70 People Reveal Industry Secrets About Their Jobs That Common People Aren’t Supposed To Know
I’m an academic researcher and I can speak for a huge number in my field when I say:
**If you want access to our studies and they’re behind a paywall, you can email us and we will send you the study.**
We are genuinely delighted to share and if you want further context for the results or what have you, I’ll always try my best to oblige.
The only limiters on that last bit is that:
1. the original data for the study might have reached the end of our right to keep it, in which case it will have been destroyed.
2. I might have forgotten details or I might have written that paper during a particularly hectic time and my file system might be total s**t.
Also a lot of us are on ResearchGate and various social media things so you can contact us through there. If you can’t contact us directly or we’re being slow, one of the other authors on the paper might be contactable.
To find out how this conversation started, we reached out to Reddit user Boring-Plastic-4667, who was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda. “I think what inspired me to ask this are the things that blew my mind when I started working as a low level corporate employee dealing with different departments,” the OP shared. “The things I saw just shocked me. So I thought it would be interesting to see what similar experiences people had in their jobs.”
If your baby goes to a nursery/daycare, chances are those weren’t their “first” steps/words etc that you witnessed. Industry standard is to not tell parents when these things happen as it makes them feel bad. I’ve seen kids up and walking about the room for weeks, even months before their parent proudly announced at drop off that they “Took their first steps last night”.
I’m a Casino Manager.
It is definitely possible (more likely than you think) to win money in the short term. For example, if you walk in, bet on Red/Black on Roulette, it’s reasonably close to 50/50 (not quite because of 0). You might do this once, double your money and leave. Congratulations.
You will always lose in the long term. Always. Anyone that thinks they have some kind of system is a sucker. A game would not make it into the casino floor if the maths have not been rigorously checked and long term simulations run to confirm.
*exception to this is Poker. The casino will always have a rake or time charge to make their money but there is no reason you cannot consistently win money if you are skilled enough.
We were also curious if they had any industry secrets of their own to share. “I’m not sure how much of a secret it is, since anyone dealing with invoices would see. But the additives that go into gasoline that can make it more expensive (think Top Tier gas or gas that gas stations market as better for your engine) are usually less than $0.005/gallon,” Boring-Plastic-4667 shared.
“Less than half a penny per gallon, and the markup can be crazy high. Also, the tolerance for the amount of gas that goes missing and we just can’t find it, either because it spilled, actually went missing, or someone measured wrong, is insanely high,” they added. “I don’t deal with much, but the little bit I do see, can easily be 50,000 gallons a month or more. A truck is upwards of 7,500-8,500 gallons. So, a lot of trucks just go missing, and we just go ‘oh well’ and keep moving on since it’s not that much in the grand scheme of the business.”
Worked in online community management and social media for years – Admins CAN read all of your PMs. Private only means private from the masses, not from administration, we had to be able to read them to check reports of abuse, grooming, illegal activity etc. I can’t tell you how much cringeworthy s**t I had to read through, especially from guys trying to hook up.
The reason why the kid fell off the Orlando free fall ride.
Any ride with an over the shoulder restraint system works by using a proximity sensor to let the computer system know where the restraint is locked. The ride can’t move unless all the sensors sense the correct metal at the correct position. On some rides you can move the sensor a few millimeters for proper alignment. Not enough to make a difference. On the free fall ride someone in management might have wanted to modify a few seats for larger guests. Someone might have told a maintenance worker to move the sensor which allowed the ride to start with the restraint in a position not in the original design. With this modification the restraint would be at more of a 45 (or so) degree angle instead of directly downward . This may or may not have been done with an engineer’s approval. This may or may not have been done with the ride vendors permission. Any procedure like this is strictly prohibited from any standpoint in the amusement rides industry. I can’t explain why they thought it was ok. In most situations you wouldn’t be able to move the sensor much without detaching the bracket and moving the whole thing to a different location. Again, this wouldn’t even be discussed anywhere I have ever worked. But they might have at Icon Park. The details of this mechanical procedure never made the headlines in Florida because all the lawsuits were settled. In the end someone decided to change the position of that sensor. We will probably never know who. There is probably a maintenance worker who was ordered to do so. I’ve worked on enough restraints to know that it was not an accident. Personally I would have refused to do it and so would almost everyone that works on these things.
The news about Boeing is not a surprise to me at all.
The amount of resources that they are able to delegate in an effort to deter whistleblowers is unfathomable to the average American/EU citizen.
We also asked Boring-Plastic-4667 what they thought of the replies to their post. “I think most of the top responses I would have expected, such as teachers gossiping about your kids or being nice to employees or managers if you have a problem and they will do more things within their power for you to fix it,” the OP shared. “The only ones that surprised me were ones I would never have thought to ask. Hearing from people who design slot machines or work in industrial safety are cool to hear from. Mainly the people who we don’t come into contact with on a daily basis, like you would a teacher.”
That store brand products and name brand products made in the same third party factory aren’t the same.
People believe that there is no difference to the recipe and that the same stuff is just put into a different box. That it’s the same ingredients on the same production line.
Each brand asks the factory to make the product at a particular price point. A luxury brand might want the product to cost $4 a unit but the store brand might want it for $2. The factory will tailor the recipe to the price point, substituting expensive ingredients for cheaper ones, eliminating an ingredient all together, altering the manufacturing process to require fewer people or equipment, or eliminating intermediate quality control steps.
Sure, there might not be a detectable difference between some products, and other products might actually be identical to the point that spending more for a better brand isn’t worth it, but a lot of products are noticeably different even if they are made on the same production line by the same people.
The OP went on to share that they think more companies, and people in general, should be more transparent. “I’m not sure they ever will be though,” they noted. “Either because doing so would ruin the ‘magic’ or, more likely, would cost them money.”
“I think these discussions should happen more often,” Boring-Plastic-4667 added. “Either to prevent people from coming up with conspiracies, hearing others perspectives on things, or just getting to hear more about other people’s jobs and advice.”
Some appetizers are the most labor intense items on the menu to make, for example: dumplings takes one worker about an hour to make 12-15 orders.
If you want to know where I’m getting at, if a restaurant offers a plethora of appetizers options then there’s a high chance a lot of them are store bought and resold because there’s no feasible way to prepare several orders for each item on the menu.
Almost nobody maintains their sobriety from their first go in rehab. It’s takes several goes. On the plus side there’s absolutely no need to be hard on yourself for returning to rehab as its nigh on impossible to achieve this on your first go.
All those “practical effects” that people love in movies are heavily touched by VFX. We fix/enhance/replace everything digitally, and the on-
set artists get the credit. My last movie had $350k in wig tape fixes. Fury Road, which was applauded for its practical effects, had 2100 vfx shots in it. The first Avatar had ~2500.
My slogan for VFX is “we make the rest of the movie”.
China has stopped buying a lot of recycled plastic from the USA due to quality issues and a lot of it just gets stored in warehouses as landfill. The industry is spending money out the a*s on PR to avoid this being public knowledge.
94% of successful consulting is making s**t up that people want to hear. However I think it’s unethical to not present good data and systematic research before providing recommendations. You can couch honest conclusions in your findings but ultimately, other than out of legal or financial obligation, they’re gonna do what they want to do.
Trained artist here. Most oil paints are made with very toxic substances, as are most paint thinners and mediums. Every single one of my teachers was either very sick (Cancer, Ménière’s disease) or a bit crazy (eating chalk, licking pallettes). All incredible artists I was privileged to learn from. One lesson I learned very well: I wear gloves and sometimes a mask when I paint.
Edit: I mentioned Ménière’s because one of my favorite teachers had it. I worked closely with him and his suffering holds a large place in my memories of school. While I think the exposure to toxins didn’t do him any favors, I should not have implied a correlation. I apologize.
To those asking: no paint was licked off palettes. They had just been cleaned with denatured alcohol and he always led with, ‘Now you could eat off them!’ before waggling his tongue on the glass. Loved the shock factor, that guy did.
I worked in politics. There are A LOT of people who write to a politician like they’re a celebrity. They receive love letters and all kinds of weird stuff. There’s also quite a sizeable part of their mail that is comprised of people asking for a photo with an autograph. Way more than you think ! Some because they’re admirers, others because they collect them… and then some other cases you don’t really want to know about (I’ve worked for a female politician, trust me, you don’t wanna know).
The dirty little secret within the secret is that the politicians I knew didn’t sign anything. They had a [machine](https://maiparis.com/en/signature-machines/28-stylowriter.html) that did all the signing for them. So technically the autographs were not even real.
In Australia, additional warranties are a rip off. If a device or product can be reasonably expected to last five years without defect then it can be held to that under warranty. Companies are f****d.
Anybody, at anytime can enter a city bus, start it up without a key, and drive it wherever their little heart desires. Honestly. The only thing stopping you is your cowardice.
dont ever order mushrooms as a pizza toping. if you want mushrooms on your pizza, buy them fresh and add them yourself. 9 times out of 10 the mushrooms theyre putting on your pizza should have been thrown out yesterday. Mushrooms are in relatively high demand, but have absolutely terrible shelf life that outweighs their demand. They really should get tossed at the end of the day after being in that little tray for however many hours theyre in there for, but managers will put them back in storage because there’s enough demand to justify not just tossing them like you would with leftover anchovies or something… and its not against the rules to re-store them. usually corporate will tell you they have 3 days shelf life, even though the arrived at the store already withering and partially slimey…just dont do it. Buy your mushrooms fresh and eat them the same day. gives me shudders just thinking about it.
If you want to remain sane never look up how much insect and rodent debris is allowed by the food safety authorities in your area. It’s always a lot more than you would imagine and can never be stopped completely.
I make wildlife films for big streamers and broadcasters. The sound is *all* either library or foley.
Car industry: NEVER buy a car that is completely new on the market! They always always come with a ton of bugs that need fixing and it takes about two years of serial production to get rid of most of them. If you must buy a new car, be sure the model has been in the market for at least two years.
The reason for why we don’t fix the problems before start of selling? Cost
Also, don’t buy models that were in development during years of crisis. Example: during the 2008 financial crisis we let got a huge number of people (to fix the numbers in the books, didn’t actually save the company money because they all got a big payout on their way out) so we were understaffed and under imense pressure to reduce cost. The models that came on the market after that time were s**t. Like, serious s**t quality we have never seen before.
When you eat at a Waffle House and want chili, ask your waitress if it is any good before you order. Sometimes it has been sitting WAY too long. The waitresses never seem to give a s**t about telling you the truth.
Lawyers who draft basic contracts, deeds, demand letters, and SPAs have a template and it usually won’t take us a few minutes to accomplish. Then we charge you the big bucks.
Tho, we did spend years learning how to do that quickly so there’s that.
Many “listeners” calling into morning radio shows are paid actors, especially in segments like “War of the Roses” and “Second Date Update”. It’s all fake.
If the TSA is giving you s**t, ask for a supervisor. Seriously. They know policy better and have powers of discretion that normal TSA goons do not. TSA goons are obligated to call one if you ask.
As an educator, we are not indoctrinating your children. If we were, they would arrive to class on time and get their work done.
I saw how slot machines for casinos were designed… don’t play slots.
I wrote an original movie a few years ago. Totally original. Totally my idea. When it finally aired on TV, It said “based on a true story.”
Also, it wasn’t Fargo.
Live Audio Engineer. Sometimes they’re faking it. I’ve had to mic drum sets where the cables went nowhere. I’ve had to ask a keyboard player if they were having trouble, because they were playing, but nothing was coming out of their channel. Don’t even get me started on pitch correction, teleprompters, guide tracks, ghost musicians, backing tracks, etc.
I work in education. We are way behind the ball with student issues, and are just flying by the seat of our pants so to speak. We are in crisis, and most parents simply want to drop their kids off and hope they have a normal experience. None of this is normal. You need to start having conversations with your kids about mental health and social media. If not…woof. Our society is not in good shape.
Data protection: most companies misuse your personal data. Even the ones with a better grasp of the law and a data protection team are cutting lots of corners.
The market for translation isn’t being killed by AI, because it’s already dead and AI is putting it out of its misery.
Essentially, translation agencies have been acting as a cartel, controlling the relationship between clients and translators and abusing their position as middlemen to drive translator pay down, mainly by using translators in developing countries whom they can pay less.
ETA: This is mainly applicable to “general” translation, but is creeping into technical subjects as well. Literary translation still appears to be somewhat safe from this trend.
English teacher. Though it’s been made less secret by the Sold a Story podcast, American schools have been peddled and been disseminating a flawed program for teaching reading for decades. Its known as 3-cueing. This has badly exacerbated literacy deficiencies and the general decline of American schools.
What’s scarier is this: research overwhelmingly shows that reading skills crystallize after traditional phonics instruction ends. It’s known as the Matthew effect. In other words, if a child isn’t reading proficiently by the time they’re supposed to, they will likely NEVER become proficient readers.
So as a secondary language Arts Teacher, there’s a really depressing undercurrent to what I do: if a student is a poor reader when they get to me…well, the damage is done.
I used to work for a major food manufacturer that makes snacks that are in most of our homes.
The snacks contain wheat. My second day on the job, I was shown how the snacks are made. From railcar to finished product.
As the raw wheat was drawn from the silos on a conveyor belt, these white pellets were sprinkled on the raw wheat. It’s pesticide. The FDA allows so much before it’s considered dangerous. Blew my mind!
Don’t buy a property down hill from an old laundromat. The chemicals they used to use easily contaminate groundwater and on top of ruining the groundwater, the vapors can come in from the floor.
If you are going to take the risk, spend the money to do an environmental assessment first!
A lot of mobile apps are money laundering devices. Especially ones that are educational or religious tools
Most—probably 80 percent or more—of the books on the nonfiction bestseller list (autobiographies, memoirs, political/business books, etc.) are ghostwritten.
Source: am ghostwriter.
Most companies, even large corporations, run their business from an excel spreadsheet saved on someone’s desktop.
Cannabis testing labs with higher fees will also return higher THC numbers
Google sucks so much now because around a decade ago, they abandoned the measurement known as “Page Utility” which just measured the usefulness of the site itself.
Instead, they migrated to “Expertise-Authority-Trust” which had good intentions of stopping the proliferation of bad info, but instead it basically resulted in prioritizing large corporations and capital over any sites created by average people.
The contract workers known as “raters” they employed to help determine the best search results became an echo chamber, as there were strict demands on exactly what the right answers were in most cases, and straying from the expectations of Big G resulted in poor reviews and possible firing. Of course, we were not allowed to say the G word – we could only say “The Client.”
It’s about to get worse, too – they just laid off a huge swathe of them.
I don’t know if this is really a secret, but something I encountered that I thought was interesting because I’d never seen it or considered it before. I work in closed captioning, and part of that workflow sometimes means doing a first pass on a project to an early version of the video. I think people would be surprised at how rough those early videos can be. *Some* dialogue (particularly when the character’s mouth is not in the shot) is often not spoken by the characters saying it because it’s temporary ADR that will get filled in by the actor later on. I’ve seen files where they don’t even have temporary voiceover, it’s literally just text on the screen saying: “ADR line: ‘This is a line of dialogue that this character is going to speak in this scene.'” You also occasionally get to see characters acting in front of green screens, or you’ll see all the safety gear/wires before it gets edited out.
One of my favorite things, though, is rough special effects. Sometimes it looks like someone using editing software for the first time, creating a crappy fire overlay for what will eventually be an actual effect, or still images just being dragged around a screen. My all-time favorite was when a scene featured an animal attack, and the “animal” in the early video was a box with a text label on it just vaguely wriggling around while the actor reacted to it.
I don’t think it’s that crazy or anything, but like the viewer almost never gets to see it because it’s all edited out and fixed by the time the show goes to air. It’s just really funny and catches you off-guard sometimes.
Pack your freight like it’s going to get a pallet stacked on top of it because it most likely will
When I used to work for Hyatt, if the mini bar was used and not declared but the value was under $15 they wouldn’t bother billing for it because it gave off an appearance that it wasn’t synonymous with a 5 star hotel.
I’m an unarmed security guard.
Every now & then I’ll get a comment from someone about how they’re glad I’m around in case there’s an active shooter or something.
Yea; if that happens? We’re not doing anything aside from getting ourselves to safety and calling the cops.
We’re literally told in training that if we try to intervene directly with an active shooter we’ll be fired.
I’m perpetually astounded by the fact that most people in the Internet industry have literally no idea what they’re selling. Like, when someone buys “Internet access,” from an Internet Service Provider, unless the ISP is _really big_ they typically have nobody on staff who could define what it is that a customer is paying for, or what the ISP is paying their supplier for. Like, where it comes from, what makes it more or less valuable… any of that. They’re literally just flying by the seat of their pants, trying stuff, paying bills that show up without really being able to analyze whether they should be buying those services or not, charging their customers more or less what their competitors charge… In other industries, there’s a keen awareness of input costs, how and when to economize, how to relate costs to value, etc. Maybe only the top 5% of Internet service providers have anyone with even the faintest idea of any of that.
It’s like if you went to a car dealer, and asked them what they were selling, and they said “A hundred and eighty miles an hour!!!” And you asked them where it came from, and they said “Off the back of a truck!!!” It’s both amazing and pitiful.
It was never a spider that caused your abscess
Not a secret, but we just kind of nod and ask what it looked like.
—
Edit: Regardless of the cause of the wound, the treatment is the same. If it was a spider bite that caused it, it’s not like we would do anything different. It is still basic wound care.
When the US overthrew the Taliban they used a pro-opium rebel group named “The Northern Alliance” to fight the ground war and then put them in charge of the country.
The soy farmers who grew soy because they were terrified of the (very anti opium) Taliban immediately swapped their crops over to Opium poppy where Afghanistan quickly became over 90% of the world’s opium supply mostly overnight.
Initially the US tried burning the opium crops but that didn’t exactly win the hearts and minds of the people so they resorted to a combination of:
a) Paying farmers the difference to just grow soy instead
and
b) actually purchasing some of the opium from Afghan farmers for the US pharmaceutical industry who suddenly had a huge surplus of opium to offload.
Oh, did I mention this was coincidentally exactly when the Oxycodone epidemic in the US happened and a bunch of powerful billionaires in the pharmaceutical industry decided to push tons of highly addictive opium pills to basically every home and family in the country?
It’s a fascinating little detail nobody ever seems to talk about.
Many people running anesthesia at your local veterinary hospital are not qualified to do so and have been taught secondhand instead of going to school. I have been in the field for 8 years and am appalled. At one hospital I was asked to train a dude how to run anesthesia who had literally no veterinary experience. It is such a complicated process and to do it correctly you need to know all the individual components of the machine, what they do and why, in addition to knowing all normal vital parameters for your patient and how to adjust fluids/gas/CRIs depending on your procedure. You also need to know anesthetic agents, which combinations go together and which ones do not and why, etc. I told them I absolutely would not be training someone with a few semesters of an ecology degree “how to run anesthesia”. It was such an insane ask. It makes me feel so bad for owners who think they are leaving their pets in qualified hands. Most of the time it’s pure luck that they get through the procedure and many people have no clue what they’re actually doing. It’s frightening.
If you plan to buy a new computer and the options are windows 10 for cheaper and windows 11 for a markup, get the windows 10. The upgrade to 11 is free.
Previous industry.
US hospitals casually refer to other hospitals as their ‘competitors’.
Noped out of that world as soon as I could.
Former manager for a certain video game retailer.
If you were obviously and repeatedly selling us stolen stuff we did, in fact, gladly help police when they came in. I even went to court once. Was funny seeing the looks on my criminal customers’ faces in the courthouse lobby, when they recognized me in a suit, talking to the cops, and they realized what was about to happen.
Went into ‘professional’ YouTube later. As in, large studio with videographers, editors, director, episodes/series. Lots of it was educational automotive stuff for performance/custom vehicles.
No, you’re not crazy, it really looked that easy in the video and you’re struggling with a horrible project that merely looked like it wasn’t difficult.
Because we spent hours off-camera Jerry rigging s**t, redoing videos, and carefully editing/magicking things to look good on camera.
I worked at a newspaper processing obituaries, and it was crazy how much funeral homes tried to rip people off.
Obits are expensive. Like, $400 for a single day expensive. And they are priced by the word. We had funeral homes who would send us obits with all the commas and periods separated to make full new words. The homes would get the estimate from our website and use that for billing the grieving family. We would edit the obit to meet English standards, which would reduce the word count substantially, dropping the price. In other words, they charged for the estimate but got billed for the edit.
It got so bad management told us we were not allowed to talk about prices with family members, even if they came in and showed us the bill from the funeral home. The “customer” was the home, not the family, so they weren’t privileged to see the pricing.
If you have to put an obituary in the local newspaper, please contact them directly for pricing guidelines. There’s usually cheaper options the funeral homes won’t tell you about.
I worked at a small, non-prestigious private college that was tuition dependent for a while. Some things I learned:
1) my school was so desperate for students that they accepted everyone who applied. They don’t advertise this and did everything they could to hide it so they can still seem more prestigious than community colleges
2) this includes admitting students who are near illiterate, have disabilities so severe that they need specialist environments, and in some cases international students who cannot write or comprehend even basic sentences in English
3) administrators will do anything they can to keep these students and their tuition (often the student doesn’t even care but the parent is desperate for the “prestige” of a private school degree for their kid and will pay full price) EXCEPT train teachers on how to teach this type of student or offer any specialists/resources. In at least one case, this included hiring a private “tutor” to do an independent study with an illiterate student who was told she should just write his essays for him because passing English 101 would be a barrier to him returning as a sophomore
4) they routinely abuse and misappropriate alum donations, especially if the alum died and isn’t likely to keep an eye on how their money is being spent
5) those “Presidential Scholarships” you received that took 10k off tuition? Totally fake. Tuition is like sticker price on a car and saying you’re getting a scholarship flatters you more than just saying they’re willing to give a discount. They have calculated how much money they need from each student and it’s less than the sticker price of tuition. ((Exceptions apply—there are some legitimately funded scholarships where donors have a clear vision of who should be rewarded. These are usually named after a person and not vague fake names like “Presidential Scholars” or what have you)
6) most of the faculty fully know the degree the school offers is s**t, but there’s not tons of faculty jobs out there so they try to do the best they can with no resources and no administrative support. They can’t fail their entire classes so they’ve had to lower standards so significantly that even juniors and seniors struggle with basic concepts that kids at a good high school already know
TLDR: don’t be fooled. Just because it’s a small school with a pretty campus does not mean you’ll get a serious degree. Check the tuition compared to decent public colleges
“Are we still connected?” most times will get an immediate response from online chat agents.
Your phone was not “hacked,” terrorists and the government don’t give a f**k about your information. You clicked on adware, malware, or a link that asked you to put in your login information.
It’s your fault, accept that.
The Coke at McDonald’s tastes better because they’re one of the only companies that refrigerate the syrup tanks, the unflavored soda and the supply lines. So when it hits the ice in your cup, it’s already super cold, so less ice melts, and the first sip tastes more “concentrated” and ice cold. That’s it. No magic. No secret formula. Just more refrigeration.
People who sell courses on how to make money make their own money selling you the course.
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I'm an academic researcher and I can speak for a huge number in my field when I say:
**If you want access to our studies and they're behind a paywall, you can email us and we will send you the study.**
We are genuinely delighted to share and if you want further context for the results or what have you, I'll always try my best to oblige.
The only limiters on that last bit is that:
1. the original data for the study might have reached the end of our right to keep it, in which case it will have been destroyed.
2. I might have forgotten details or I might have written that paper during a particularly hectic time and my file system might be total s**t.
Also a lot of us are on ResearchGate and various social media things so you can contact us through there. If you can't contact us directly or we're being slow, one of the other authors on the paper might be contactable.
To find out how this conversation started, we reached out to Reddit user Boring-Plastic-4667, who was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda. "I think what inspired me to ask this are the things that blew my mind when I started working as a low level corporate employee dealing with different departments," the OP shared. "The things I saw just shocked me. So I thought it would be interesting to see what similar experiences people had in their jobs."
If your baby goes to a nursery/daycare, chances are those weren't their "first" steps/words etc that you witnessed. Industry standard is to not tell parents when these things happen as it makes them feel bad. I've seen kids up and walking about the room for weeks, even months before their parent proudly announced at drop off that they "Took their first steps last night".
I’m a Casino Manager.
It is definitely possible (more likely than you think) to win money in the short term. For example, if you walk in, bet on Red/Black on Roulette, it’s reasonably close to 50/50 (not quite because of 0). You might do this once, double your money and leave. Congratulations.
You will always lose in the long term. Always. Anyone that thinks they have some kind of system is a sucker. A game would not make it into the casino floor if the maths have not been rigorously checked and long term simulations run to confirm.
*exception to this is Poker. The casino will always have a rake or time charge to make their money but there is no reason you cannot consistently win money if you are skilled enough.
We were also curious if they had any industry secrets of their own to share. "I'm not sure how much of a secret it is, since anyone dealing with invoices would see. But the additives that go into gasoline that can make it more expensive (think Top Tier gas or gas that gas stations market as better for your engine) are usually less than $0.005/gallon," Boring-Plastic-4667 shared.
"Less than half a penny per gallon, and the markup can be crazy high. Also, the tolerance for the amount of gas that goes missing and we just can't find it, either because it spilled, actually went missing, or someone measured wrong, is insanely high," they added. "I don't deal with much, but the little bit I do see, can easily be 50,000 gallons a month or more. A truck is upwards of 7,500-8,500 gallons. So, a lot of trucks just go missing, and we just go 'oh well' and keep moving on since it's not that much in the grand scheme of the business."
Worked in online community management and social media for years - Admins CAN read all of your PMs. Private only means private from the masses, not from administration, we had to be able to read them to check reports of abuse, grooming, illegal activity etc. I can't tell you how much cringeworthy s**t I had to read through, especially from guys trying to hook up.
The reason why the kid fell off the Orlando free fall ride.
Any ride with an over the shoulder restraint system works by using a proximity sensor to let the computer system know where the restraint is locked. The ride can't move unless all the sensors sense the correct metal at the correct position. On some rides you can move the sensor a few millimeters for proper alignment. Not enough to make a difference. On the free fall ride someone in management might have wanted to modify a few seats for larger guests. Someone might have told a maintenance worker to move the sensor which allowed the ride to start with the restraint in a position not in the original design. With this modification the restraint would be at more of a 45 (or so) degree angle instead of directly downward . This may or may not have been done with an engineer's approval. This may or may not have been done with the ride vendors permission. Any procedure like this is strictly prohibited from any standpoint in the amusement rides industry. I can't explain why they thought it was ok. In most situations you wouldn't be able to move the sensor much without detaching the bracket and moving the whole thing to a different location. Again, this wouldn't even be discussed anywhere I have ever worked. But they might have at Icon Park. The details of this mechanical procedure never made the headlines in Florida because all the lawsuits were settled. In the end someone decided to change the position of that sensor. We will probably never know who. There is probably a maintenance worker who was ordered to do so. I've worked on enough restraints to know that it was not an accident. Personally I would have refused to do it and so would almost everyone that works on these things.
The news about Boeing is not a surprise to me at all.
The amount of resources that they are able to delegate in an effort to deter whistleblowers is unfathomable to the average American/EU citizen.
We also asked Boring-Plastic-4667 what they thought of the replies to their post. "I think most of the top responses I would have expected, such as teachers gossiping about your kids or being nice to employees or managers if you have a problem and they will do more things within their power for you to fix it," the OP shared. "The only ones that surprised me were ones I would never have thought to ask. Hearing from people who design slot machines or work in industrial safety are cool to hear from. Mainly the people who we don't come into contact with on a daily basis, like you would a teacher."
That store brand products and name brand products made in the same third party factory aren't the same.
People believe that there is no difference to the recipe and that the same stuff is just put into a different box. That it's the same ingredients on the same production line.
Each brand asks the factory to make the product at a particular price point. A luxury brand might want the product to cost $4 a unit but the store brand might want it for $2. The factory will tailor the recipe to the price point, substituting expensive ingredients for cheaper ones, eliminating an ingredient all together, altering the manufacturing process to require fewer people or equipment, or eliminating intermediate quality control steps.
Sure, there might not be a detectable difference between some products, and other products might actually be identical to the point that spending more for a better brand isn't worth it, but a lot of products are noticeably different even if they are made on the same production line by the same people.
The OP went on to share that they think more companies, and people in general, should be more transparent. "I'm not sure they ever will be though," they noted. "Either because doing so would ruin the 'magic' or, more likely, would cost them money."
"I think these discussions should happen more often," Boring-Plastic-4667 added. "Either to prevent people from coming up with conspiracies, hearing others perspectives on things, or just getting to hear more about other people's jobs and advice."
Some appetizers are the most labor intense items on the menu to make, for example: dumplings takes one worker about an hour to make 12-15 orders.
If you want to know where I'm getting at, if a restaurant offers a plethora of appetizers options then there's a high chance a lot of them are store bought and resold because there's no feasible way to prepare several orders for each item on the menu.
Almost nobody maintains their sobriety from their first go in rehab. It's takes several goes. On the plus side there's absolutely no need to be hard on yourself for returning to rehab as its nigh on impossible to achieve this on your first go.
All those “practical effects” that people love in movies are heavily touched by VFX. We fix/enhance/replace everything digitally, and the on-
set artists get the credit. My last movie had $350k in wig tape fixes. Fury Road, which was applauded for its practical effects, had 2100 vfx shots in it. The first Avatar had ~2500.
My slogan for VFX is “we make the rest of the movie”.
China has stopped buying a lot of recycled plastic from the USA due to quality issues and a lot of it just gets stored in warehouses as landfill. The industry is spending money out the a*s on PR to avoid this being public knowledge.
94% of successful consulting is making s**t up that people want to hear. However I think it’s unethical to not present good data and systematic research before providing recommendations. You can couch honest conclusions in your findings but ultimately, other than out of legal or financial obligation, they’re gonna do what they want to do.
Trained artist here. Most oil paints are made with very toxic substances, as are most paint thinners and mediums. Every single one of my teachers was either very sick (Cancer, Ménière's disease) or a bit crazy (eating chalk, licking pallettes). All incredible artists I was privileged to learn from. One lesson I learned very well: I wear gloves and sometimes a mask when I paint.
Edit: I mentioned Ménière's because one of my favorite teachers had it. I worked closely with him and his suffering holds a large place in my memories of school. While I think the exposure to toxins didn't do him any favors, I should not have implied a correlation. I apologize.
To those asking: no paint was licked off palettes. They had just been cleaned with denatured alcohol and he always led with, 'Now you could eat off them!' before waggling his tongue on the glass. Loved the shock factor, that guy did.
I worked in politics. There are A LOT of people who write to a politician like they're a celebrity. They receive love letters and all kinds of weird stuff. There's also quite a sizeable part of their mail that is comprised of people asking for a photo with an autograph. Way more than you think ! Some because they're admirers, others because they collect them... and then some other cases you don't really want to know about (I've worked for a female politician, trust me, you don't wanna know).
The dirty little secret within the secret is that the politicians I knew didn't sign anything. They had a [machine](https://maiparis.com/en/signature-machines/28-stylowriter.html) that did all the signing for them. So technically the autographs were not even real.
In Australia, additional warranties are a rip off. If a device or product can be reasonably expected to last five years without defect then it can be held to that under warranty. Companies are f****d.
Anybody, at anytime can enter a city bus, start it up without a key, and drive it wherever their little heart desires. Honestly. The only thing stopping you is your cowardice.
dont ever order mushrooms as a pizza toping. if you want mushrooms on your pizza, buy them fresh and add them yourself. 9 times out of 10 the mushrooms theyre putting on your pizza should have been thrown out yesterday. Mushrooms are in relatively high demand, but have absolutely terrible shelf life that outweighs their demand. They really should get tossed at the end of the day after being in that little tray for however many hours theyre in there for, but managers will put them back in storage because there's enough demand to justify not just tossing them like you would with leftover anchovies or something... and its not against the rules to re-store them. usually corporate will tell you they have 3 days shelf life, even though the arrived at the store already withering and partially slimey...just dont do it. Buy your mushrooms fresh and eat them the same day. gives me shudders just thinking about it.
If you want to remain sane never look up how much insect and rodent debris is allowed by the food safety authorities in your area. It’s always a lot more than you would imagine and can never be stopped completely.
I make wildlife films for big streamers and broadcasters. The sound is *all* either library or foley.
Car industry: NEVER buy a car that is completely new on the market! They always always come with a ton of bugs that need fixing and it takes about two years of serial production to get rid of most of them. If you must buy a new car, be sure the model has been in the market for at least two years.
The reason for why we don't fix the problems before start of selling? Cost
Also, don't buy models that were in development during years of crisis. Example: during the 2008 financial crisis we let got a huge number of people (to fix the numbers in the books, didn't actually save the company money because they all got a big payout on their way out) so we were understaffed and under imense pressure to reduce cost. The models that came on the market after that time were s**t. Like, serious s**t quality we have never seen before.
When you eat at a Waffle House and want chili, ask your waitress if it is any good before you order. Sometimes it has been sitting WAY too long. The waitresses never seem to give a s**t about telling you the truth.
Lawyers who draft basic contracts, deeds, demand letters, and SPAs have a template and it usually won’t take us a few minutes to accomplish. Then we charge you the big bucks.
Tho, we did spend years learning how to do that quickly so there’s that.
Many "listeners" calling into morning radio shows are paid actors, especially in segments like "War of the Roses" and "Second Date Update". It's all fake.
If the TSA is giving you s**t, ask for a supervisor. Seriously. They know policy better and have powers of discretion that normal TSA goons do not. TSA goons are obligated to call one if you ask.
As an educator, we are not indoctrinating your children. If we were, they would arrive to class on time and get their work done.
I saw how slot machines for casinos were designed... don’t play slots.
I wrote an original movie a few years ago. Totally original. Totally my idea. When it finally aired on TV, It said “based on a true story.”
Also, it wasn’t Fargo.
Live Audio Engineer. Sometimes they’re faking it. I’ve had to mic drum sets where the cables went nowhere. I’ve had to ask a keyboard player if they were having trouble, because they were playing, but nothing was coming out of their channel. Don’t even get me started on pitch correction, teleprompters, guide tracks, ghost musicians, backing tracks, etc.
I work in education. We are way behind the ball with student issues, and are just flying by the seat of our pants so to speak. We are in crisis, and most parents simply want to drop their kids off and hope they have a normal experience. None of this is normal. You need to start having conversations with your kids about mental health and social media. If not…woof. Our society is not in good shape.
Data protection: most companies misuse your personal data. Even the ones with a better grasp of the law and a data protection team are cutting lots of corners.
The market for translation isn't being killed by AI, because it's already dead and AI is putting it out of its misery.
Essentially, translation agencies have been acting as a cartel, controlling the relationship between clients and translators and abusing their position as middlemen to drive translator pay down, mainly by using translators in developing countries whom they can pay less.
ETA: This is mainly applicable to "general" translation, but is creeping into technical subjects as well. Literary translation still appears to be somewhat safe from this trend.
English teacher. Though it's been made less secret by the Sold a Story podcast, American schools have been peddled and been disseminating a flawed program for teaching reading for decades. Its known as 3-cueing. This has badly exacerbated literacy deficiencies and the general decline of American schools.
What's scarier is this: research overwhelmingly shows that reading skills crystallize after traditional phonics instruction ends. It's known as the Matthew effect. In other words, if a child isn't reading proficiently by the time they're supposed to, they will likely NEVER become proficient readers.
So as a secondary language Arts Teacher, there's a really depressing undercurrent to what I do: if a student is a poor reader when they get to me...well, the damage is done.
I used to work for a major food manufacturer that makes snacks that are in most of our homes.
The snacks contain wheat. My second day on the job, I was shown how the snacks are made. From railcar to finished product.
As the raw wheat was drawn from the silos on a conveyor belt, these white pellets were sprinkled on the raw wheat. It's pesticide. The FDA allows so much before it's considered dangerous. Blew my mind!
Don’t buy a property down hill from an old laundromat. The chemicals they used to use easily contaminate groundwater and on top of ruining the groundwater, the vapors can come in from the floor.
If you are going to take the risk, spend the money to do an environmental assessment first!
A lot of mobile apps are money laundering devices. Especially ones that are educational or religious tools
Most—probably 80 percent or more—of the books on the nonfiction bestseller list (autobiographies, memoirs, political/business books, etc.) are ghostwritten.
Source: am ghostwriter.
Most companies, even large corporations, run their business from an excel spreadsheet saved on someone's desktop.
Cannabis testing labs with higher fees will also return higher THC numbers
Google sucks so much now because around a decade ago, they abandoned the measurement known as "Page Utility" which just measured the usefulness of the site itself.
Instead, they migrated to "Expertise-Authority-Trust" which had good intentions of stopping the proliferation of bad info, but instead it basically resulted in prioritizing large corporations and capital over any sites created by average people.
The contract workers known as "raters" they employed to help determine the best search results became an echo chamber, as there were strict demands on exactly what the right answers were in most cases, and straying from the expectations of Big G resulted in poor reviews and possible firing. Of course, we were not allowed to say the G word - we could only say "The Client."
It's about to get worse, too - they just laid off a huge swathe of them.
I don't know if this is really a secret, but something I encountered that I thought was interesting because I'd never seen it or considered it before. I work in closed captioning, and part of that workflow sometimes means doing a first pass on a project to an early version of the video. I think people would be surprised at how rough those early videos can be. *Some* dialogue (particularly when the character's mouth is not in the shot) is often not spoken by the characters saying it because it's temporary ADR that will get filled in by the actor later on. I've seen files where they don't even have temporary voiceover, it's literally just text on the screen saying: "ADR line: 'This is a line of dialogue that this character is going to speak in this scene.'" You also occasionally get to see characters acting in front of green screens, or you'll see all the safety gear/wires before it gets edited out.
One of my favorite things, though, is rough special effects. Sometimes it looks like someone using editing software for the first time, creating a crappy fire overlay for what will eventually be an actual effect, or still images just being dragged around a screen. My all-time favorite was when a scene featured an animal attack, and the "animal" in the early video was a box with a text label on it just vaguely wriggling around while the actor reacted to it.
I don't think it's that crazy or anything, but like the viewer almost never gets to see it because it's all edited out and fixed by the time the show goes to air. It's just really funny and catches you off-guard sometimes.
Pack your freight like it's going to get a pallet stacked on top of it because it most likely will
When I used to work for Hyatt, if the mini bar was used and not declared but the value was under $15 they wouldn't bother billing for it because it gave off an appearance that it wasn't synonymous with a 5 star hotel.
I'm an unarmed security guard.
Every now & then I'll get a comment from someone about how they're glad I'm around in case there's an active shooter or something.
Yea; if that happens? We're not doing anything aside from getting ourselves to safety and calling the cops.
We're literally told in training that if we try to intervene directly with an active shooter we'll be fired.
I'm perpetually astounded by the fact that most people in the Internet industry have literally no idea what they're selling. Like, when someone buys "Internet access," from an Internet Service Provider, unless the ISP is _really big_ they typically have nobody on staff who could define what it is that a customer is paying for, or what the ISP is paying their supplier for. Like, where it comes from, what makes it more or less valuable... any of that. They're literally just flying by the seat of their pants, trying stuff, paying bills that show up without really being able to analyze whether they should be buying those services or not, charging their customers more or less what their competitors charge... In other industries, there's a keen awareness of input costs, how and when to economize, how to relate costs to value, etc. Maybe only the top 5% of Internet service providers have anyone with even the faintest idea of any of that.
It's like if you went to a car dealer, and asked them what they were selling, and they said "A hundred and eighty miles an hour!!!" And you asked them where it came from, and they said "Off the back of a truck!!!" It's both amazing and pitiful.
It was never a spider that caused your abscess
Not a secret, but we just kind of nod and ask what it looked like.
—
Edit: Regardless of the cause of the wound, the treatment is the same. If it was a spider bite that caused it, it’s not like we would do anything different. It is still basic wound care.
When the US overthrew the Taliban they used a pro-opium rebel group named "The Northern Alliance" to fight the ground war and then put them in charge of the country.
The soy farmers who grew soy because they were terrified of the (very anti opium) Taliban immediately swapped their crops over to Opium poppy where Afghanistan quickly became over 90% of the world's opium supply mostly overnight.
Initially the US tried burning the opium crops but that didn't exactly win the hearts and minds of the people so they resorted to a combination of:
a) Paying farmers the difference to just grow soy instead
and
b) actually purchasing some of the opium from Afghan farmers for the US pharmaceutical industry who suddenly had a huge surplus of opium to offload.
Oh, did I mention this was coincidentally exactly when the Oxycodone epidemic in the US happened and a bunch of powerful billionaires in the pharmaceutical industry decided to push tons of highly addictive opium pills to basically every home and family in the country?
It's a fascinating little detail nobody ever seems to talk about.
Many people running anesthesia at your local veterinary hospital are not qualified to do so and have been taught secondhand instead of going to school. I have been in the field for 8 years and am appalled. At one hospital I was asked to train a dude how to run anesthesia who had literally no veterinary experience. It is such a complicated process and to do it correctly you need to know all the individual components of the machine, what they do and why, in addition to knowing all normal vital parameters for your patient and how to adjust fluids/gas/CRIs depending on your procedure. You also need to know anesthetic agents, which combinations go together and which ones do not and why, etc. I told them I absolutely would not be training someone with a few semesters of an ecology degree “how to run anesthesia”. It was such an insane ask. It makes me feel so bad for owners who think they are leaving their pets in qualified hands. Most of the time it’s pure luck that they get through the procedure and many people have no clue what they’re actually doing. It’s frightening.
If you plan to buy a new computer and the options are windows 10 for cheaper and windows 11 for a markup, get the windows 10. The upgrade to 11 is free.
Previous industry.
US hospitals casually refer to other hospitals as their 'competitors'.
Noped out of that world as soon as I could.
Former manager for a certain video game retailer.
If you were obviously and repeatedly selling us stolen stuff we did, in fact, gladly help police when they came in. I even went to court once. Was funny seeing the looks on my criminal customers’ faces in the courthouse lobby, when they recognized me in a suit, talking to the cops, and they realized what was about to happen.
Went into ‘professional’ YouTube later. As in, large studio with videographers, editors, director, episodes/series. Lots of it was educational automotive stuff for performance/custom vehicles.
No, you’re not crazy, it really looked that easy in the video and you’re struggling with a horrible project that merely looked like it wasn’t difficult.
Because we spent hours off-camera Jerry rigging s**t, redoing videos, and carefully editing/magicking things to look good on camera.
I worked at a newspaper processing obituaries, and it was crazy how much funeral homes tried to rip people off.
Obits are expensive. Like, $400 for a single day expensive. And they are priced by the word. We had funeral homes who would send us obits with all the commas and periods separated to make full new words. The homes would get the estimate from our website and use that for billing the grieving family. We would edit the obit to meet English standards, which would reduce the word count substantially, dropping the price. In other words, they charged for the estimate but got billed for the edit.
It got so bad management told us we were not allowed to talk about prices with family members, even if they came in and showed us the bill from the funeral home. The "customer" was the home, not the family, so they weren't privileged to see the pricing.
If you have to put an obituary in the local newspaper, please contact them directly for pricing guidelines. There's usually cheaper options the funeral homes won't tell you about.
I worked at a small, non-prestigious private college that was tuition dependent for a while. Some things I learned:
1) my school was so desperate for students that they accepted everyone who applied. They don’t advertise this and did everything they could to hide it so they can still seem more prestigious than community colleges
2) this includes admitting students who are near illiterate, have disabilities so severe that they need specialist environments, and in some cases international students who cannot write or comprehend even basic sentences in English
3) administrators will do anything they can to keep these students and their tuition (often the student doesn’t even care but the parent is desperate for the “prestige” of a private school degree for their kid and will pay full price) EXCEPT train teachers on how to teach this type of student or offer any specialists/resources. In at least one case, this included hiring a private “tutor” to do an independent study with an illiterate student who was told she should just write his essays for him because passing English 101 would be a barrier to him returning as a sophomore
4) they routinely abuse and misappropriate alum donations, especially if the alum died and isn’t likely to keep an eye on how their money is being spent
5) those “Presidential Scholarships” you received that took 10k off tuition? Totally fake. Tuition is like sticker price on a car and saying you’re getting a scholarship flatters you more than just saying they’re willing to give a discount. They have calculated how much money they need from each student and it’s less than the sticker price of tuition. ((Exceptions apply—there are some legitimately funded scholarships where donors have a clear vision of who should be rewarded. These are usually named after a person and not vague fake names like “Presidential Scholars” or what have you)
6) most of the faculty fully know the degree the school offers is s**t, but there’s not tons of faculty jobs out there so they try to do the best they can with no resources and no administrative support. They can’t fail their entire classes so they’ve had to lower standards so significantly that even juniors and seniors struggle with basic concepts that kids at a good high school already know
TLDR: don’t be fooled. Just because it’s a small school with a pretty campus does not mean you’ll get a serious degree. Check the tuition compared to decent public colleges
“Are we still connected?” most times will get an immediate response from online chat agents.
Your phone was not “hacked,” terrorists and the government don’t give a f**k about your information. You clicked on adware, malware, or a link that asked you to put in your login information.
It’s your fault, accept that.
The Coke at McDonald’s tastes better because they’re one of the only companies that refrigerate the syrup tanks, the unflavored soda and the supply lines. So when it hits the ice in your cup, it’s already super cold, so less ice melts, and the first sip tastes more “concentrated” and ice cold. That’s it. No magic. No secret formula. Just more refrigeration.
People who sell courses on how to make money make their own money selling you the course.
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