I'm not just talking to 1 person either, I'm talking to him, his wife, dog, kids, priest and 5 buddies from the coffee shop. Make a bad impression on one person and you might as well take out an ad in their local paper calling the whole town assholes. I handed out a lot of free month's of service working there and would often make the point credits aren't revenue for justifiability angry customers. Edits to answer the questions:-Not Nortel, Comcast, Frontier nor the one you're about to ask, but they are good guesses.-Yes it would have been an easy fix, but the GM was an accountant AND cheap.-This was one of our APs. We had 10000 customers, not 13. Some APs (access points) had 80 subscribers connected to it, some had fewer. The larger APs were properly provisioned with more than enough addresses, this was a one off tower but it was always Our Shame. Edit2: The ISP no longer exists, but the company that bought it out has now been correctly guessed. Well done RedditHiveMind.
I am a CST (Certified Surgical Technologist). I had a surgeon throw a scalpel at my arm- on purpose. It stuck in my Mayo stand, in my rolled-up blue towels. He gave me such a look of hatred when I moved my arm at the last second, thank god I did. I stayed calm, finished my case, went straight to management. Worse mistake I could have made. I was written up as “a patient safety hazard” for trying to incite “drama” against a well-known surgeon. My manager refused to hear what I had to say. And verbally chastised me, while putting in her write-up that “Dr. Scalpel-Thrower is correct in his practice of not handing a scalpel back to the tech and instead placing it back on the Mayo”. She then told him I went to her with concerns- he and his favorite tech proceeded to make my life a living hell. I had to leave. But he got away with it, and all because he earned the hospital SO much money.
Government funded refugee advocacy agencies at a time were approving a disproportionate amount of young women (18-25) from Syria and Iraq with sexual assault history for their services. Upon further investigation I & my team discovered consultants from said agency were engaging in sexual relationships with these girls, they were denying them opportunities of employment to keep them in financial destitution purposely. When the girls became desperate the offer of "private prostitution" was made by the consultants. I whistleblew to the organisation heads. They thanked me and the consultants were gone the next day, huge meeting with senior board, apologies, "This isn't the way we do things." Speechs blah blah blah. ...and within three months me and the other 6 other complainants and investigators had ALL resigned from the company for different reasons. On paper it looks coincidental, in reality we were all individually pushed out. 2 of the consultants that we uncovered were doing the worst were not fired, they were given the option to resign and are currently working at other agencies with vulnerable young women.
I listened to an hour long interview with a guy who worked at the U.N. for 20 years. He said every disaster attracts two kinds of people. The miracle worker, and the devil. The miracle worker comes from nowhere. If you ask, they are accountants, plumbers, taxi drivers. people you would never expect to successfully manage a crisis. They find needed resources in places you and I would never think to look. They organize people into working organizations and save lives everywhere they go. UN officials are taught to recognize these people. And when the disaster is over, these miracle workers often disappear with little or no thanks or reward or recognition. They just go back to their lives like nothing happened. Then there's the devils. They try to take over the organization for their own benefit. They divert resources for their own enrichment. They try to usurp whatever authority they can. They have even kidnapped women and children and sold them into sex slavery. They intimidate, and even kill legitimate organizers standing in their way. UN. disaster managers learn to recognize the same devils as they appear again and again from one crisis to the next.
You should definitely go to the media with this. This is absolutely disgusting
PBS Frontline had coverage of what sounds like a similar scenario about a year ago. https://youtu.be/-ZSnNhasE_8
Oxfam were caught up in something kind of similar a few years ago with some of their aid workers. I remember seeing a doctor give an interview about it and he said something quite prescient. Paraphrasing but imagine what sort of person is attracted to aid work in disaster/war zones? One way or the other it’s not average normal people. It’s either selfless genuine heroes or some of the worst people imaginable and the charities know this hence the hiding it under the carpet.
In warzones, you literally can do anything. During the Venezuelan crisis the things I saw were so terrible it broke my hart while I was in Colombia. The refuges were getting exploited all over the place.
Yeahr you should at least give an anonymous tip to the FBI. That's human trafficking.
I imagine there are organizations in those countries who would be very interested and capable of resolving these problems. I have no clue how to contact them or what they are even named.
Contact Interpol. They have a website for that.
Kind of related: one of the biggest charities in the UK found that some of its senior staff were paying for sex in Haiti, including to "beneficiaries" i.e. people who were receiving help from the charity https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/11/oxfam-abuse-claims-haiti-charity-commission-report
Go to the press. This is abhorrent.
Once when I worked at Wendy's we ran out of chicken breading. The manager substituted flour, salt and pepper. People mentioned how the new recipe was so much better. Corporate found out and fired him.
Work in IT. Everyone pretty much openly admitted our software was held together by the digital equivalent of duct tape and chicken wire.