Ever wonder what you aren't being told when you visit a business? These whistleblowers are spilling the tea on the secrets industry insiders are keeping from their customers.
SaibanAhmad asked: What does your job ask you to hide from the customers?
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.
This hero courier.
I worked at a UPS store on a military base. When packages came back to use for whatever reason, we always told UPS that we'd donate the contents to on-base thrift store. We'd keep office supply stuff. BUT that never happened.
One cat, packaged all his belongings at our store and shipped them prior to leaving for deployment. This was at the start of the Afghan war. He didn't check his shipping label right and about 3 weeks after it shipped it came back to us as denied/RTS. We held it for a few months, expecting him to come back.
After waiting, my boss told me to open it up and take whatever I wanted out of it. Trash everything else. So, I opened it and it was like a dream come true. Every gaming system, stacks of games, expensive watches, all sorts of good sh*t. It didn't feel right.
Went in on my day off after hours, looked more inside the box. Found a small address book with numbers. Got in contact with his parents and explained who I was, how I got their numbers etc etc.
Ended up generating a label that night for it and shipped all this guys stuff out on the stores dime. Boss was pissed as hell with me for doing that.
And you wonder why customers get so frustrated...
My last job was a "white labelled" help desk. You had to hide the fact that your company existed at all from the customer; you had to pretend you were from whatever company the customer was using for their IT.
I worked for a monitoring center, and that's what we did, instead of saying "This is Avantguard" we had to use the name of the company, we monitored for medical buttons (like "I've fallen and I can't get up! (Alert one, Responselink, Life Protect, EMC Security company, etc.), security systems for homes and businesses, and fire alarms. The thing that made it the most frustrating was when they were doing something wrong on their end, and we couldn't just strait up tell them what was wrong.
Like they would press their button to "Hang up," but it just calls back into us again, and we have to be like "Ok, I'm going to disconnect, you don't have to do anything" while they are screaming that we keep calling them, when it would be so much easier to just say "We can't call you, the only way we can get in contact with you is if you press your button, so stop pressing it unless it's an emergency" That company was awful to work for.
Edit: Also, we weren't allowed to tell them that we were understaffed, or that we were really busy.
Yeah, definitely vet your tattoo artists.
As a tattoo artist, often times apprentices at the end of their apprenticeship will start to tattoo paying customers (walk-ins) and for a few tattoo shops, the apprenticeships are much shorter than they need to be. So if you're getting tattooed but someone who seems to be young or they seem inexperienced, they probably are, and they're probably still in their apprenticeship. But the shop will tell you they're actual artists. Do your research when thinking about getting a tattoo, and don't be afraid to wait months (or even years) for the right artist for you, it'll save you from really bad tattoos.
I think this might have happened to me. Went into a shop with a good idea of what I wanted and was prepared to wait to get it. Surprise to me when they said they'd get me in same day! It looked fine that day and a few months after, but slowly became obvious that they didn't go deep enough in some places and had shaky hands on others.
Good news is about 1.5 years after the initial tattoo I went back to the shop and asked for the artist, who was still working there. He seemed embarrassed and touched it up with no charge. I tipped him good and it looks much better. Still love my tattoo.
"Informed consent"
MD in Pathology. We are the ones who give the bottom line diagnosis and staging for most cancers and many other diseases.
In a weird way the patient isn't out customer - their doctor is. We are telling them what the diagnosis is and what evidence we have to support it. Anything we say can trigger them to do a whole new treatment plan or a bunch more tests, so we have to be careful not to mention random things that we see unless we want them acting in it.
For example we might think 'these megakaryocytes are a little small and I see a few of them bunched together here, but it's only in a couple spots.' If we bring it up it might seem more significant than that, and trigger a distracting question about one disease process when we know that's not the actual problem. A big part of the training is learning how to communicate the truth without clouding it with the truth.
Unfortunately this often means that the reports are almost unintelligible to the patients because they are not the intended audience of the report really.
And yet, fast food rarely makes people sick.
I've worked at 2 fast food restaurants in my life. At each one, the only time that food safety protocol was followed or enforced was the day that the health inspector was coming to "grade" us.
Edit: I should also note that both stores received 100% Everytime the health inspector came.
Edit 2: Obviously every restaurant is different. It all comes down to management. The stores I worked at were all about getting food out the door as fast as possible, with the smallest number of people working as possible. That leads to cutting corners. Not all restaurants (even fast food) are like that though.
My point in posting was that even though they appear clean, or have a high score posted for their health inspection, that doesn't mean they're following all of the guidelines set in place for them.
It's amazing how common this is.
I think the word you were looking for was 'disgusting'
Band Aids are better than casts.
You'd be amazed at how good construction workers become at hiding flaws. It's quite nearly a part of the job description and a large reason why so much of construction effort is put towards cosmetics (beyond the fact that most people just don't want to be looking at a bunch of rough-in work that's functionally the same but aesthetically atrocious).
I concur. I was a finisher for some years. Painting, staining, so in other words making your brand new piece of sh!t house that you paid way to much for look nice. Amazing how many home owners get duped or just plainly have idea what they are doing or agreeing to.
This is totally unsurprising.
Cellphone store. Customers returned perfectly good phones all the time. We were told to sell the boxes as brand new, first time activations and purposefully leave out the fact that they had, in fact, already been activated and taken home - within 48 hours.
I'd be pissed if I bought a phone full price and it was even slightly used. I let those phones get dusty & would never sell them just to spite that policy.
I used to work at one too and we also did that as well. I think the one thing that annoyed me the most was the push to sell the accessories just cuz it was on a daily basis. I understand the need to sell accessories, but what I didn't understand was the need to sell accessories that DO NOT FIT THE PHONES. Like is it that hard to find accessories that actually fit the phones to their exact model? For example, if you wanted a screen protector it was either gonna fall short around the edges or be too big where we had to cut it so it so would fit.
It was worse for tempered glass cuz we it was more expensive. I loathed every time I had to sell one. If I didn't, I would get in trouble and get scolded for not hustling enough. I worked at a small town store so I knew a good chunk of people and felt terrible selling them. I only sold them whenever managers were present, otherwise I'd just tell customers to order off of Amazon. Screw that place.
"Your issue is important to us."
How many people are actually working on this really important project. Spoilers, it's just me...
Client: "Can we add X"
Me: "No."
Client: "Can we have a discussion on this with the whole team?"
Me: "You just did."
Know what doesn't lie? Google Images.
Also, at the hotel I worked at, if a guest found a stray bed bug, all staff were instructed to neither confirm nor deny that it was an actual bed bug. Word games were not fun.
I experienced that first hand! Went to a convention that was infested with cockroaches. Collected a few in a cup, and went to the front desk to complain. They re-assured me that what I saw was just "harmless water bugs" and that there were no roaches anywhere in the hotel. None. Zero. Nada.
Had to ask them if they'd be fine with me releasing these harmless bugs in the lobby, and the moment I said that they froze... and realized there was nothing they could say or do.
Gordon Ramsay would not approve.
I work in a deli & bakery currently. All of our food is from frozen & they want me to call in 'fresh' 'baked in store everyday' dude it was frozen for 3 months thawed for an hour & then cooked. It's no better than anything else you get from the freezer section & in many cases the freezer section is higher quality stuff...
Last year I found out that the "fresh baked" hot-crossed buns sold came in frozen, were thawed and then thrown in the oven for a very short time (I think it was literally less than a minute).
