Working at the Olive Garden, people assume the wine pours are measured and stingy, but the truth is the opposite. If you’re not a jerk, you can get three free samples easily, and honestly, more than that if the server likes you. I used to pour heavy on purpose. The samples aren’t just a taste—they’re a full pour when you’re in good standing.
And when we present your profile next to someone else’s to an employer, sometimes one of you is just there to make the other one look better. That’s the unspoken part of the hiring dance. I worked at a no-kill animal shelter for years. The public hears “no-kill” and thinks no animal is ever put down, but that’s a fantasy.
We still had to euthanize animals, especially ones with severe behavioral issues. We had to ask hard questions: When is a dog too dangerous to rehome? Can you adopt out a pit bull with a bite history? What happens when a dog becomes a genuine threat to the staff?
And when the news got out that we put a specific animal down, the Facebook warriors would come out swinging, calling us murderers. None of them donated time or money. None of them volunteered. But every single one of them knew exactly how the shelter should be run.
I’d ask people who criticized our euthanasia policies why they didn’t adopt or volunteer. Not one of them had an answer. I work at a cemetery now. The concrete and metal vaults that caskets go inside of in the ground are supposed to protect them from water, but they do the exact opposite—they hold the water in like a bathtub.
The caskets get soaked. The sales team paints a nice picture of how the casket-vault combo will look down there, and it’s a complete lie. That’s just one of the many lies in the funeral business. My company claims to be a leader in technology, but we’re literally running on Excel macros with random codes that nobody fully understands.
If one thing breaks, we risk crashing the entire company. We have no idea how to fix it without causing a catastrophe. I work at a major chemical plant upriver from a big city. If the public found out how old, run-down, and poorly maintained the equipment is—the exact equipment meant to keep hundreds of millions of gallons of contaminated water from leaking or spilling into the river—the EPA would shut down every plant on the river.
But here’s the thing: the EPA already knows how inefficient and poorly disposed our waste products are. My plant has a yearly budget specifically dedicated to paying fines. It’s terrible, but it’s not exactly surprising. Your child’s school report is probably word for word the same as half their class.
There are only so many ways to say “works hard but needs to focus on accuracy. ” My kid’s current school restricts teachers to a set of stock sentences, so the report cards read like a primitive chatbot wrote them. At the hospital, there are secret employees who walk around to make sure doctors and nurses sanitize their hands before entering and leaving a patient’s room. You would not believe how many of them don’t follow protocol.
They get written up constantly—more than most people would ever guess in a single day. The chicken bites at most fast food places aren’t cooked to order. The fries look darker today not because they’re extra crispy, but because a shift manager was too lazy to change the oil. The oil is supposed to be changed every five hours.
And the house sauce is just mayo, ketchup, paprika, and pickle brine. The sticky patch outside the bathroom might be pee. And every restaurant’s “secret sauce” is just Thousand Island dressing. It always is.
We tell the public we want to give students the assistance they need, but if our school tests and diagnoses a child for autism, then we become responsible for paying for all the follow-up medical help. That’s why some schools drag their feet. In my state, schools have to test and diagnose every student who might need an IEP, even if they already have a medical diagnosis. The thought is that they’re only required to provide support for students whose education is actually impacted by the diagnosis.
All of our videos are made by the same people in the same building, and we just change the text and logo between clients. The interviews are scripted too—we feed the lines to the subjects because the company doesn’t want to pay us a fair wage or give us benefits. The only saving grace is that we don’t have to sign anything, meaning no NDA. So here I am, telling you.
We bill by the hour at my company, but nobody who works in this industry actually monitors their time closely. The numbers are just made up, and everyone knows it. I work in a public library. Since we’re open to everyone, we get a lot of homeless clients, and in this day and age, that means a lot of opiate users, many of whom shoot up in our restrooms.
We’ve had many overdoses, most of which were treated quickly with Narcan. But not always. Some people are beyond saving or found too late. In 2019 alone, we had thirteen deaths in the library.
Security and the EMTs are always careful to make it look like the person being wheeled out is just ill, so the patrons don’t panic. The actual death count is hidden even from the staff. I only know about it because I’m friends with a few security guards. I work for a convenience store chain known for frequent restroom checks and having sharps containers in every bathroom.
Stores in rougher areas have that happen quite frequently. Most of the time, all it takes for a free upgrade is being polite to the right employee. My manager will literally ask us, “Are they being nice? ”—unless it’s the weekend or a show night.
Then we have no availability at all. Even if it’s a show you’re not personally interested in going to. For everyone asking what I do, just assume it’s like this everywhere, because it usually is. I’m a special education teacher.
The amount of injuries people sustain working in this field is staggering. I teach high school, and the kids can stay until they’re twenty-one, so most of the violent students are full adult-sized. We get concussions, bites, broken wrists and arms, scalping, and physical assaults. Students grab you by the chest, pull out their genitals, and start masturbating in the middle of class.
I like my job and enjoy working with my students, but the public has no idea how dangerous this position really is. That’s why I left the field entirely. Too many injuries, unreasonable parents, and the school refusing to place violent students in more appropriate—and therefore more expensive—settings until someone gets seriously hurt. Our safety was never the priority.
The pastries at my bakery are supposed to be made fresh. They’re frozen. We just heat them up. We’re supposed to teach information literacy at the university, but none of us actually checks to see if our students’ sources are legitimate.
I remember my first year of college, I did some drinking instead of my assignment. I had to cite five sources, so I made up book titles and listed the five Backstreet Boys as the authors. I got a good mark. The longer I’m in engineering, the more I realize we don’t get the design right—we just go with the best option we have at the moment we run out of time or budget.
Every engineer has the designs that are best and the designs that the accountant approves. Those are two very different things. Goodwill has its own landfills for things that don’t sell. Items sit on shelves for weeks with continuous price decreases, then get one last shot at the outlet stores where everything is priced per pound.
Don’t get me wrong—their community programs do great work. But I love going to Goodwill and seeing IKEA furniture priced higher than it is brand new. I’m a municipal worker. We actually work hard and care about the city.
It’s hard on us when people stop their cars to yell at us without getting all the facts, and we can’t defend ourselves. Most of the time you’re reaming out a laborer who has no control over your taxes or which street gets paved. Your package gets thrown five to twenty feet more than five times on its way to you. A lot more if it travels far.
If it doesn’t say fragile, it’s getting chucked. If you’re polite to me and it’s the end of the day, I will give you free baked goods I made earlier. One time I was at a local bakery right before closing, and they happened to be closed the next week, so they gave me a ton of free stuff—cookies, two loaves of bread that I’d never tried before but turned out to be delicious, and an assortment of other things. As a delivery driver, we add ten to fifteen minutes to the estimated time so we seem speedy and aren’t late when we hit traffic.
We also charge delivery fees that most people don’t notice or ask about. We do that when we’re short on drivers. But no matter how legitimate it is, corporate shows up and lowers the projected delivery time so more people order. Yeah, it’s still forty-five minutes, but corporate wants you to see twenty-five because profit.
I used to work for a pesticide company spraying flies on farms. Some of the poisons were so strong that one pint added to a five-hundred-gallon tank of water, when sprayed, could knock flies straight out of the air. It was just as toxic to birds. In fact, we were told if we ever spilled a bottle on the ground, we should call the EPA to clean it up rather than try to handle it ourselves.
Ironically, by fall the flies had developed such a resistance that the only way the poison killed them was if you drowned them in it. It still killed birds, though. And one last thing: it was an organic pesticide that could be absorbed through any unprotected human skin. I only worked there for a year because of that.
Back when I was twelve to fifteen, I helped out with the family business selling coffee and twisted chips. When we first started, the thing that attracted people was that we always had baked goods up for grabs. Everyone loved them. The reality was that we bought them all from Costco—the wholesale warehouse store—put them in different packaging, and played them off as homemade.
This went on for two years. It’s extremely common. Half the lunch trucks I’ve eaten off have Costco muffins they sell as their own. Not my industry anymore, but banks would often make decisions about which houses to repair that were probably technically illegal.
I currently work at a drug and alcohol rehab. AA has an abysmal success rate if you measure success by continuous sobriety over a significant period, and that’s how AA tends to measure it. But because one drink counts as failure, a lot of people drop out of AA out of shame, and it takes them a long time to get sober again—if they ever do. I’ve seen people with twenty-plus years of sobriety beat themselves up over one night of drinking, feeling like total failures.
Various harm-reduction interventions have higher success rates because they measure progress differently—drinking less often, in smaller quantities, more responsibly. If you were a mess all last year but you’re sober enough to show up for work most days this year, that’s success. Here’s the big shocker: most problem drinkers and drug users recover on their own without treatment. By recovery, I mean learning to have a functional relationship with alcohol and drugs.
I know several people in our community who were court-ordered to rehab and AA years ago and stopped going as soon as they didn’t have to. They aren’t one hundred percent sober all the time now, but they go to work every day. They have happy marriages. They take good care of their kids.
They don’t get arrested. They don’t get behind the wheel drunk or high. I’m not saying twelve-step programs are worthless—some people do stay sober the rest of their lives and are happy. That’s success.
But it’s not the solution for everyone. Unfortunately, rehabs that use different treatment models tend not to receive government funding. Courts tend not to refer defendants to harm reduction. And AA perpetuates the myth that permanent sobriety is the only alternative to prison, the madhouse, or death—and that AA is the only place to achieve it.
We tell customers we have a supplier we get parts from for repairs. Our supplier is Amazon. Maybe that’s not a secret from the public, but we’d probably be shut down if OSHA or the FDA found out about some of the other things we do. I work at an HVAC company.
The bosses in our office know that about half of their employees—mostly the supervisors—are doing drugs. Everything from marijuana to hard drugs. On the road, on the roof, wherever. The office bosses might be doing drugs too, and they let us know every year about the annual drug test, which is supposed to be random.
They don’t say it directly, but the message is clear: “The drug test is in three months. That’s probably enough time to pass if you stop now. ” They don’t care if we’re safe, either. They just want the jobs done because they overbook them and need us to move fast.
One guy fell off a ladder from twenty-five feet. He’s been doing physical rehab, and they refuse to pay his workers’ comp. They’re trying to get him to come back to work when he shouldn’t be lifting anything heavier than a cup. I’ve had times where I wanted to put on my harness and lanyard because the roof was thirty feet or more off the ground, and my supervisor gave me crap and told me to hurry up because the harness was a waste of time.
Most supervisors out on the road don’t wear required safety gear. They just want to move fast to keep their numbers up. Guarantee if I got seriously injured, they’d ask if I could still work—not call 911 to help me. I worked for a cable contract company like that once.
The sheer amount of drugs those people did was insane. But they worked seven in the morning to seven at night every day in hot attics. You’ve got to be on something to do that. The ice cream machine isn’t broken.
It just needs cleaning, which takes a long time. I work at a Burger King. They played us like a fiddle on the ice cream machine thing. And we won the state clean audit award five years in a row and never told our customers.
That seems like something you’d want to advertise. Most professors are winging their lectures. Showing up to office hours really does help your chances of a good grade. A receptionist calling to reschedule your appointment because of “schedule constraints” or because the doctor is suddenly traveling usually just means the doctor decided to take the day off on a whim, and now we need to clear the schedule.
What I really hate is when I already wait three months between neurology appointments, and they call a week ahead to tell me the doctor wants the afternoon off, then reschedule me for another three months. Now I’ve got six months between appointments. I understand needing time off, but don’t punish me because of it. I’m a nanny.
So many secrets are kept from the public, mostly to protect the families. On my second day at a new job with a nice, high-profile family, I picked the kids up from their prestigious preschool, and the five-year-old announced, “Daddy has a big bump on his dong that he had to get poked at the doctor. ” I had to look my boss in the eye that evening knowing he had a pimple on his penis. It’s never anything that would drive a country into mass hysteria—just things like how much beer the parents drink, the fighting, and all the details regarding genitalia.
Got to love kids. They relay so much TMI it’s not even funny. I’m a teacher. We totally talk about your children in the faculty room all the time.
Sometimes the comments are nice: “Oh, you have Emma? I had her last year. She’s awesome. ” Usually they’re not nice.
“Dean is a little jerk. Freaking Dean. ”
A lot of restaurants I worked at relied heavily on microwaves. Large batches, pre-prepped, labeled by date, and frozen.
Even if they did keep an eye on the dates, Gordon Ramsay and any kitchen inspection program would still have a cow. At my restaurant, we don’t recycle anything we can’t make money from. That’s it. The average programmer or IT guy is just better at Googling things than you are.
They know the actual words to type. Asking them why one program does one thing instead of another doesn’t get you a good answer. If you get a call from a telemarketer or a survey call center, you need to specifically ask to be taken off the call list. Don’t be polite.
Don’t make excuses. Don’t mention you don’t have the time. Don’t mention time at all. Don’t just hang up.
All of those allow the company to assume you could technically take the call at a later time. Just say, “Take me off your call list” or “Put me on your do-not-call list. ” You didn’t hear this from me. That’s what I was raised to do, and the same people will still call anyway.
Nowadays it’s not even humans—just robocalls. I used to work as a front desk agent at hotels. Hotels can end up booking more rooms than they actually have. Most systems allow sites like Expedia to book the hotel to one hundred and two percent.
Expedia bookings are the lowest priority. If you don’t want to get bumped, book from the hotel’s own website. And be aware that at midnight the system rolls over to the next day. If you need a room after midnight, call the hotel directly.
I learned that lesson the hard way when I booked through hotels. com for an event. I got the worst possible room, the hotel refused to rebook me, and because hotels. com already took my money, I couldn’t even get a refund.
Not my current job, but we released convicted sex offenders from prison who had not completed all of the required counseling or therapy mandated by the state. There’s an absurd number who don’t even start the process before they’re released. If you’re a regular customer who doesn’t tip your delivery driver, your order is never a priority. And if you’re an absolutely fantastic tipper, you’ve started many arguments—some possibly escalating to physical violence—over who gets to take your order.
I work at a plasma center. Your bottle of plasma sells for around a thousand dollars. We give you twenty-five. Imagine if we paid people five hundred.
So many people could pull themselves out of poverty. I work at a university facilities department. My coworkers genuinely care about students, student research, and opportunities beyond the classroom. I’m constantly impressed by how much our electricians, custodial staff, and EHS people care about students excelling.
At my last job, someone cut off the tip of their finger, and it was never reported to OSHA or the asbestos board. Also, we never found the fingertip either. You have been visited by the romantic doggo. Comment “love is magic” so you never fall in the friend zone.
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