If you’re doing a holiday in the USA and renting a car via enterprise, Alamo or national book with Rentalcars.com, unless you’re flying with doing a Virgin package holiday, in Which case do it with them. They have the best rates in the market due to special agreements. If you want the best customer service experience for rental cars book with Virgin as they will put a lot of pressure on Alamo/national/enterprise who will bend over backwards for you.

I used to work for a popular wrestling company, billionaire owner, very profitable, would write off any OSHA penalties as the ‘cost of doing business’ just as they did in 1998, when The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table

It was me, I did it, I put that cheeky note on the noticeboard. I told the boss I accepted responsibility because I was in charge on that shift, but in fact it was me all along. Sorry Derek. (Not sorry.)

Anybody knows that one waterfall attraction in the Southeast US? The one that advertises bloody everywhere? Waterfall is pumped during the dry seasons, otherwise there’d be nothing to see. Lots of the formations are fake, and the Cactus and Candle formation was either moved from a different spot in the cave, or is from a different cave in New Mexico. Management doesn’t want people to know that, but fuck 'em.

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…

People like me help to define, build, test, and support important services you use. Explains a lot.

Everything comes in frozen. Before mixing with the sauces it smells off. Half the staff mix without gloves. Dont get the tuna but have it your way…

The majority of tech startups are super chaotic and barely keeping things running. More than you would ever imagine.

Instagram allows employees to check on the accounts of the users and share that to other people. I didn’t work there, but an employee told my girlfriend who I talked to before we were exclusive. I think that’s total bullshit

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.

Over a decade ago I worked as a freelancer for an Investment Bank (the largest one that went bankrupt in the 2008 Crash, which was a few years later) were the head of the Proprietary Trading Desk (the team of Traders who invest for the profit of the bank) asked me if I could change the software so that they could see the investments of the Client Trading Desk (who invest for clients with client money) was making, with the assent of the latter team.

Now if the guys investing money for the bank know what they guys investing customer money are doing they can do things like Front-Run the customer trades (or serve them at exactly the right price to barelly beat the competiotion) thus making more profits for the bank and hence get bigger bonuses. This is why Financial regulations say that there is supposed to be so-called Chinese Walls between the proprietary trading and the customer trading activities: they’re supposed to be segregated and not visible to each other.

Note that the heads of both teams were mates and already regularly had chats, so they might already have been exchanging this info informally.

I was quite fresh in there (less than 1 year) and the software system I worked in at the time was used by both teams, but when I started looking into it I saw that the separation was very explicitly coded in software and that got me thinking about what I had learned from the mandatory compliance training I had done when I first joined (so, yeah, that stuff is not totally useless!!!)

So I asked for written confirmation from the heads of both teams, and just got some vague response e-mails, no clear “do such and such”.

So I played the fool and took it to a seperate team called Compliance (responsible for compliance with financial regulations) saying I just wanted to make sure it was all prim and proper, “just in case”.

Of course, it kinda blew up (locally) and I ended up called to a meeting with the heads of the Prop Desk and whatnot - all stern looks and barelly contained angry tones - were I kept playing the fool.

Ultimatelly it ended up not being a problem for me at all, to the point that after that bank went bust and its component parts were sold to another bank, the technical team manager asked me to come back to work with the same IT group (remember, I was a freelancer) with even greater responsabilities, so this didn’t exactly damage my career.

That said, over the years there were various cases of IT guys in large investment banks who went along with “innocent” requests from the Traders and ended up as the fall-guys for subsequent breaking of Finance Regulations, serving jail time, so had I gone along with that request I would’ve actually risked ending up in jail.

(Financial Regulators were and are a complete total joke when it comes to large banks, which actually makes it more likely that some poor techie guy will be made the fall guy to protected the bank and its heads).

1-800-got-junk? doesn’t care at all about its environmental impact. No sorting what so ever happens to what goes on their trucks it all goes to landfills. All the ads will say they recycle and that they repurpose old furniture but I was threatened with being fired when I recommended donating antiques instead of dumping a load of furniture.

More jobs and more profits comes before anything else in that company, including employee health and safety. Several times I was told to enter spaces we werent trained for (attics and crawl spaces) and carry waste I legally couldn’t transport (human/organic wastes and the laws states the driver is fined, not the company). One guy injured his shoulder during an attic job and was told to finish the shift or lose his job. Absoulte scum of a company with very sleazy management and possibly the labour board in their pocket as they kept “losing the files” when I tried to file a report with buddy’s shoulder (he was hesistant to report for fear of losing his job).

Not strictly a company secret, but I had to sign an NDA for it, because… reasons.

I used to work for a massive conglomerate, these guys are making from components for satellites and tank to rubber gloves for hospitals, and everything in between. My job was to help the company implement regulations, work with auditors and generally follow product specific rules.

So I was on these 2 New Product Development teams and because the products needed some very specific testing equipment, we started working with local authorities and some contractors to build the testing station in the future factory. We drafted plans, prepare documents, we had an auditor come and see the place, the contractor came and checked what he needed to do, everything was going according to plan.

While all of this was happening, I was on a separate project where we were working on closing down the above mentioned factory.

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.

I used to work at Starbucks (almost a decade ago now), but at the time, the motto was “just say yes” to any customer requests. We also had free drink cards that you could give out to deesclate any issue. So I would say any time you’re even the slightest bit unhappy, bring it up, and you should at least have your problem solved, if not compensated for a free drink next time.

We also had customer satisfaction surveys that would print on reciepts, where filling one out would get the customer a free drink. We always kept them for customers that were happier to try and rig the odds in our favour of a higher rating, but also if a customer asked for one, I would give it if I had it. You could always ask the cashier if they have any of those as well.

Again, not sure how much either of those things have changed in the past 10 years, and I’m not sure how regional it was (this was in Canada at a corporately run store), but maybe worth a try.

Also I love these types of threads – great topic to post.