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15 Seedy Secrets From Different Industries That Are Kept Hidden From The Public
#1
Work in a law office. For the hourly rate that gets charged by attorneys, you would rightly expect that they would lovingly pour over every pleading and piece of correspondence to be sure that it is crafted in the most meticulous manner possible.
90% of practicing law appears to me to be cutting and pasting. For a firm that specializes in one area, the same things come up over and over. At every firm I have worked in/talked about with its employees, there is an enormous "Samples" file in their office/on their computer for every pleading, letter, etc. that regularly comes up in the course of business.
You've probably heard that the legal system is clunky, slow, and inefficient. A tremendous amount of the delay in cases is caused by sloppy attorneys cutting and pasting, say for instance, a request to produce documents, and forgetting to change the due date from the last time they used the form. And, lawyers being lawyers, they wait until the last possible minute legally permissible to inform the other attorney of their mistake. And just like that, your attorney delayed settling your case for a month because they sent out a defective request for discovery.
I've gotten declarations from opposing counsel in cases where their client is female and the name at the top of the declaration was a man's name. I've been sent answers to Form Interrogatories (standard questions to be answered within a short time by the opposing party) that were very obviously the responses to some other client's case, including their Social Security number, their place of employment, their address, the names of everyone living with them, etc.
Long story short: tons of lawyers out there recycle their work product, bill as though they prepared it anew, and at times, are not even careful enough to check that they aren't sending your social security number into the world, or even that your name is displayed correctly.
Edit: Could have been clearer, I guess...my point, and emphasis throughout, was on the inattentiveness, not the use of samples in itself.
Tl/Dr: Lawyers recycle their work from client to client, sometimes with exceedingly bad attention to detail.
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#2
You know those calendars with all those hugely muscled firemen in provocative poses?
Yeah, most of us look *nothing* like that. Sorry, ladies.
#3
Wanna know why candy is expensive for the average joe? It's expensive for the theater too. As long as you don't show it to us, just bring candy in your pocket WE ARENT CHECKING FOR IT. someone brought in 5 pizzas in the boxes, I applauded.
#4
Used to work for a company that made software that runs on cars. The company develops the software and hardware for each series of car manufacturer (hence why all the Honda cars have the same stereo layout in a given year) and then ships a finished unit to a big car manufacturer to include in the car. I overheard some engineers talking
A "I found a bug where a rare combination of commands will make the volume stuck at maximum"
B "That sounds dangerous, are you going to report it?"
A "No, I already send the code and the product is ready for shipping, I am not delaying anything unless someone complains"
So if your car is ever stuck on max volume now you know.
#5
There are Bad Doctors / Nurses / Healthcare professional etc.... (By bad I mean any kind of bad, ranging from slightly unprofessional to "nearly" too dangerous to be allowed to practice)
The thing is, if you ask us, we can't blatantly tell you they're not good. So if you want to know if your future surgeon is good, either try to find other of his/her patients or look him/her up on the internet. The reason is that Since I'm not a Doctor, I technically have no right to criticize them and it would be considered "Damaging his/her reputation" and could be sued / lose our jobs for that.
However, you can also try to ask anyone you know in the hospital to try and find out. You'd be amazed what is said between nurses and other professionals behind closed doors. You can bet that if a surgeon is REALLY bad, even the janitors will know.
#6
I offer middle of the road customer service which almost never results in a customer survey.
Really we don't often care about making you happy, we care about getting rid of your problem so we don't have to deal with you anymore. Only extremely good customer service or extremely terrible customer service will result in a survey, so I do enough to get rid of your issue, as quickly as possible, so you go away.
#7
Do any of you buy bras from Victoria's Secret? You know how they're $50ish? Well we sell a good load of our inventory to discount stores like TJ Maxx and Marshalls, and they put them up for like $5. Those are the exact same bras that are in our stores on the same day. We just print over our logo so that discount store customers dont know its ours. We want to hold that "expensive" image, but we still like the money we get from those store buying in huge lots! So the next time you want a "lux" VS bra, just hit marshalls.
#8
Animal rescue organisations are rife with abuse towards volunteers. Lots of emotional blackmail by telling the volunteer that an animal will suffer if they don't do something. Therefore volunteers end up fostering more animals than they can cope with, working 14+ hour days. Volunteers who are very trusting or afraid/unable to say no get the worst of it and are pushed well past their limits.
Less common but I have seen multiple occasions where a volunteer will be reaching the end of their rope and they'll be asked to foster "one more time" and it will be a near unadoptable animal, that animal will then be left with them and the organisation will cut all contact or pretend you agreed to adopt that animal.
This happened to me once and I was left with two 1 year old feral cats in my two room apartment where I have another cat. I was only meant to mind the two for a weekend. Another person who worked with a different organisation was left with 8 extremely sick kittens which she had to pay for the medical treatment for out of her own pocket.
#9
Used to work in food service. I would strongly suggest *not* going to some restaurant or what have you when there is a special deal or promotion going on where there's going to be a huge crowd.
Being really busy trying to keep up with such a high volume of customer demands makes it very hard to keep up with standard health code practices.
#10
A surprisingly large amount of online service providers blatantly employ what we in the industry refer to as [dark patterns.](http://darkpatterns.org/) Basically, not all the frustrating interactions you find online are based on bad design. Often, it's a deliberate and calculated approach based on human psychology.
Fortunately, the majority of people I've worked with have a pretty strong ethical bias against this. Unfortunately, I've also met plenty of people who have zero qualms with monetizing deliberately deceptive patterns of online interaction.
#11
I'm a DSP (direct support professional. I assist in the day to day lives of those with mental and physical handicaps.)
It's all about money. Not the people we support, not the staff, just profits and funding. They kept a guy around for months while he was injuring both residents and staff because he was bringing in decent funding. They will put people in homes they don't fit into just because they are well funded. (A full care individual in a home that is short staffed and has 15 other people to support.)
We get paid far less than the job is worth, and usually have to fight to get time off and taking a sick day brings on world War 3. We are about 9 staff short throughout the agency, and no one is willing to pick up shifts anymore, but they will gladly take on more supported people to keep the funding coming in.
I love my job, and I love the people I care for, but it's blatantly obvious now that this company doesn't care about anything but funding.
#12
I'm in health insurance. The company I work for is very transparent and honest, imo. We have the market share that it doesn't matter.
But your HR people are playing games. On two of the plans I service we cannot print a document that says a procedure is not a benefit. We cannot state that ink. If you call in, I will tell you your shingles vaccine is not covered. But if you look at your plan documents, we can't tell you there that the shingles vaccine is not a benefit, so we just don't mention it at all. It's nowhere to be found. Doesn't matter that it's one of the most commonly requested services by retirees, were pretending it doesn't exist so it doesn't say "no" anywhere. And it's your HR team that is making that call when they set up your benefits.
Also in almost every case having two corporate insurance plans is a waste of money. (IE, "my coverage is primary, my wife's is my secondary") you're wasting money. Medicare is a totally different story.
#13
Not my current job, but a previous tech support job.
You have probably given your name, address, social, phone number, etc to a non government agency at some point. There may be some who have access to information without anything as much as a background check. You can do the math here.
#14
I worked for a certain well-known scientific organisation. I was not a scientist but a designer trying to make their shiny new machine look like something that customers would actually want to buy instead of a pile of tubes and wires in a plywood frame.
Without giving anybody ideas about how to get a bowie knife onto an aeroplane, a regular metal detector has two major weaknesses that could in theory be exploited to sneak in a metal thingy. Our new design used a cryocooler to overcome these weaknesses.
The major application for our metal detector was in the food industry; I was given a confidential book from a major food manufacturer that was basically a summary of every "I found this [thing] in my box of [food product]" phone calls the company had received in a certain time period.
One of the nasty ones was a couple of people ended up with the tips of hypodermic needles stuck into their tongues or the roofs of their mouth.
This is because when cattle are injected with things to make them bigger or healthier, they can move and snap the needle off.
Nobody is going to be bothered digging through the skin of a pissed-off cow looking for the end of the needle so the cow heads off to Bovine University with the needle still in there somewhere.
Abattoirs have x-ray machines but you can imagine how hard it is to find a tiny sliver of stainless steel in something that is not a nice consistent density, so the needle occasionally ends up in food.
One of the funnier ones was a caller who found a complete Parker stainless-steel pen in her packet of noodles. No, it wasn't a giveaway.
#15
I work for a Fortune 500 company that sells medical devices.
Believe it or not, the big companies really are the ones you can trust. Why? Because they have so much to lose, they've learned to be 100% on the level with regulatory bodies. They don't cut corners or push the boundaries of the law to get their product to market sooner, and most actually self-impose stricter requirements for the products in terms of quality and consistency than the regulatory bodies require. This of course isn't out the goodness of the their heart, but because the potential cost of even a single mistake can be in the billions.
The smaller startups, on the other hand, have no multi-billion-dollar business to lose, and as such often play fast and loose with the law. They frequently do the bare minimum in terms of testing and validation, and will often quietly market their products off-label (meaning they advertise uses for a product without having the clinical data to verify its safety).
This isn't all startups by any means, most are perfectly legitimate and hold themselves to the same standards as the big boys, but there are quite a few who operate this way.
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