Ask Lemmy

There have been plenty of movies and shows based on this so I guess I'm more confirming a poorly kept secret than I am revealing it, but;

If you go out to eat in a college town (esp if it's a state school,) there's a good chance that almost every employee (managers, bartenders, servers, you name it) is drinking or smoking pot out back, if not in the middle of an active bender. We'd fill our water bottles with alcohol, make food for our stoner friends in exchange for drugs, take shots in the walk-in fridge, roll on Molly while cooking, run out back to puke, and rally for the rest of our shift. After closing we'd meet up with other industry friends, usually at a bar where one of them was still working, close that place down, then pair off and hook up in questionable places.

I've had sex on restaurant rooftops and patios, in supply closets, behind the stacked pallets in dry storage, and in the manager's office. I witnessed others get it on in booths, on top of the video poker machines, and even on the bar itself. Thankfully never where food was prepared, but that was pretty much the only thing that was off limits, and only within my social circle. I can't speak about others.

I'm a boring elder millennial now, but every once in a while I reminisce about working in the service industry. I don't think I appreciated how much freedom I had, I was too busy worrying about money, school, and relationships. I definitely wouldn't do it again, but I'm glad I got to sow my oats, or whatever.

My boss was high 99% of the time he was at work.

Or awake.

I work in pest control and 99% of the shit we use. You can buy without having a license. The license just covers us to use the products on other people's houses responsibly. If you really want to do pest control, you only need a few chemicals and they are all easily obtainable on Amazon.

Snake Farm, when asked how to sell a policy that's clearly more expensive than the competition's answer was "They should feel privilege to be a Snake Farm customer."

The hubris was baffling.

Worked Customer Service for a well-known car company that also had it's own financial services dept with its own branded credit card. During training we were told that the card itself sucked and that smart/discerning customers would likely reject getting the card if they actually knew the details. Why should people get the card? Just based on the "prestige" of the brand, because they would see it as a status symbol. And they had a quota for us to sign people up for every month, which I consistently failed because literally the only time I could get anybody to sign up for the card was when they didn't care enough to know the details and just absent-mindedly said, "Yea sure, I'll do that."

A large pizza chain, it costs about $1 to make a large cheese pizza. Cheese is re-used as much as possible.

I was high the whole time, beginning to end.

i worked in a place where we put journal,magasin in leters and film. we got a DISGUSTING porn thing like... i dont even think it was legal (zoo ect) i personaly refuse to put that in envelope. and you know what? the most common adress we got? religious person. yup most recieve it was the one in church reading you the bibles...

I know this thread is old but: so many HIPPA violations, oh my God. I am a pediatric therapists/child psych, and the clinic I used to work at constantly stored client data in the most insecure ways, and therapists and staff would discuss client names, diagnosis', address, EVERYTHING openly in the break room. I complained at one point, but it went nowhere. Turns out nobody cares, lol. They also frequently ignored the best interests of our clients to maximize profit from insurance (leaning towards fraud). I ultimately left the company when my boss blatantly violated the safety of one of my clients by refusing to send her home when she had a fever of 104 F. Sure, working with kids means everyone gets sick a lot, but when the child is THAT sick, they need to be in a hospital, not in a hot, cramped room with a therapist.

I worked for a company that had an expensive San Jose lease during the .com bubble. When they decided they needed to get out of that lease, they folded the company - “fired” everyone, then re-hired everyone under an independent second company that was owned by the parent company. Sketchy, but not really surprising…

When they re-hired me, they didn’t have me sign any NDAs. All the old NDAs were with the company that folded, not the parent company. Some days I wish I had been unethical enough to sell off their source code to a competitor.

Worked for a Gaming Hoster. Critical informations where hidden in small texts everywhere just (we) couldn't get sued. VPS would get "corrupted" when not used for a period of time, just so we could replace it with a new server. Backends were not protected. You could replace the executable with something malicious and get access to the server. Some more specific things i can't name or it would be clear which hoster it is. NEVER trust a gaming hoster which have access to you server files..

The dealership I worked for gave out loans they knew people couldn’t afford, ignored safety items, slapped inspection stickers that didn’t match vehicles to get them on the lot. Ran a lift that was jerry rigged because the wiring busted along with the hydraulic tank.

Employee bought a vehicle and his manager watched where he went on his lunch (via GPS installed by said company into sold vehicles). Funnily enough it was to an interview.

Oh another one. School bus company 1 is one of the largest in the US. In between runs a buddies transmission starts leaking on his bus. He calls the terminal on my phone to let them know.

“Keep driving keep it going, we are not sending out another bus to you.”

Transmission in a 45ft flat nose busts fully in the middle of one of the busiest intersections in the town. He calls over radio letting them know it busted as he told them.

“What do you mean this is first time I’m hearing about this”

Flat nose I drove kept writing up for not having heat and turning it into the people I was told. This went for an entire winter and I didn’t have heat until after the thaw and spring started. Mechanic never knew that bus had been being written up. They were hiding slips. Same bus, folding door let go and was flapping in the wind with a bus full of students. Over the radio they said to keep driving and refused to send a replacement.

My wife worked at a pretty well-known hiking supplies store in our country. The retail price is sometimes over x4 the manufacturing cost and extremely marked up. The amount of faulty products with manufacturing faults is really high, with the suppliers 100% aware but gave the stores discounts on the wholesale price just to push units, even though the clothes/bags/shoes would break after a year or so of light use.

I work for a MSP that works a lot with very large tech companies. Most of these companies outsource a lot of work to India. I frequently have to remote in and help them with our product. You'll see passwords in plain text being thrown around in teams chats, .txt documents on the desktop and emails like candy. I will frequently work with individuals with titles like "Cloud Engineer" to "Solutions Expert" that I swear have never opened a terminal window in their life and unable to follow basic IT instructions. I have worked with a lot of very good Indian engineers, but I swear chronyism has a lot of people put into positions that they aren't really qualified for.

Shit, piss or vomit has graced just about every surface at your public pool and the staff are constantly fighting a losing battle against it. Nothing is washed just power sprayed till it looks clean.

Our SSL implementation never checks the certificates, largely defeating the purpose of SSL.

One company I worked at had more full-time collections people than sales people. Our products were a lot cheaper than our competitors, and it attracted a lot of customers with no money.

Another company I worked at ignored all "first notice" bills they ran up. CFO told me that if a company wanted paid, they needed to send a second notice.

Certain search engine company was a badly managed, bureaucratic slog of an ads-driven soulless corporation for way longer than people think.

I worked for lumber liquidators, and their point of sale software seemed to be surplus navy because if you dug deep enough you could order nuclear sub parts.

Military equipment is sold to the PRC and mislabeled as COTS, i.e. civilian.

Worked for an online poker company. The information they stored from users devices was insane. Registration and connection ips, mac addresses, disk serials. Basically any identifiable piece of pc information they stored in their database so they knew who was logging in where and from what computer.

My previous employer - a multi-billion dollar internet search company would secretly listen to people's conversation via their mobile devices then place ads on the same devices (e.g in the browser search results or at the start of videos) based on keywords from the conversations, this had to be kept hidden of course and this large well-known company shall remain nameless.

They let the intern access the production db. The company is one of the biggest hosting and internet service companies in the country. The db was SQL but had no primary key.

I was the intern. I normalized it to 3NF as part of my internship project.