It’s a sad side effect of doing business. To make money, corners get cut, rules get broken, and problems arise—some more disturbing than others. Then, these types of shady practices become common, and before you know it, they’re written in stone, unbeknownst to regular people like you and me. These are the real secrets that people who’ve worked in different industries have shared online. Some will make you never look at some things the same way ever again. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
1. No Experience Necessary
You know the people who write instruction manuals or user guides in stuff you buy? Half the time, the writers have never even seen or touched the actual product. Someone just sends pictures and a rough description of how it's supposed to work, and that's it. It’s up to the writer to come up with the layout and content.
2. A Little Birdie Told Me
Young children always talk to whoever’s handling them about their parents. Whether it’s their teachers, coaches, principals, or camp counselors, they talk to them a lot. And kids pick up on all the dirty little secrets, so it’s always interesting.
3. Wasn’t Me
Ghostwriters get no credit and are never mentioned in fiction. John Grisham, Danielle Steele, James Patterson, Janet Evanovich, etc., all those big names with New York Times bestseller books every year use ghostwriters. It's barely even a secret.
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4. Short Cool Down
I worked in an airport hotel. Hotels often sell rooms multiple times. Many guests most likely won’t arrive due to missed or delayed flights. There are guests who check out from 2-3 AM to catch their early flights, so even though the room is technically still theirs, someone quickly and sometimes poorly cleans the room.
Then they tell the arriving unexpected guest or new booking that there’s a random computer issue and to wait 20 minutes. After, they check them into the departed guest's room, praying all the while. I’ve had to run a kettle many times under a cold tap to hide the fact the previous guest used it 15 minutes before the new guest arrived.
5. Law Of Man
It’s lobbyists or special interest organizations who actually write most of the state bills. I have seen my boss give bill language to a state legislator and then found the same language in print a couple of days later several times. The bill may change in committee but usually not drastically against the original intent.
6. Unknown Illnesses
In air traffic control, a diagnosis of virtually any mental illness and a diagnosis of many physical conditions will disqualify you and will end your career, no exception—and there’s a dark consequence to this rule. For that reason, people avoid their doctors like the plague and are stuck dealing with their health problems on their own. It’s actually pretty sad.
7. Trusty Service
I’m a customs broker, and every day, hundreds of thousands of containers and air shipments come into the United States. The volume of customs entries coming in daily is staggering. Licensed customs brokers are trained and tested not just on knowledge, but on ethics. We even pledge to partner with CBP to uphold the law.
We also pledge to cooperate with them should we come across anything suspicious. Why so much emphasis on this? Customs can't actually screen everything coming in. Oversimplified, CBP basically works on an honor system. You file an entry detailing what the shipment is, and they just take your word for it and release it.
This happens hundreds of thousands of times a day. Maybe at best, customs can screen 3-7% of what's coming in, and the rest of it just waived through.
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8. Gotcha No Captcha
Whenever you start filling out a form for a quote on something on any website, change your mind, and say, "Nah, I don't want to give them my personal information," and then abandon the form before pressing, "Submit," it’s already too late. The company leads will capture your information in real-time as you enter it.
The submit button is just there to move you to the next step, not to actually send your information to the company.
9. Dirty Diaper Secrets
There are too many people who work with children like teachers and childcare workers and don't follow confidentiality guidelines. They’re always gossiping about families with coworkers, talking about children's home situations, creeping family's social media, and other kinds of things they know they shouldn’t be doing.
10. Say That Again
99.9% of advertisements involving “real people” are acted and scripted. Even when the people being interviewed are actually not actors, they're prompted on what to say. For example, a guy won a car from one of our brands. During the first take, the interviewer said to him, “Congratulations on your win! How do you feel?”
He answered, “Uh...really great. It's a big surprise, to be honest. Thank you.” Then, after several rounds and coaching, his answer was, “I feel so lucky to have won a (BRAND) car! The design is first-rate, and I'm most impressed by the fuel consumption. I’ll definitely keep on holding (BRAND) as my top car of choice.”
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11. Drinks All Around
There is at least one water bottle, soda can, energy drink, and/or spray paint can sitting on a piece of blocking behind the drywall somewhere in your house. And it could have been really anybody who was working on your house’s construction and abandoned their drink container banishing it forever behind concrete walls.
12. Low Vegginess Standards
Someone has probably dumped the produce you bought on a dirty floor at some point, then scraped it up off of the floor, and put it back in its container.
13. IT’s Fine
There are usually a lot of IT problems happening in any company’s computer system at any given time. Sure, there are outages that occur and bugs happen too. Most of the time the IT people know about these things are happening and put them off until they cause a problem or if someone complains about it. Then it’s fixed.
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14. The Addiction Cycle
There is a problem in substance misuse treatment in the United States called body brokering—and it’s even darker than it sounds. Substance misuse treatment can be very expensive, and insurance companies pay a lot of money for a patient to be there. Treatment centers will hire these “body brokers” to find addicts who have the best, highest-paying insurance.
They entice them to check in to a specific center, and then the center gives the broker a commission from the insurance money. This can go as far as body brokers giving more illicit substances to some addicts before they come in because it’s better for them if they have a higher level of bad stuff in their system upon their admittance.
This is because the insurance company will give more money for a longer stay at the treatment center. Brokers will also hire other addicts in a pyramid scheme type way to check in to the treatment center, make friends with the other patients, and upon discharge, encourage them to relapse so they come back to treatment.
15. Goes On And On And On
People pad documents with unimportant paperwork on purpose to slow auditors down. Every data point, the minutiae of calculations, dense explanations of statistical methods that go on at length with notes about distribution fitting, all are unnecessary. Auditors aren't usually very technical, so they stop at each point.
What they don’t realize is that they can throw half the thing out. If you're good at it, you can balloon a 30-page document into 100 in a matter of minutes.
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16. Getting The Job Done
A lot of the time when you discuss your project with an engineer and decide to trust them with it, the engineer delegates it to cheaper contractors as soon as you sign the paperwork. Their job is just to get new business.
17. Spend Money To Make Money
Corporations spread the idea that lawyers are expensive and plaintiff lawyers get unreasonably high payouts for doing little work to try and discourage people from suing them. Most plaintiff lawyers work on contingency where they don’t get money back from advances unless it’s a win and usually offer free consultations.
Spreading the false narrative of, “It’s gonna cost you to even talk to a lawyer about that,” huge companies discourage people from even getting a consultation and finding out the reality. In the same way, the narrative of plaintiff lawyers getting unreasonably high fees for cases also misrepresents what really happens.
For example, a big company says, “This class action got $2.50 for each person, but the attorneys got $250 thousand.” But the only reason the attorneys received all that money is that the company went as long as possible litigating over $2.50 racking up attorney fees on both sides instead of avoiding the whole thing.
The simple solution could’ve been, “You got us, here’s your money,” and the company would pay next to nothing in attorney fees. Plus, $2.50 times a million people is a lot, which suggests justification for the attorney fees with the total amount recovered and that the case was not that insignificant from the beginning.
But, by controlling the narrative, companies suggest the idea that it’s unreasonable to be mad that they had used millions of dollars from consumers and that it’s even more unreasonable for someone whose job it is to take on all the risk to be paid based on a percentage of their results. Sure, there are windfall cases.
Usually, these cases offset the 10 other cases that take a hit on fees. It’s like putting $100 in a slot machine, losing 10 times, and then hitting one jackpot on your last turn to make it back to $100, and then having the casino say, “He got $100 for a single game of slots. This is ridiculous,” until you give back $90.
18. A Rich Look
Contractors base their services costs on how much money you look like you have. I’m a contractor. I come to your house, and you tell me what you want. My jumping-off point is how much the market will bear. If I think you can afford a $4,000 solid oak bookcase, that’s what I’d quote you. I could make a cheaper version.
But that would mean I make less money, and why would I do that? It’s not that I’m ripping you off. I’m selling you a better product, but in doing so, I make more money. So, when you get a quote, it can pay to be very direct about your budget or else they’ll sell you the most expensive version they think you can afford.
19. Up To Code
I work at a theme park, and we use codes with numbers for situations that could happen in the park so we won’t cause panic. For example, we use code 25, which means there’s a fire. We also use codes for some categories of people like code 20 is for mentally disabled people. We also use hand signals for some situations.
20. Take Your Meds
As a former retail pharmacy technician, I saw many forged prescriptions for strong narcotics for otherwise seemingly young, healthy patients. In hindsight, it's really sad because I was witnessing the opioid crisis unfold before my eyes. But the pharmacist has full discretion to pretend we don't have the product in stock.
The pharmacist can also turn people away or straight up call the authorities. We will literally put on our acting game and keep these people at the pharmacy until they arrive.
21. Hope For The Best
The real reason programmers have so many screens is that one of them almost always has Google pulled up on it. No one knows exactly what they’re doing 100% of the time. It’s typically always, "Hmm, I think this should work," or, "Well, maybe this fixes it."
22. Lickety-Split
Sometimes we archaeologists lick artifacts to quickly determine if they are bone or pottery. Bone sticks to the tongue whereas pottery doesn’t. Then we also tap the bones on our teeth to determine if they are pottery or a rock. If it’s rock, it’ll hurt while pottery won’t.
23. Impactive Perspective
I’m a documentary editor. This varies depending on the content/genre, but documentaries can never be completely true. Those who work on documentaries understand that they are almost as fictional as completely made-up stories. Again, this depends on the project, but there are some common practices like, “Frankenbiting.”
It’s when you splice sentences and words to create a different message. It’s used a lot in reality TV and really dramatic documentaries. It’s necessary to make a documentary watchable. There are hundreds of hours of footage, and creators purposely choose every piece of footage to expose to audiences over other footage.
This can actually destroy lives whether a person is posed as the enemy or antagonist or displayed in a way that does not represent them accurately, which is most, if not all, of the time. I’ve had to take mental health days off from working because I become so worried about how my decisions might affect people’s lives.
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24. Made Local
Pretty much all high-end handmade in Australia jewelry in Australia is made in a secret factory in Bali. All of the clients have to show an established business and sign confidentiality agreements.
25. Dark, Dirty Depths Of The Sea
A lot of unethical shipping companies dump a lot of garbage, oily sludge, waste contaminated water and oil when sailing in far international waters. There are only a few handful players today who are really executing business trades while still keeping the carbon footprint and environment as one of their core policies.
26. Long-term Loss Study
Schools will lower their admittance standards for international students since schools depend on that money to stay afloat. The more cuts the system does towards the public system, the worse this gets. You have to lower teaching standards with outdated infrastructure and bloated classes with students with lower skills.
I've seen students attend classes who were completely unable to speak any English. When I say any, I mean any. They had to start with “hello my name is,” “I, you, he, she, it,” and “chair, desk, table,” weeks into their program. The way class hours and modules work means they can’t take two months and solve the problem.
So, they have to waste everyone's time and money, including theirs, for months and months while failing everything.
27. Playing With Desire
Some stores that sell used merchandise like video games and movies will pay you money for stuff without no questions asked even if they know it’s probably taken from somewhere else. It doesn't hurt to get brand new games released hours before for a fraction of the cost. They sell them five dollars cheaper for a profit.
28. Church Is In Disservice
This may be specific to the church where I work, but it's pretty common in 1,000+ members churches. They're all two-faced. They'll tell the janitorial crew, "Janitorial service is truly a ministry, and it's so good and so important." But when the church needs to make cutbacks, we're some of the first ones screwed over.
They expect us to clean until 2-3 AM on a Sunday morning after people have used the building until midnight. Somebody high up in the church hierarchy was straight-up harassing me, and, as a woman, nobody really has my back. There are too many fake, judgemental, hateful people who hide behind this guise of Christianity.
These people will lock people out of the building and laugh at them. They tell the people who aren't dressed presentable enough to sit in the back if their frozen, hateful stares didn’t already run that person away. This is so anti what a church and Christianity should be.
29. Word Mumbo Jumbo
Copywriters write most online articles. We don’t know what we’re saying. We get a topic, Google it, and reword other articles into a new one. All we do is include SEO words. I've written articles for HVAC companies, movie and TV reviews, and other stuff I've forgotten. If it's a blog post online, it's probably fake.
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30. V. I. P. Sevice
Every stereotype you’ve ever heard about retail and sales staff doing everything in their power to make a rude customer’s life worse is 100% true. We make sure that you spend the most money, send out the worst version of the product, and put you on hold for an hour while everyone has a chat and a little bit of a break.
31. Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cardigan
Library workers are all a bunch of tatted-up punks outside of work. You usually can't see the tattoos because we cover them up with cardigans. We also will ignore parental restrictions if their children have their own library card. If a parent tells us her kids can't do certain things, we’d check it out to them anyway.
If parents want to control what media their child consumes, they shouldn't give them their own library card.
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32. No Good Goods
Incompetent, poorly trained, and uneducated staff from exploited poor countries manage an overwhelming majority of international trade. Government checks are all corrupt even from Western countries that people assume to have low corruption. This is by design. It's a miracle that ships don't collide and sink constantly.
33. Ready For Anything
The armed forces usually have no idea what’s going on at all, and when we look all uniform and ready to go, it’s because we’ve been waiting on standby to figure out what to do next for 7 hours.
34. Trendset Plans
I managed this Asian supermodel for around five years. She brought me along when she met with other celebrities who were usually Western and sometimes other Asians to ensure she understood everything and didn't make any major cultural faux pas. I was still teaching her English as I am native and fluent in her language.
I don't know if this is "dark" per se, but questionable for sure. Many of these actors, musicians, etc. have other businesses and brands too. They sit down and off-headedly formulate the fashions/trends they would start soon so that they could have goods waiting to sell and accommodate who participated in these trends.
The trends that they, themselves, started. They would also plan out propping each other's business plans up by reinforcing the trends with appearances, comments to fashion magazines etc. The first time I heard this kind of talk, I thought they were just being full of themselves, as they all are very prone to be anyway.
And then I saw the effects of the talks happening a few months later over and over. "This is what we'll have people wear in the fall." “Send me the sample when it's ready—I'll get my demographic on it." "Your concert is in June, right?" "Yeah, I'm a medium. Here's my manager's number. She'll get it to me for the show."
35. Been Here A While
When you order pizza, if you choose “unpopular” toppings, you are most likely eating a mixed bag of fresh and spoiled ingredients. It’s because pizza kitchens have to refill the toppings containers every week. If management doesn’t have staff empty and clean them, you end up eating rotten and rancid meat and vegetable.
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36. Missed Treatment
I don't know if it's a secret exactly, but many clinicians in the mental health field refuse to work with clients with a borderline personality disorder diagnosis. Although there's a pervasive belief that there is no treatment for BPD, there have been some partially effective treatments for decades for it now like DBT.
Patients diagnosed with BPD are at a hugely elevated risk for rates of suicide, and DBT has shown to be effective in reducing those rates. I think it's pretty questionable...it would be like if the majority of doctors refused to see patients with arthritis because there's no cure for it.
37. Nothing To See Here
My cleaning company got paid extra to clean at night in one particular area and we’re not allowed to ask questions about whatever we were cleaning.
38. Professionally Made
I make expensive stuff that several governments and some high-end consumer product manufacturers buy. One of the machines that each bit of product has to go through only works right if someone stands there and pokes it with a stick. It’s not even special. It’s just a metal rod that fell from another piece of equipment.
We just wrapped some tape around it to make a handle and always make the new guy do it because of how boring it was.
39. Watching Out
The “monitoring center” for alarm/camera tech for residential and business is a lie. There is a pretty good chance that no one is responding or it’s going to a call center handling a lot of calls. The authorities won't usually even dispatch for unconfirmed alarms if at all. The gear is stupid cheap and easy to install.
I literally had one day of training and looked everything up online. It's all there including install and override codes for most systems since the 90s. Most stuff they sell is worthless. You’re better off monitoring and servicing the system yourself. Everything is on eBay for pennies compared to what the company charges.
You can reprogram and set up even used gear that’ll work fine. If you really want to be secure, get a good dog. But tons of people are locked into years of contracts over basically $30-40 worth of gear.
40. What You Don’t See
I was an ophthalmic tech in the 90s in factory and clinical settings. First off, contact lenses. The "3-day wear" lenses and other time frame are the exact same. Literally the only thing different between lens packs is the labeling. When you buy glasses, "UV coating" is already on the lens blanks and doesn’t come off.
You get it whether you pay for it or not. Eyeglass adjustments are little more than just wiggling them a bit with tools and putting them back on your face. I take glasses into the back room, square them, and drop them a few times on the desk, which does get rid of some "stair step" but overall doesn't do anything much.
I read a newspaper for a minute or two and then go back out and put them on the amazed customer’s face. Yes, there is a huge difference between the $1 pair of kid’s sunglasses and high-quality plastic frames. Cheap plastic will melt in the hotboxes, so don't try to use them for custom lenses. You're not fooling anyone.
41. Only If You Ask
Businesses offer rebates rather than cash discounts because they know the odds of you going to the trouble of mailing in a rebate coupon are minimal. Then they don't pay the first time because they know the odds of you complaining about it are infinitesimal. Usually, the only time they’d pay you off is if you complain.
42. Take This
The official policy for customer dissatisfaction at a particular Canadian coffee franchise I worked at was, "offer them free stuff until they stop complaining."
43. Mismarked Page
When people return their library books, we usually make some pretty disturbing discoveries. We find a surprising amount of toilet paper, random items, and bills that are left in the books as bookmarks, forgotten, discovered, and thrown away.
44. Pays To Be Kind
Most "subscription services" will raise their prices over time because they expect you to just suck it up. This applies to phone bills, cable packages, internet service, etc., Phone and politely complain about the price. Skip the canned, "Well, the price has gone up because inflation/rising costs/age/end of promotion."
Continue to politely say it's too much, your budget can't handle all your outgoings, and you may need to drop [service]. Either you’re speaking to someone who can reduce the price or they can put you through to a person authorized to lower the price. Politeness is key since you don't want to make any of the agents mad.
They may either stonewall you or send you into a transfer loop to nowhere useful. Unable to afford the service, found a better deal with a competitor, or questioning what you're really getting for the service works. Declarations of long-term loyalty and disregard for people handling your call will just waste your time.
If at first you don't succeed, call back tomorrow. Chances are you will get a different agent who may have a different approach. There is no company of any great size where everyone in customer service will give exactly the same response and assistance.
45. Flash Sale
A used car is priced based on what it will sell for, but what calculates the margin is how long the car has been there. You can save thousands if you ask if a car was traded in without detailing or advertising yet. Some car dealerships have reward systems based on numbers for the salesmen and the dealer and management.
If you go at the end of the month, you can sometimes get a screaming good deal because even at 0 profit, the sale bumps them up to a big bonus.
46. Looks About Right
People who make nine bucks an hour and could care less about safety or if it’s up to code mass produce cheaply made mobile homes. It’s hundreds of people in a factory with little supervision with the main goal to get as much out as possible with little attention to protocol, codes, and fire stopping. I was a HUD admin.
I ended up doing inspections so the fire marshal could stop fining us, and the amount of stuff that people overlook and not care about is infuriating.
47. We’re All In This Together
I don't know if this is a secret, but flight attendants and pilots don't get paid while boarding, deplaning, and delays. So, when you're delayed and angry, so are we. We're not making money and still have to be there.
48. All About Quick Fixes
Hotels are held together by more superglue and duct tape than you know. It doesn't matter how nice they are unless you're talking about ultra-rich type places.
49. How Do You Know?
There are lines where management in call centers can listen to customers while they’re navigating the phone tree or waiting on hold for quality control. We hear every line of nasty words and curses people say. Many Live Chat sessions allow associates to see you typing in live time. People type a lot of horrible things.
And then they redact them without pressing Send. Engaging with Customer Service brings out the worst in people, especially when they think it’s in private.
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50. Healthy Choices
Almost every registered nurse has what is called a blacklist of doctors they would not want even remotely near them should they need emergency services. People need to take better care and precaution of who they choose to accept as their doctor.
51. Anything For The Cause
I am a Romanian who has worked for a US Armed Forces contractor. The DOD doesn’t care about the price of the stuff they're buying. Once, I sold a bag of 240 hex nuts for $9,000, which I got for 25 dollars. The spending the DOD does is really as bad as you might have heard of. The more that they spend, the better.
52. Eating Clean
I worked at a Dairy Queen when I was 16 and found roaches. They fired me because I was “too slow” when I was cleaning. When in reality, I was actually scrubbing everything down because everyone else barely cleaned anything. That being said, don’t go to Dairy Queen.
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53. Decease Infectant
Hospitals are not clean. The only really clean place in a hospital is the operating room. Other than that, the place is crawling with germs and whatever else has mutated on the floors and walls.
54. Voiceless Voices
Audiobook narrators are woefully underpaid. We are some of the only recording artists who do not receive royalties for our work, and our wages went down by about 66% when Audible renegotiated the AFTRA contract ten years ago. The rates have been going up incrementally since, but narrators are still treated very poorly.
Many now record our own work; in addition to being a narrator, I am the director, engineer, and researcher on nearly every book, but only get credit for narration. I have to fight to get more money than I’d get for just narrating a book. In addition, it’s expected that narrators promote the books that they've recorded.
This is despite the fact that we get no residuals. In other words, we do not get any revenue from the audiobook sales, just a flat fee up front. A while ago, a very popular author wrote to me to congratulate me on the fact that the last book of his that I'd narrated was the number one best-selling audiobook on Audible.
Thanks, I said, but that means nothing to me because I don't get a dime from sales. He was shocked. Narrating audiobooks is often difficult and usually tedious work that requires an exhausting amount of focus. The industry continues to expand, and it’s only fair that the co-creators of this work receive their just due.
55. Call For Humiliation
This isn’t a practice in the US, so some may find it shocking. Huawei takes employees pay for any mistakes. I received a companywide “corrective email” with a picture of the guy who messed up, his team leader and the line manager, a description of what they did wrong, which was some security password issue, as well as the fact that one month's pay has been taken from each of them.
56. Like Something, Do Something
If you call customer service and the representative does a good job and you want to compliment them, ask for a supervisor specifically. If you say you want to make sure we're rewarded for good service, don't explicitly say you want to talk to someone, we can't transfer you. It really does help improve customer service.
Those calls are more likely to be used for training new reps, and the representatives who get compliments from customers get raise too.
57. Shell Outs
Hermit crabs as pets is actually incredibly cruel because they rarely breed in captivity, so they have to be taken from the wild. They get their natural shells taken from them so that they will be forced to adopt alien and colorful man-made shells in hopes some kids find them more attractive to pay and bring them home.
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58. Give A Little, Get A Lot
I started a job that did this—and quit the very next day. Some bars actually task bartenders with stock rates of 104% -110%. This basically means that with every pour that should be 25ml to 50ml, they actually tell you to underpour on every drink to ensure we’re actually making back stock on every purchase. This also means they have their bartenders make more "head" on beers.
So, bartenders swirl the glass or intentionally hold it so more to produce more head saving more stock.
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59. Deciding To Draw
Animator here. It's coming more and more to light lately, but big animation studios and game companies treat their employees like garbage, pay them barely anything, and expect them to work hard "because of the love for the job." And they can get away with that because there are hundreds of thousands of other creatives.
And they would be more than happy to deal with all of the garbage treatment just for a chance to work at a AAA studio. Really, it's not just animation though, the entire entertainment industry is this way.
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60. Less Than A Bargain
The clothes you find at an outlet, more often than not, are not "cast-offs" or overages from the regular store. There's a whole separate entity that designs and produces clothes at a lesser quality for outlet prices.
61. Stuck To The Spot
I work in a county prison in the Midwest. The most disturbing thing about it is some inmates get stuck in this terrible loop. Many inmates with mental issues get caught in this loop where they can’t have any clothes or items because they will try to hurt themselves, and they are in their locked cell for 23 hours a day.
This makes them angrier, so when they finally get out, they lash out at staff, and they go back. It’s a vicious cycle for a lot of inmates and worsens a lot of mental illnesses. Staff can’t do anything though because if they allow the inmate with mental illness to socialize, they risk a lawsuit from people around them.
They can use the individual’s history of outbursts in court. The majority of hospitals won’t take them because they won’t risk their staff. So, they are just stuck in a room, and their only hope is consistent medication stabilizing them.
62. Objects Dirtier Than They Appear
You should never drink straight from the can/bottle. As a retail and former warehouse worker, I know that workers climb on the stacks, rats run over them in the warehouse, they sit in stagnant water under leaking roofs, etc., If you can, pour it in a cup or sanitize it.
63. Paging Dr. Google
As a nurse, I’ve had to Google and watch teaching videos on not-so-common procedures five minutes before going in and performing the procedure on the patient. Doctors will Google your symptoms if they’re stumped on what to give or diagnose.
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64. Wooden Sound
People in the musical instrument industry look the other way when it comes to less than official methods of exotic lumber harvesting.
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65. Always Good To Share
99% of consulting is basically copying one company’s good idea and selling it to another. It’s just PowerPoint presentations of peer company practices bouncing back and forth into eternity.
66. No Dog Onboard
I’m working at a dog boarding place. It's relatively common, at least in my area, for boarding workers to kick and slap dogs – even little puppies – when they misbehave. We do our best to discourage it, but we had to fire a couple of new hires—and one cast was particularly disturbing. A new employee broke a dog's jaw. Also, flea outbreaks are insanely common.
If you really need to board your dog, please ask for a tour first. A lot of boarding places are super shady.
67. Excessive Handling Methods
Airline worker here. Let’s just say if your bag is in transit from the belt to the aircraft and it falls out of the bag cart because we have awful transportation equipment, that bag will most of the time sit on the road for hours rain or shine before someone takes and sends it on another flight to the same destination.
Also, yes bags are thrown, and not one supervisor cares unless someone slams it with a purpose like a wrestling move or something.
68. Keep It Quiet
I work in a pharmacy. The vast majority of prescription medication recalls the public never hears about is astonishing. We just send in whatever we have in our stock still, and no one notifies the patient.
69. Power Play
This isn't dark or really secret, but really funny and nobody else would know this. When playing trombone, we sometimes have to clench our bum hard so we can reach a high note.
70. Freshly Chilled
When you order a cake from a bakery, most of the time it was baked and frozen anywhere from a couple of days to a month before and only pulled out the day before or day of to finish your order. It doesn't ruin the cake; it just makes it easier for us to take more orders because we have them ready to go and finish quickly.
71. Last Meal
I have worked in vet medicine since 2013—and I have a heartbreaking secret. I have this habit, especially when owners don't want to be present for their pet's euthanasia, in which I give their pets chocolate, pieces of my meal like meat, bread, cheese, even onions/garlic, or the best wet food we have prior to giving them the medications that help them sleep.
They won’t have to suffer from the damaging effects of those foods if they're going to be euthanized in a couple of minutes. I like to give them a taste of something they would never get to try otherwise. Of course, I would never do this unless the pet was already en-route to the room where the procedure would take place.
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72. It’s A Wrap
I worked for a pizzeria that sold a “thin crust” pizza. Yeah, no. No thin crust pizza. In fact, there wasn’t a crust. It was a tortilla. It was just pizza toppings on a tortilla that was briefly set in the oven or cooked in the microwave depending on the size. They told me that if I ever said anything, they’d fire me.
73. Practicing For The NBA
Pretty much every delivery service usually treats even the most fragile packages as balls. There’s even this guy who keeps yelling "KOBE!" every time he throws something onto his truck. If they can launch it, they will.
74. No Stupid Questions
While correcting your university exams, we will all meet up together, bring sweets and crisps, and the occasional bottle of whatever, and then have an absolute blast making fun of how dumb your answers are. We will give and deduct points where giving and deducting is due, but if you wrote something stupid, we share it.
We read it out loud so everyone can laugh about it. We will also take a blank exam to write down the dumbest answer we could find for each of the exercises. This top-dumb exam will be kept for future entertainment.
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75. Bragging Surcharge
I work for a hotel that holds conferences and events. I would advise people to never have a host bar i.e. all the drinks for the evening are on one tab. For example, the owner of the company or the family of the bride or groom might cover their evening’s tab. My bosses have a habit of adding drinks that no one ordered.
They press random buttons on the till to rack up the bill without actually serving any guests. If I catch them doing it, I'll immediately get rid of them as it's not right. They don't get any extra pay if we sell more at the bar, so the only reason they do it is to be like, “look at me,” to their boss.
76. Guessing Game
Anesthesiologist here. The inhaled anesthetics or “gas” we use to keep you unconscious during surgery are a mystery to us. We don’t know how they work. There are theories, but we just know that it keeps you asleep.
77. Taking An Extra Step
When you go into a phone shop to get a new phone and we ask if you are an existing customer, it’s usually because our best deals are reserved for new customers. Also, if we tell you we are out of stock on a popular phone, it’s sometimes because we're down to just a couple and saving them for a deal with a new customer.
If you want the best deals, you usually need to change your provider. You could walk out of my store, go into the store next door and transfer your number to a no-contract plan with them, then walk back into my store saying you want to bring your number across from our competition, and I’ll somehow find you your phone.
78. Just Saying
All those supermarkets that say they're doing extra deep cleaning in wake of what’s happening this year are not really doing anything. We didn't have enough staff to do the general cleaning necessary before this, and we certainly don't have the staff now. Try telling a suit that you're not filling a shelf because you're cleaning it.
79. Who Does The Work?
Film executives sometimes buy scripts without ever reading them. They have their assistants read them, write a summary, and tell them whether it’s good or not. Usually, if the assistant says it’s worth buying, they’ll read it but not always.
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80. Precious Ethics
The gold and gemstones in your jewelry are a lot more questionable than the diamonds. They just didn't make a movie about those. And if you ask me if I'm, "Sure it's not a blood diamond," but you're carrying Prada or wearing Nikes, screw you and your ignorance.
81. Adding More Greens
At a very large pizza chain restaurant that continues to remains widely popular, we used these perforated pans for thin crust and stuffed crust pizzas. Only the dishwasher cleaned them and did it by the hundreds per day. At least half would still have burnt cheese and stuff on them. These were all just stacked to dry—and it gets grosser from there.
When making new pizzas in those pans, sometimes the pans that were left to "dry" overnight grew bits of mold around the burnt cheese. Our managers told us to just put the dough on top because otherwise, we would never keep up with the orders if we rewashed everything. The manager said, "Don't worry, it all gets cooked."
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82. Sorry Not Sorry For All Your Loss
This one hurts—it gets people at their most vulnerable and rips them off. Funeral directors will sell you a casket that you can buy at Costco for 20% of their price. About 70% of the cost of funerals is convincing people into paying for overpriced options and guilting them if they choose not to. We have a lot of fun when we don't deal with customers, but we never have that "fun" with bodies.
Sources: Reddit,
