Yesterday, I stumbled on a crazy fascinating Reddit thread asking users, “What is something your current or past employee would NOT want the world to know about their company?” Boy, did they answer. We curated some of our favorite and most instructive revelations (occasional misspellings and bad grammer included, FYI) after the jump!
The Restaurant You Love:
The restaurant where I work is well known for their home-made garlic toast. It comes with every entree. If the table doesn’t finish their basket of toast, whatever is left in the basket goes back in the warming drawer…. And then back out to another table. I always try to encourage people to take it home with them, usually saying something like, “you might as well take it home, we’re just going to throw it away and it’ll go to waste!” just so I don’t have to put it back in the drawer. I can’t help but think about that one piece of garlic toast that keeps traveling from table to table and never getting eaten and continuously gets recycled. Eew.
The Pet Store You Visit:
Worked at a pet store that sold puppies that were guaranteed to be from reputable breeders. Every dog there was a puppy mill dog shipped in on huge freight trucks from places like Kansas and other parts of the mid west to central pa. We were not allowed to say anything to potential buyers. Most of these dogs came in horribly ill and our boss would refuse to treat them at the vet, many he let just suffer and die. We also carried reptiles and had one large alligator, He didn’t like that we had to keep replacing the more expensive heating and full spectrum bulbs needed for them and would just use regular incandescent bulbs. The other employees and my self took it upon out selves to try and get medical attention and proper supplies for the animals usually that meant spending our own money out of pocket to care for them properly. Our boss was a sales first kind of guy, if an 8 y/o wanted an iguana, our boss would tell the mom they stayed small and were totally a great pet for an 8 y/o if it meant he would make a sale… Needless to say the place was recently shut down after numerous complaints to animal control and the SPCA… most of those calls to the SPCA came from me and other employees. We didn’t want to quit because we all were covertly trying to keep as many animals as healthy as possible while sending photos and complaints and generally working to get the place shut down.
I work in a shipping company warehouse.
The TV Show You Watch:
I work for an entertainment show. We have something called a Death Box. The “box” consists of footage and information related to a particular celebrity that lives such a reckless life that in the case that they die, we already have stuff to work with. When I learned of it, I was disgusted. We have one for Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears amongst others.
The Shipping Company You Use:
Fragile stickers don’t do anything for your package until it’s in the couriers hands – maybe. Your shipped items are going to get BEAT the fuck up. Wrap it 5x in bubble wrap. If you think you’re being too cautious – you’re not. Warehouse workers don’t care. Your packages are going to be loaded into a hauling truck, stacked in no specific order, slammed around while transported, then throwing around by workers sorting them. I’m sure this is already common knowledge. Just a friendly reminder before the holiday season comes full swing.
The IVF Center:
I worked at an IVF lab (fertility center) in a major city in the United States. Our center was on the medium-large end, doing about 2000 IVF cycles per year. They wouldn’t want the public to know this: exactly what everyone fears will happen, happened. More than once. An embryo belonging to one patient was transferred to a completely different patient’s uterus. You hear about this in the news occasionally, but for every case that is published, there are a few that don’t go public, and just quietly settle with the patient.
Your Interior Designer:
I worked for a high end interior designer and when they would re-do clients’ bathrooms they would get the best towels money can buy… from Wal-Mart. My job was removing the sewn-in tags.
The Mattress You Just Bought:
Mattresses in general cost somewhere in the range of 50-300$s to make. Mattress companies will then proceed to charge the customer a mark-up of upwards 10 times that. When you go to buy them, any sticker price can be halved. Then maybe even 20% more on top of that. The entire thing is a cartel.
The Car You Bought:
We incorrectly installed the seat safety bracket mounts in over 750,000 cars, and there has been/will be no recall.
Your Internet Service:
Cable Internet Provider: No matter what speed of internet you have it costs the company the same amount.
Your Health Care Information:
I worked for a software company that makes electronic health records software. Obviously, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a big deal, but if there was ever a bug in the software which we could not reproduce, doctors didn’t care about HIPAA anymore. They just wanted the bug fixed. They would send us their database loaded with patient data without a second thought. Anyone could have taken it. It wasn’t until a number of us complained that we started scrubbing certain fields from incoming databases immediately upon receiving them to make the data useless to anyone else.
The Place You Got Your Ears Pierced:
I used to work at a mall piercing place. We got about 15 minutes of training before we were allowed to pierce kids’ ears. If people bled on the ear piercing guns, we would simply wipe them off with a tissue, and use them again on the next person. We were also never taught anything about cross-contamination and blood borne pathogens during training. I would never take my kids to get their ears pierced at the mall. Choose a reputable body piercer and take your kids there. Some people are afraid of taking their kids to body piercers because they look sketchier than the pretty mall down the street, but body piercers will use an autoclave and most of them (if they’re any good) are trained to properly deal with blood and bodily fluids. The person at the mall, no matter how much experience they say they have, does not have the proper tools to deal with blood. About 99% of our piercings did not draw blood, but the 1% that do are definitely not dealt with well. I tried my best when I worked there, but there’s only so much you can do when there is no equipment on hand to properly sterilize anything.
So now that we’ve shared these stories, we want to hear yours: What’s something your current or former employer wouldn’t want the world knowing about their business practices? Tell us in the comments!
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