What are secrets of your job?

[Radium_Angel]

1 hour ago, LaFemmeEnVert said:

spend it all

Yup. Case in point, we bought a $20k laptop for a user here because she needed to burn some money, or lose it....

 

...it's still sitting in the box, unopened.

 

[handymanshandle]

8 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

the mark up really surprised me. the list price of the sinks my company sells to normal people is on average 40% higher than what we sell to retailers and we make a good 20 or so % profit on sales to retailers

oh it's crazy the mark up on some electronic goods and accessories lol
I work at a pretty large US retail company that has a few locations in Mexico and Canada it used to have some non north american branches but those closed lol

All they allow me to say is that 5% Above Cost is our discount lol

[Arika]

I work in a bank, in a role where I have access to all customer's details.

 

That "adult" store you order from with no identifying information or use a "shell company" to process payments, isn't actually that secret. For example we have a "toy" store in my town that shows up as (street name) bookstore....which everyone already knows about.

 

Threatening to take your business elsewhere doesn't affect a bank as much as people think. unless you have a lot of lending  (or the Branch Manager has no spine) we don't fight to keep you as a customer if you offer no value to us.

 

 

 

 

the below 2 aren't "secrets" as such as the information is publicly available if you care to go looking for it

 

When we ask for ID, we're not doing it to be annoying, doesn't matter if you're a regular and "know everyone", if we don't get it, we can be fined up to $126,00 per incident.

 

It costs the bank more to fight a compliant worth less than $7000 that has gone to the Banking Ombudsman, so they will generally just pay out to "close the complaint"

 

 

 

[Guest]

I work at an accident claims center, so I get to see how people injure themselves.

 

let me tell you once you get over that 40 mark you start doing some really fucking stupid stuff and getting injured really stupidly.

[vanished]

27 minutes ago, Arika S said:

Threatening to take your business elsewhere doesn't affect a bank as much as people think. unless you have a lot of lending  (or the Branch Manager has no spine) we don't fight to keep you as a customer if you offer no value to us.

I know this flip side of this is also true though (maybe you can confirm).  If you have a, lets say, sufficient amount of money stored with them, a lot of regular fees and pressure to downgrade from grandfathered options to new inferior products suddenly disappear when they "remember" this fact.

[Arika]

7 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I know this flip side of this is also true though (maybe you can confirm).  If you have a, lets say, sufficient amount of money stored with them, a lot of regular fees and pressure to downgrade from grandfathered options to new inferior products suddenly disappear when they "remember" this fact.

It certainly can be. depends on if the branch has hit the deposit target or not. 

 

happens a lot with Solicitors/law firms where the branch will bend over backwards to keep them as a customer despite not actually getting much (if anything) out of the business apart from numbers in the books

 

 

[wasab]

13 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

I work for the gov't.

We waste money like it's going out of style. (big surprise I know)

What the gen public may not know, is that it's often done on purpose.

I'm gonna be a legislator and then vote myself a raise of 1000% alongside 100 years of back paid and bounuses upon leaving office.

[Bonzilink]

17 hours ago, Mooshi said:

Not secrets that break any NDA, but something about what you do that the general public isn't really aware of.

 

I work with a large US cellular company, let's call them "red check mark". At random, customers are sent a satisfaction survey via text about how we did blah blah blah. The thing is, these things are anything but transparent with the wording. Customers have no idea that any score below a 9 out of 10 is treated the same. That "8" you thought was good goes against us in the same way if you gave out a 1. It's the biggest insult you can give without realizing it. This ties to our bonuses which means what you felt was a good score only screws us out of bonuses in the hundreds.

 

Remember that next time you call in and liked the rep, but we're upset at something else. We can't control wait times, our queue is back to back. Failing us on that only helps the company not pay out while encouraging the cycle of turnover leaving that queue full.

 

Bonus: They're sending customer satisfaction surveys to non customers now which have the same bonus impacting weight as an actual customer. Let that madness sink in. Imagine going to Pizza Hut and them handing you a survey for Popeye's. Yes, this is real.

 

I don't get paid shit because I'm a 13 year old with no job.

[BuckGup]

The government is the largest buyer of super computers

[GrockleTD]

1 hour ago, BuckGup said:

The government is the largest buyer of super computers

To be fair, who else really has the money?

[TempestCatto]

I guess what I have to say is more obvious than anything else here. But I work custodial at a school, that also holds lots of outside events (such as weddings and funerals). Women are at least 3x messier than men in the restrooms. In addition, for every 5 women who wash their hands, only 2 men will. After both Sunday church services (3-4 thousand people total) we end up with 6 packs of multi-fold commercial paper towels used in the ladies room vs only 2-3 packs in the men's room (this example only uses the main bathrooms next to the sanctuary).

 

Another one is that when cleaning the bathrooms, always leave the seats up in men's rooms because most of the time, they'll just pee. Saves the seat from being full of piss for when someone actually needs it.

 

Staying on the bathroom theme, pee is very acidic and if you ever use a bathroom with commercial vinyl floor tile (the stuff that needs wax) you can guarantee that your splashies are melting through the 5-6 layers of wax and staining the tile underneath it.

 

There's plenty more, but I'll end there. I could also give examples of my other job, of when I used to work traffic control.

[Dylanc1500]

5 hours ago, pinksnowbirdie said:

oh it's crazy the mark up on some electronic goods and accessories lol
I work at a pretty large US retail company that has a few locations in Mexico and Canada it used to have some non north american branches but those closed lol

All they allow me to say is that 5% Above Cost is our discount lol

I worked at a GM/Yamaha/Cub Cadet dealership my senior year in high school. We paid dealer invoice price on everything except new Silverado trucks. Cost was roughly 45-55% off retail in most cases. I will say this much, I purchased a brand new key fob for one of my truck's and retail price is normally around $75, but I only paid $27. Mark-up can be pretty crazy in some instances

[Bananasplit_00]

From working in building plan approval:

Your neighbours yard has to be worse than a scrapheap for anything to happen. If you complain about your neighbours yard bring a mess there is usually nothing deeper than a Google street view look at it too, I worked there a little bit two years ago and some of the street view photos were from 2011...

 

From selling food at a festival:

Legally we need a sign that says "ask the staff for what's in it if you have allergy" but most of us hadn't a clue about what allergens were in the food.

 

I probably have some other ones but those are the two that come to mind

 

[zassou]

used to work for food delievery. you have to complete over 30 orders per day, 7 days a week to meet minimum wage. that usually means 12 hours per day.

no matter you're delievering a bag of cheap sandwich or some fancy french snail with truffles, it always about a piece of george washington per order. if you failed to deliever the food, no georges for you.

 

theres no lunch break what so ever, you arent taking orders, the system pushes orders to you (in soviet russia style), you have to force close the app aka kill the process or turn off your phone entirely. and if you do that you'll gonna have some serious watercooler talks like that time you get scolded by your headmaster because you use your left hand to write.

 

and thats why i quit. kinda envy those in the states where they get tipped. yeah it's abusive, at least you're making money. some client used to ask me why im not upset, i reply: we are too tired to be upset.

[TetraSky]

Not for current job, but I used to work at a food bank before and....

Vegetables/fruits(fruits to a lesser extent) at food banks is often time quite disgusting and you should always wash it all before even considering eating them (if any of you ever need that sort of service), because we sure as hell didn't(might be different elsewhere... so I can't say other food banks are the same).

Especially things like potatoes and onions, which were in contact with their rotten siblings that came in a huge pallet bin and were essentially shoveled out of with an actual shovel(plastic, which was washing multiple times a day) before being sorted by other staff and/or volunteers.
They really should've washed them all after being manually sorted... But they didn't have the installation for it and considering we had to serve over 2000 people a week (doesn't sound like much... But it's a chore, especially when each person can take more than 1 bag... We usually went through 4 pallets of 600+ bags of potatoes a day, that's about 6 bags of 5lbs on average per people. All of which had to be manually sorted and put in the netting bag machine for individual weighting/bagging and there was a lot of back and forth between the sorting area and the distribution area... barely any time for a 15 minute break in the entire day due to being short staffed)

 

Worst memory is having to shovel a literal pallet filled with bags of rotten potatoes into a dumpster... because they were so far gone, that there was maybe a single potato in every 3 bags of 5lbs that was okay... The sheer stench of it all... The feeling of the shovel sliding right through the bags like it was butter...  

The company that donated those was subsequently blacklisted... which is unfortunate because it means less food for the poor. But come the fuck on, how could anyone think it was a good idea to literally deliver a pallet filled with 99.99% rotten potatoes to a food bank, as if that was a good deed...

[Radium_Angel]

3 hours ago, TetraSky said:

as if that was a good deed...

Tax write-off probably...

[Worstcaster]

Ambulance service - Driving really fast can lead to substandard care.   It's hard to start an IV if your partner is throwing you all overt the place with their driving.  During a cardiac arrest we may drive even slower than the speed limit in order to do quality chest compressions. 

[GDRRiley]

On 8/15/2019 at 6:01 AM, Radium_Angel said:

I work for the gov't.

We waste money like it's going out of style. (big surprise I know)

What the gen public may not know, is that it's often done on purpose.

That I know given my dad sells fire equipment to US military bases and everyone has their year end order ready.

[TempestCatto]

2 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

everyone has their year end order ready

Even at the churches I do sound for, this is a common concept. If you don't use up what's left in your budget for the year, the higher ups will lower it for next year. So you always have to spend your whole budget by the end of the fiscal year.

[GDRRiley]

17 hours ago, GrockleTD said:

To be fair, who else really has the money?

Northrup Grumman

Boeing

and any other large US military supplier 

 

 

1 minute ago, TempestCatto said:

Even at the churches I do sound for, this is a common concept. If you don't use up what's left in your budget for the year, the higher ups will lower it for next year. So you always have to spend your whole budget by the end of the fiscal year.

Yeah its just stupid and then those who didn't make an order all are scrambling, dude this date comes every year like clock work.

Edited August 16, 2019 by GDRRiley

[Ravendarat]

21 hours ago, pinksnowbirdie said:

oh it's crazy the mark up on some electronic goods and accessories lol
I work at a pretty large US retail company that has a few locations in Mexico and Canada it used to have some non north american branches but those closed lol

All they allow me to say is that 5% Above Cost is our discount lol

Electronics is a funny business, some stuff people think have HUGE markup and others next to nothing. As an example in Canada you often see TVs that might be say a $498 55 inch tv. Some of those tvs might have a retailer cost of $410 and others might be a lost leader and have a retailer cost of $530 but is put out under that just to get people in the door. Computers are another one, they have shitty markup at the retail store, there might be backend funding but at the store level its super common to see a $999 laptop with a cost of like $975. Its amazing though how many times people come in and try to bargain to get $300 off that laptop

[Teddy07]

Worked in the office of an electricity company which held a prize game where people had to send a postcard. I believe the top prices were entries in an amusement park.  Well, the drawing wasn´t random because I selected the winners base on electricity consumption and numbers of children. This means only customers win anything and I also had to check if the person won before.

[Teddy07]

trash

13 hours ago, TetraSky said:

But come the fuck on, how could anyone think it was a good idea to literally deliver a pallet filled with 99.99% rotten potatoes to a food bank, as if that was a good deed...

2

I watched a short video about this because it also happens in Germany. It was said that companies that do this are doing it to save money or more precise disposal costs. An example was a pizzeria that donated a plastic bag filled with liquid pizza. It was disgusting and was thrown right into the trash.

[Otto_iii]

Might get shamed for this but here goes; I used to work a very nice, and affordable Vientnamese+(excellent Pho, Pad Thai, Vermicelli etc) and American Chinese (value lunch items with real veggies and meats, not prepacked frozen stuff) restaurant and at basically all times the owners Dog, a mutt mini dachshund lived there since said owner worked 12+ hours a day.  Presumably other businesses around us knew this as the dog was repeatedly let out back without a leash to roam, it was too smart to run away and too kind to bite, no issue, (and shame on anybody who owns a dog that for who that would be imo)  More over this was even true year after year when the Health Inspection came by, the dog was clever enough to hide and not make a sound, ever. 

No, the dog was nowhere near the food, nearer the cleaning supplies without that being a potential issue for the dog, all the same im sure if anybody had found this out despite it going on for over a decade the whole place would of ceased to be. 

Owner now has a much bigger place in a different state (hint:mushrooms), in a very well known city in fairly prime spot, no dog there anymore though, the poor boy got old and moved homes. 

[kaiju_wars]

I work in law enforcement.  Our location tracking is not like CSI.

 

You don't call and .0023 seconds later I have your exact location.

There can be a major uncertainty, it does not give me an address, it gives me coordinates.  On top of that, not all phones will plot, some will stay on the cell tower.

Also, we can't just "track a phone."

Also when you call, even if it does get a super close or even exact location... it doesn't give us your name and address, there's a reason we ask.