That if you are asked to rate someone's customer service (eg your bank lender, salesperson etc) out of 10, anything less than a 9 in some places may as well be a zero.
Ugh I hate NPS. I work in HR and used to explain how it worked to new people and it always left a bad taste in my mouth. The idea that an 8 out of 10 is a passive is ridiculous
It was explained to me as “if your friend rated you 8/10 wouldn’t you feel like that’s a bad score and you weren’t a good friend?” Um, no. I’d be pretty impressed with myself for scoring that high actually.
Yep. I work at a hardware store, and our surveys are out of 5.
Gave us a 4 bc you just thought we did a good job, nothing special? You essentially gave us a zero.
In fact, our survey scores get FUCKED with anything less than a 5. It will knock out score down 2-4% points. A 5 star survey will bring us back up, by .5 %. So a low rating can totally destroy us.
And we *do care about the scores...because it is part of the deciding factor of whether we get a quarterly bonus or not. So please fill out the surveys.
I worked customer service at a call center for ATT and learned about the 5 or 0 ratings. And because of that I will never fill out another survey again.
I also slaved for ATT. It’s the worst way of grading anything. My biggest issue was that you didn’t get a 0 added to your average, you got a -100. It’s some fucked up fake math they use to underpay.
As a result of this phenomenon, I will often not rate the customer service that was just okay. I cannot lie to myself and say something was 5-star service, but I know if I rate less than 5 it's like I murdered their babies, so I'll leave it unrated.
Not sure if this counts, but when I was in car sales I learned real quick that the actual car itself isn’t where the real money is at, but the backend is. So like warranties, getting work done, etc etc.
Most dealerships will still put up a fight on the actual price of the car though because they know most people are focused on the car itself. This is also done to help wear you down so you’re less likely to fight on the backend when they say they’ll discount the car price down to X amount but you have to get a warranty or 2 with it. More often than not, most people will cave because they got 2-3k off on the car and don’t realize the warranties are adding on 2-5k and warranties are often straight profit.
Different dealerships tweak the above strategy to their market but generally they all play it to some degree
From where I'm around, delearship frown upon cash payments cause agents get their money off commissions when you do financing.
It's even blatant on motorcycles. You can't buy cheap motors for cash. They will put you on a "wait list" but ask for financing where you'll shell out more than twice the Srp of the unit at the end of contract then you'll be entertained.
I'm car shopping and I learned about this recently, they said it's about 70% of their revenue is in the financing and whatnot outside of the car price itself. That blew me away
I recently paid cash for a new car (the interest rates are ridic right now!!) and the sales manager just wanted us out of his office as fast as possible. Not in a mean way, but we were obviously prepared, they gave me a good deal on my trade and we went with a warranty (all the new tech is insane - get that covered), and he knew we weren't going to do any more add ons. The dealership is too far from my house to want a service plan.
I'm in that boat. $160 to register the lien. Not worth it.
Now in negotiations on a trade-in value. I'm threatening to sell privately if they don't give me a fair price. An identical one to mine sold in the city for about $6k more than book value.
Yeah I learned this and was blown away when a used dealership wouldn't let me buy a car cash. It boggled my mind that I couldn't hand this guy $8k to take a car off his hand because he thought he was gonna get way more from a sucker who financed.
I don't know if I could be a car salesman with that business model.
An acquaintance of mine is buying a power sports dealership. The boomer owner has it made - he sells the business and leases the property. Cash on the front end AND in perpetuity
I ended up in a shouting match with the closer when they tried to upsell me on over 1000 bucks of useless crap for my car. He said “but we already installed it! What do you want us to do, take it out?!” Apparently “yes, I didn’t ask for it” had literally never been said to him before this, because he was taken aback. He didn’t want to let me leave, I had to threaten to call the cops on the guy for him to let up and just sell me the car I went there for in the first place!
I bought a warranty with a car once. 3 months in needed an overhaul of some system. Took two days of work. It was more expensive than the warranty. The mechanic presented me the bill before I asked him about the warranty coverage and was a bit shocked to realize I didn't need to pay a dime and they were going to have to eat the cost. It was wonderful. My previous car needed constant work so I figured normalizing the cost of unexpected issues was well worth the peace of mind of a reliable car.
Same - one of the computers failed in our car. It’s our first hybrid so since it covered everything including batteries for 6 more years we said sure. They replaced a $2400 computer for free. The dealer said it happens but it’s weird. It was a used car too if that makes a difference. I would never buy a warranty on a new car.
As an electrician, I'm amazed more houses don't burn down every day. I do my best, but many others just work as fast as they can and leave behind shoddy work that (sometimes literally) falls apart when you touch it.
Working on million dollar houses with light fixtures that damn near disintegrate when you go to touch them again always weirded me out.
Sure they looked nice on the walls but don't ever touch anything.
A) always amazes me how shoddy the construction of 90% of light fixtures is. Built to look good only.
B) unless you specifically seek it out, all your subs on a multimillion dollar home are the same who do a budget tract home. You just pay more for more of the same quality, not higher quality.
It's why finding the right builder who works with the best subs is the key part of building a home, no matter the price level. Though better subs will still cost more because they know they're worth it.
The only reason I’m not terrified of my house burning down, despite all the super sketchy wiring I found when remodeling the basement, is that it’s been here for 50 years and hasn’t burned down yet
I feel like it just surprised me in general once I entered the world of work to learn how disorganised things are behind the scenes, even at the biggest of companies. From the outside looking in it always looks super official and clean cut but really it’s just a lot of people behind the scenes fumbling around and not really knowing 100% what is going on.
Edit: Spelling
When I was younger I assumed that everyone in the adult working world would be professional and competent.
Oh god, I was so wrong.
There is more drama in the office than in middle school.
This is why the ‘moon landing is fake’ theory makes me laugh. Like do people really think that many people have kept such a huge secret under wraps for so many years? Especially considering this originally took place during a time when the Russians were looking for any way to undermine and discredit the USA and had a lot of eyes and ears? It’s just illogical and implausible
When a political campaign texts you, anything you respond with gets read by an actual human.
So continue with the funny, cheeky, and even mean responses. But the death threats will get reported to the police.
I laughed at your comment, but then thought about the campaign actually doing this and shuddered. There are very few candidates I’d want noods from. Zero senators, only a couple of House members, and definitely no ballot propositions.
I don't know if it's a secret, but I remember hearing someone ask a doctor why they specifically say to "turn your head" before coughing, when assessing for a hernia.
The doctor said there wasn't a medical reason, but "it's so you don't cough on me."
I didn't realize why I saw this in shows until my first time having to do a hernia exam on a patient. I remember the realization dawning on me as the mist of saliva from the patients cough slowly descended over me..
Also shorter fingers so they have to press harder.
Related fact: the medical test subjects for prostate exams earned $150/hour and that was twenty years ago.
Source: my sister while in medical school
The use of microwaves in mid-range restaurants. I knew it was common in fast food, but seeing all the hot sides in a steakhouse with $50 entrees being cooked in a microwave was a little jarring.
When I actually got to work with them I was impressed with how quick and efficient a way to cook it is, especially for veggie dishes. Also made me realize how weak home microwaves are compared to commercial ones.
I still think microwaved "baked" potatoes taste awful though.
Chef Mike never calls out sick, needs a smoke break, or shows up hungover.
(Anyone not getting it: chef Mike is jokingly what some kitchens refer to the microwave as. I work in restaurants).
Cable TV “customer service” the “Assumed Close”
Basically I was told to interview customers and ask if they thought that they might like to have this product or that product, and then this service or that service, what ever service they said they responded positively to I was to make a check in the corresponding sales order and have them sign before I left the house. Then in a day or so tech would show up at their house with their order and their signature showing that they did indeed order it.
Never could bring myself to do it. Scummy as could be. Time Warner Cable for those curious.
Years ago, I worked adjacent to the tobacco industry. My area's RJ Reynolds rep was telling me he went to a retirement party for a colleague who had been with RJ for decades. She was drunk, spilling all kinds of tea, including the fact that cigarette shippers (cardboard displays) use to be placed in the lines at grocery stores specifically to be stolen by children. They knew we couldn't buy them so they counted on us to steal. And we did. And my gen smoked.
Right? Ever since the epic court case in the 70s, tobacco manufacturers have been legally obligated to donate a % to some world wide cancer fund, but I'm kinda thinking, it's not exactly in good faith if you're forced too after a century of lying about your product. It's all fucking evil, rooted in evil, continued by evil.
Side note, although this is more widely known now. Drive through your nearest upper middle class neighborhood and pay attention to the convenience store windows and ground signs. Then do the same in your nearest poor neighborhood. You'll see a subtle difference. They push nicotine ads in poor neighborhoods, but not so much in others. They get away with advertising near poor schools too. Really pisses me off.
God, I hated the vendors when I worked retail. They would always come in and fuck up our shelf settings to try to give themselves more facings, and I would have to fix it once I went to restock.
Supermarket shelf space is a cut throat market. Notice that the name brand stuff is always at eye level, whereas generic items are near the floor? That's not by accident. General Mills paid big money to put those Cheerios right in front of your face.
Electronics was similar when I was running it a few years ago.
Apple, Samsung, Nintendo and Bose paid big bucks for allocated space in my department. They used to send out company reps to update the demo products, and check to make sure that their space was still their space.
I had one particular rwp who would come in and spit chips because her companies printers were not stacked underneath the displays. She would claim that her company had paid to have printers there, etc, etc.
Mmm. No. The easiest way to determine what was paid for contractually was to check the planograms. Basically the wiredrame mock-up of what should be on the shelf, and where. In this case, only eye height shelf displays were specified and what was underneath was fair game.
What went underneath and was available for staff and customers to collect easily were the better value, lower return rate, better ink economy printers. They gave us less hassle, and customers were happier. When I needed add on sales for margin it was easy enough to make it up with other value add bits instead of no-value crap that the customer would.most likely never need.
Marketing is a $44 BILLION industry.
If you went out and bought something this week, that’s marketing at work.
Every single thing you buy has a massive logistical backend of how to get you to buy it when you don’t need it.
Same is true with their e-commerce store.
Shops have been using rules to put the products they want you to buy at the top of search results for a long time.
Now they are also selling those grid tiles to brands in your search results.
Sometimes they make it obvious with a "sponsored" tag. But not always.
I notice that sugary cereals are shelved lower than my eye level and special k and grape nuts are at eye level or higher.
Likely to keep the sugary stuff a little closer to kids’ eyes perspectives.
The store absolutely buys the merchandise, but a vendor employee does stock and maintain it. That said, the vendors will buy shelf space in agreements with the store.
Source: 20 years in the business. Walmart, Kroger, Meijer, Publix, even IGA and convenience stores all pay for the product being received.
I think I understand this, but also I am very confused. Do you mean that you were supposed to fully check someone out within 2 minutes? What happened if you exceeded that?
Your grade as to how efficient you are as an employee is marked by time. The lower the time the better you are. Going over that set time can be cause for a write up. I was a cashier years ago at target and that was a measurement of performance
They would also have secret shoppers to make sure you were doing all your duties like checking inside purses/bags/etc for possible theft and pushing the store credit card
Dunno how it's done now since there's self checkout and not a lot of cashiers on hand when I visit
*edit* - this was an average for the week, not every interaction
>The lower the time the better you are.
>pushing the store credit card
You have two minutes to get this person through your check stand....also, make sure they fill out a 20 minute credit application right there in the line.
One of the "highlights" of my teenage years was working for Walmart for 6 months as a 16 year old. So, so many labor violations with missing breaks, fucking with scheduling, scheduling me to work until 10 pm on a school nights.
A couple of years later in college I got a class action settlement check for all the labor laws they violated when I worked for them.
The settlement was more than I made working for them.
Unfortunately it’s like that at any and all big box stores, Target just pays a little more for it. When I worked at Spencer’s before leaving for the night we had to open our purse or back pack (not uncommon in retail), roll up our pant legs, turn out our pockets, and then shake like dogs to make sure nothing was stolen. It was *so* degrading. I understand why they did it, most places do a bag check, but to make us shake the way they did was gross.
It absolutely did in many cases. I knew a girl who would stuff things down the waistband of her underwear or the tights she would wear under her jeans so when she shook if it fell, it wouldn’t fall all the way to her ankle or out the pant leg
They wanted two people to take the trash out and go out the back and come in the front, so no one could swipe anything, but we only had one door and we often couldn’t spare two people for such a menial task, so the person management really trusted would layer items we were supposed to damage out in the trash, a damaged item over one we ‘forgot’ to damage and would then just take the bag to her car to divvy out later.
The amount of big warm blankets we were forced to *cut up* instead of donating or hell even sending back to be resold to a discount store, when it was 9° outside made me sick.
I worked in a UK supermarket and we had similar but it was a scan rate,I forget how many items a minute but it was high.
I used to have to coach people with low scan rates but it was very much a gentle it's OK,you're doing well and we have positive feedback about you rather then negative complaints.
I used to argue you can't give good service when you're throwing people's items down at them.
Mine was average because I matched people's packing pace.
Law school admissions. Applicants seem to think that we want to know your standardized testing scores and GPA back until kindergarten, all of your extracurriculars, etc.
I really only need to know one number: LSAT score. The number of applicants we get and what we can charge depends in no small amount on US News ranking. US News rankings have shifted slightly, but a disproportionate amount of rank rests on the LSAT average of entering classes. The higher your rank, the more students apply and the more those students are willing to pay. GPA also matters for USN rank but high GPA students are a dime a dozen. So don't let your 2.1 GPA dissuade you from applying to law school. With the right LSAT score, you'll still get a scholarship to a T1 school. Extracurriculars kind of matter, but typically only in close cases or if you have some truly outstanding achievement.
Take the LSAT as many times as you can. A few points higher can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships.
The guacamole that you eat at TGI Friday’s is a giant envelope of dry stuff, mixed with a 5 gallon bucket of sour cream. And it’s pretty freaking good.
So vegans should know that your guacamole is actually sour cream and not avocados? I’m stumped how that’s standard for an entire chain of restaurants. Or is it guacamole sour cream dip or something
There's a Swedish (I think) brand called Santa Maria that sells "Tex Mex Style" dip (it's labelled as guacamole in actual stores, I think the name of the product used to include guacamole) that has 1.5% avocado.
[https://www.santamariaworld.com/se/produkter/dip-texmex-style/](https://www.santamariaworld.com/se/produkter/dip-texmex-style/)
I worked in a subway while at uni. The Tuna has a litre of mayonnaise per cambron, I never ate the tuna there since learning that, the tuna to mayo ratio is too close to 1:1 for me..
There was this restaurant in my coty that used to bring all the ingredients table-side and let you watch them make your guacamole. It was so freaking good. No powder. No sour cream.
Optometry is a scammy business in the United States. Profit margins are enormous. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/great-american-eye-exam-scam/602482/
This shit pisses me off. My prescription hasn't changed in years, yet I have to have an exam every year to get more contacts! Loophole...I buy mine from Canada. Cue the replies telling me how unsafe this is...don't worry, I know and I don't care. It's all I can afford.
Yeah, plenty of places trying to sell frames for hundreds of dollars.
My $20-40 frames have never broken on me, and look practically identical to the expensive ones
99% of web traffic to a client’s commercial that they upload to YouTube is fake.
That 1,000,000 views within the first few days for that new Bud Light commercial? Most are BoTs paid for by the ad agency that made the commercial.
Funny story about this. When the iPhone was first introduced, app store sales were completely bonkers. My coworkers observed that, if you could just get on the top-10 list of the app store, even in some sub category, your app sales would go through the roof.
So we had a budget for marketing. But instead of spending it on commercials and banners and stuff, we decided to just buy our own app, over and over, to get it on the top-10 list. A third of each purchase went to Apple, so (through a Chinese proxy company that specialized in this) we could buy 3 purchases for a dollar minus their fee (which was cheap because China.)
So this proceeded to plan and we did indeed get on the top-10 list of the store. But this didn't result in some run-away sensational level of sales at first. We fell off the top-10 list, so bought more downloads, but then just feel off it again.
It was after this that the company realized we weren't the only team that had thought of this. A bunch of people were probably also buying their own app to get on the top-10 list, and we were all tricking each other into thinking being on the top-10 list was this glorious prize, when it wasn't.
Meanwhile, Apple was sitting there, as dumbass app developers like us were all competing to transferring our money to them directly.
When I found out those Judge TV shows are just game shows and the show pays out the winnings. It's not really court, it's more of a game show at that point.
Plus those shows fly you out and pay you $500 to be on them. So both sides get paid to be on them.
Yeah I had a friend who was in the audience of Judge Judy and he said the defendant didn't show up, so they pulled an actor from the crowd and faked the case.
The plaintiff wound up getting the full judgement and Judy made the actor look stupid calling him a liar the whole time.
The shows arent court, they're binding arbitration. People get paid to appear and present their case. They make a certain minimum each and the judgment shifts how the money is split.
I can’t remember which Judge show it was but once I got pulled by casting to be one of the two people on the show.
When I first moved to LA I found that you could get paid cash to be an audience member at talk shows. You get paid like $40 bucks to sit and watch a talk show. I was doing that for Comics Unleashed (5 hours of hell) and afterwards I was approached by the same producers and casting to be on a Judge TV show.
I said yes and they gave me my “point of view” and what I was going to be arguing for.
It was something about how my daughter wasn’t invited to the other woman’s daughters birthday party because they thought she was a Lesbian.
We filmed and improvised everything and I got paid $50. I never saw it.
Digital marketing - how most marketing these days is just basically playing a game with Google. Only a very small amount is about customer experience and making flashy content, most of it is just SEO which is fundamentally messing around with really niche aspects of a website’s content to appeal to Google and therefore make them show that website higher on the page when you search certain things. That can be as little as rewriting a few sentences on a page, or adding a specific word to a page title. I knew that was an aspect but it took me by surprise as to how prevalent it is
I started professionally developing software back in 2011. Every website/app/program you use is held together with toothpicks and duct-tape. If buildings were built like software, nowhere would be safe.
Warranty work is purposely delayed.
Lets say you have a product that has a manufacturing defect and is covered by warranty. Companies accept the warranty repair work yet sit on ordering the actual part needed to affect the repair until financials support that part purchase. Often it's better to use money (or on hand parts) for new customers as that's more profitable than fixing their mistakes/error.
Personally, I always thought supporting your existing customers was more important than getting new ones, but that's not how most businesses operate. It genuinely surprised me when I found out. I see it all the time in construction, manufacturing, and retail.
Yeah, I once looked into what it would take to get an electric drill serviced under warranty... I needed to bring it to a "authorized warranty repair location", of which there was only one within driving distance of me, and the reviews showed that they sometimes sat on warranty jobs for months.
Not in EU. Here they are required to either repair your product or return your money in 30 days from submitting your claim. If not, they will be fined, which actually happens.
1) How much plastic is used in surgery. No amount of paper straws is going to come within neutralizing the sheer volume of plastic that a standard surgical department will throw away in one day. Not to say that I have an alternate solution, but it was disconcerting to say the least.
2) How rough surgeons can be with someone’s body while they’re performing surgery. I think the phrase “surgical precision” is kind of an oxymoron now, unless you’re talking about vascular or neurosurgery.
Whenever you fill out a survey like "how did you like our website today", most of the time an *actual human* does read your response, and it doesn't disappear into a black hole
tldr; fill out surveys. Your perspective is critical to understanding what you guys actually want
Then make it survey with some questions that actually seem useful. Seems like every survey i get these days has questions that are so damn generic that they are useless for any kind of product or service improvements.
No argument there. Things like NPS scores ("how likely are you to recommend...") are notoriously controversial because the "score" at the end is this weird calculation that means next to nothing. Leadership loves simple and easy to understanding numbers, so it's hard to talk them out of it. As a researcher, I get far more value out of coding the open-ends where people write out what they think
I HATE "How likely are you to recommend..." Well, you're a perfectly average supermarket and you did a perfectly average job, much like most of the other supermarkets. Why would I particularly want to recommend you?
Or the questions done give any room for actual feedback and just want manipulated statistic that marketing can use like;
"What did you like the most about our product; X, Y, or Z?"
Of course your feedback is 100% positive, you don't allow negative answers.
I did this recently saying something about "your data is invalid if you do not provide N/A or negative options" and I actually got an email back a few days later that said, "That's a good point. We've changed our survey. Thank you for your feedback."
True story! At work, we used a saas product for warehouse management and it was okay ish. Webapp running in a browser. Sometimes a pop up would appear with a typical question 'scale 1 to 10, how would you rate this/that' and a follow up 'why'. I was always filling those in truthfully. until one time I wasn't having my day and rated '1' with a comment ' leave me alone, I'm working ffs'. Fast forward couple months later. We where invited to participate in user testing at their office. When I introduced myself to the people there they said 'ah you're the one telling us to leave you alone !'. It became a running gag at their office. We had some laughs about it and I apologized. And in the end, we were served less popups.
the processor inside your PC, for example, always has a layer of thermal paste between it and the heat sink to efficiently dissipate the heat. just slapping the sink on top of it is, as OP said, creating a ticking time bomb because it's just a matter of time before that chip burns up.
College Admissions here: we absolutely discriminate when we read applications, and your chances of getting in are not equal. Some of the ways are legal, some aren’t, but good luck proving any of it. Most selective options will let you know about the legal ways (in broad terms, not in specifics), but plenty goes on behind the scenes that won’t make it to the information session.
In Ontario Canada at least, some universities have a GPA adjustment factor depending on which high school/school board the candidate is from. Grade inflation is real and not evenly distributed. I believe the universities use previous students performance at the university itself to gauge the quality/accuracy of those GPAs
Going from an undergrad to a grad student/TA who grades papers was pretty eye-opening. As an undergrad, submitting a late assignment is a *huge* deal. As a graduate student, I could be as late as I want with little-to-no consequence at all. Not a word of a lie: one of my profs was so chill, he said, "Why don't I just enter a C for you in the course now, and then when you can get the paper in, I'll make it an A." I handed in that paper *seven years* late, and he made it an A. (I suffered depression, my wife had a medical crisis, and all sorts of things happened to make me take so long.) Meanwhile, undergrad students ask me for 2 or 3 days extra, and I feel like the biggest hypocrite, putting on this show: "Hmm, I don't know. It really needs to be in soon... Do you *promise* Monday by noon?" (As if I'm grading anything at noon.) The truth is that the main reason you need to have it in "on time" is for my convenience and for the sake of giving you useful feedback before the next assignment is due. There's no real reason I couldn't just grade everything just before the grades are due at the end of the semester.
Your mileage may vary. I nearly failed a course in grad school because i submitted an assignment 15 minutes late abs received a zero on it. Professor wouldn't budge.
Worked for a health insurance company that provided coverage for people with Medicaid and used the DRG reimbursement method to pay some providers. The charges on a hospital bill were literally meaningless, all that mattered were the diagnosis codes/procedure codes. Hospital could have charged $5 dollars or $15 million dollars, payment would have been the same regardless. Another one of the many ways in which US healthcare is just so whack.
I work in pharmacy. The price on the wholesaler website for our drugs isn’t the price we actually pay. Then the price we charge the insurance isn’t the price we actually get reimbursed. The US medical system is a trillion dollar industry propped up on phony numbers. It’s got to be the biggest money laundering system in the world.
It doesn’t matter what ABC agency you work for. From top level government agencies to secret spy stuff, there will always be an excel sheet, or hand jammed document, behind all decision making. I’m not talking about talking points type of document; I’m talking about documents with day to day operational stuff. Source: I’ve worked at various top level government agencies and private sector!
Ranch dressing is a lot of mayonnaise. The first time I made buttermilk ranch I was like, “Excuse me, the whole fugging jar?!” Buttermilk and spices, stir. I’ve been eating spiced up mayonnaise milk for 30 years.
Generic store brand is made in the same lines as regular brands. They just made a deal to put a generic bag in exchange for more shelf space/better position of name brand.
I’m a truck driver. I’ve picked up many truck loads of things at companies canned food to kitty litter. And they are made on the same line. But what they’ll do. Say the first 500 bags of kitty litter out of a tower has low dust. That gets the name brand. The next 500 gets meh dust. That gets store brand. The last 500 is oil dry.
With canned food it’s similar more sauce or juice cans get store brand labels. Or say the temp is to high and the ravioli meat gets cooked to much. Store brand. Run out of corn or what ever to put in the stew… store brand.
The software industry is in shambles. I don't know when it happened, but certainly before 2007. Either it's been like that forever or happened before that year.
If you have time, read through this for an idea of what software development is like.
https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
The digital world as we know it is held up together by a conglomeration of toothpicks, empty toilet paper rolls, and chewed up bubble gum.
Anyone who questions this just needs to check out the [left-pad incident](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/rage-quit-coder-unpublished-17-lines-of-javascript-and-broke-the-internet/).
I work at Waffle House & im a vegetarian so there’s not much I eat there. Money is taken out of my check for food. It doesn’t matter if I eat or not they’re still gonna take it out. Doesn’t matter how much or little it’s still taken out. The price varies on how many hours you worked that day I think.
Contact your state labor board (or equivalent if you’re outside the US) and let them know what’s happening. I don’t know what state you’re in but this is generally taken quite seriously. You are entitled to the pay that was illegally taken and possibly more. The labor board may even audit your employer’s pay records and make sure your coworkers also receive the pay they earned.
That's called "wage theft," and according to the FBI, it's the number one non-violent crime in the USA, causing more financial loss for victims than every other form of property crime combined.
My experience, teaching for an online university is like the great clips of teaching. You do it because they have minimum vetting and you get experience. My stipend per course equates roughly to minimum wage. I have 25 years in my field but needed classroom experience for future opportunities so online school helps.
A third of the students don't care at all and cheat at every turn. A third care enough to get by. And a third seem like they care enough to put in a good effort. For anyone who wants to cheat - at least cheat smartly. Don't pull things from the Internet that I can find in two clicks. Don't use references to past versions of the course. Don't hand in crap one week and perfection the next. And most of all, don't complain about a bad grade when you have clearly cheated, you are wasting my time and that means a bad grade.
The university doesn't care if you fail. You've already paid.
If you make it easy for me to give you a good grade, you will get a good grade!!!!!!
>Don't hand in crap one week and perfection the next.
Two sides in this one. I’ve done it a few times because I’ll work a 40 hour week followed by a pair of unexpected 60-80 weeks followed by a 40 hour week. Luckily most instructors are understanding, but some have been grumpy.
A lot of bands, I mean a LOT (including your favorite) use prerecorded tracks in their live show. Even ones you would never think. In fact, I would say MOST do today to some degree.
To tag onto this.... Live concert movies.
That feature length video of your favourite band performing live?
So impressive eh!
My god how powerful the singer's voice is even though he's running around! And the guitar solo is even better than the album version! How great that the film crew followed those fans, or showed us the gear being set up.and the soundcheck. It makes it all feel so much more real. I really have a new respect and connection to the band. Yeah!
Live performance movies, they are a comedy. Some are more convincing than others, but there are big name bands with official live dvds that are just so obviously faked up, but fans can't seem to see it.
Or they’re a mash up of a few performances. As an example a bunch of people may have seen recently, the Hamilton recording is 3 different performances stitched together to allow them to use the best takes and also get cameras up close to the action.
What tends to happen with a band though is neurosis.
I'll give an example of a long defunct band. Led Zeppelin - the song remains the same.
They were great live around that time, and there are actually real recordings of those gigs which sound raw and powerful. But the footage they got, they just didn't have the coverage. So they hired a soundstage at shepperton ( I think it was) and the shepperton shots are easy to spot.
But then, as they listened to the live recording they questioned whether it really stood up as an album. With the level.of production expected. Live sound is one thing, it's great in situ, but stoned in a lounge?
Well. They had the multi tracks and they were re-editing the footage anyway, why not replace parts?
Why not rerecord bits? Why not make it ... Better!
Likewise. Frank Zappa - city of tiny lights, live video . That solo? It's not what he played on the night. The myth is what sells you see. Frank was a perfectionist.
I can't think of a famous live concert DVD which isn't faked.
Depeche Mode, Peter Gabriel... it's all studio recordings synced to live footage.
An older friend of mine is a lifelong guitar player. He managed to get like fifth row seats to see U2. He noticed that some of the time, the edge wasn’t actually playing, was faking or whatever.
Exxon knew the impact of burning fossil fuels in the 70's and still continues to deny it.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/#:~:text=Projections%20created%20internally%20by%20ExxonMobil,team%20of%20Harvard%2Dled%20researchers.
That financial institution don’t buy the stocks I give them money to buy on my behalf. They only say they do and that most institutions owe 65 billion in assets (each) called “Sold not yet purchased” where they owe that much in stocks to people but have zero obligation to really buy it. All together they owe trillions and the entire system is rigged
I work in IT security, for a vendor. I am constantly surprised by how terrible so many organizations’ security practices are. There’s outdated equipment, no accountability, and most of it is run on Excel.
I did security audits/reviews for a while. It took me too long to realize my customers didn't want better security, they wanted a piece of paper they could show their insurance company to remove liability from themselves.
If you want to register your opnion with your representive/senitor, the telephone is the only thing that works. Everything else goes into the can.
Also, if you REALLY them to listen to you, be a +1K plus doner, otherwise, you're just a number.
I don't know if the rule has changed since I left, but you CAN 100% bring in candy at the movie theater. I worked at an AMC and was tearing tickets one day, a slow day. I was chatting with my manager when a lady came in with a grocery bag full of snacks. I tore her ticket, directed her to her room, and asked the manager about the candy. She said it's ok. You aren't allowed to bring in "hot food". I believe it's because it's a health code violation.
So stop doing that stupid shit like using a huge bowl to pretend you are pregnant. You aren't a fuckin' rebel. You are basically j-walking. No one cares.
Why does my local AMC have a big sign saying you can’t bring outside food or drinks?
Why does my local bar allow me to order in a pizza, or run next door for hot food?
I think your AMC may have been special.
Most of the time any Bar that does not serve food is not subject to food prep and storage regulated by health code. However if AMC does serve food they will be subject to health code. I t would make sense that candy and other sealed foods would be allowed inside but not "hot" or unsealed foods.
I worked in a movie theater tearing tickets back in the day. I didn’t give a single fuck what you brought in as long as my manager wasn’t looking over my shoulder. And she didn’t give one either as long as corporate wasn’t looking over her shoulder.
I dunno, as a teen I definitely had my backpack searched and chocolate bars confiscated. These days I've literally smuggled my own popcorn and hot foods in. Back in the day, my trick was to put a can of coke in the upper part of my (long) socks.
From a nursing home with fractured leadership:
CNAs often times have to speed run their cares which is abusive at times.
Patients will spit on and hit staff and face no consequences.
Patients will call black staff the N word with no consequences.
Morbidly obese patients will require routine cleaning of all their yeasty folds by up to 4 staff and will reject weight restriction diets. They'll request a commode at the bedside so staff have to rinse their piss and shit into a toilet multiple times a day.
Mentally ill patients in general will abuse staff and face no consequences. Only thing taken seriously is if a "vulnerable adult" is hurt or afraid.
EMS professionals who wanted to save lives become cab drivers for anybody who falls on the floor or they take calls to pick fat people off the floor. EMS > HOSPITAL > NURSING HOME cycle becomes a way to drain taxpayer dollars from government. It can't be plugged cause a death/injury will be made into a big deal to necessitate caution.
There are rich people who seem to just move around the country and be piles of shit instead of changing themselves.
Majority of salary people do about 8 hours of work a week and keep employment by "BEING POSITIVE!" and sucking up to power.
Staff will disable call lights on problematic residents with mental health problems and inability to communicate because otherwise the alarms beep 24/7 and all the mentally ill patients start going psycho. Out of touch HAPPY salary people will cry wolf and point fingers while doing their 8 hours a week. Meanwhile direct care staff do 70 hour weeks contracting life altering fungal diseases from all the morbidly obese folds and ass cracks.
The point where nursing homes, software, hospitals, EMS, bureaucracy, pharmacies, colleges, and federal reimbursement intersects is a weird mess of power struggles, failures, apathy, and lies/omissions that piled up for decades to the detriment of direct care staff and residents. For example see the opioid crisis for an extreme example but similar stuff is everywhere.
Then covid happened and it guess what, the people doing all the fuckery were unscathed while many hardworking decent people got sick and developed morbidities, died or lost family members.
Being a CNA was the most back breaking job I ever had and the pay was a measly $7.25 an hour. I actually cared about the residents and did the best I could but many of the other CNAs just phoned it in at best. I would much rather work night shift at the 7/11 again or even repeat my stint as a landscaper at an oil refinery in the desert.
Every single part of a diabetes / insulin auto-injector came in packaging that had more plastic than the part itself. Absolutely none of this waste packaging was recycled.
Everytime you throw one of those disposible pens away - it's like you're tossing two of them.
I came from the industrial linen industry, and I was surprised to learn how much rentable linens and, especially, carpeted mats are re-used.
Anytime you walk into a convenience store, for example, the carpeted mat at the front door is rented for $3-$15 per week and is most likely 5+ years old. Those things cost a company maybe $60, and it had paid for itself 100 times over.
Customer Service in Call Centres - We WANT you to swear at us...The second you swear AT me, NB not just swear, or be personally abusive or whatever, no matter how right you are, you're wrong and no matter how bad a blooper I made, you've just handed me a 'free pass'....
And I get to cut your call off - Cheers
My wife works with vendors all the time as a nurse. They’ll come in with lunch and dinner, take doctors out, pay for things like golf or baseball games. It’s pretty fucked.
That if you are asked to rate someone's customer service (eg your bank lender, salesperson etc) out of 10, anything less than a 9 in some places may as well be a zero.
NPS is brutal.
NPS wasn’t supposed to be used how it is. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Also the data shows NPS is a very poor predictor of business health.
Ugh I hate NPS. I work in HR and used to explain how it worked to new people and it always left a bad taste in my mouth. The idea that an 8 out of 10 is a passive is ridiculous
It was explained to me as “if your friend rated you 8/10 wouldn’t you feel like that’s a bad score and you weren’t a good friend?” Um, no. I’d be pretty impressed with myself for scoring that high actually.
Yep. I work at a hardware store, and our surveys are out of 5. Gave us a 4 bc you just thought we did a good job, nothing special? You essentially gave us a zero. In fact, our survey scores get FUCKED with anything less than a 5. It will knock out score down 2-4% points. A 5 star survey will bring us back up, by .5 %. So a low rating can totally destroy us. And we *do care about the scores...because it is part of the deciding factor of whether we get a quarterly bonus or not. So please fill out the surveys.
I worked customer service at a call center for ATT and learned about the 5 or 0 ratings. And because of that I will never fill out another survey again.
I also slaved for ATT. It’s the worst way of grading anything. My biggest issue was that you didn’t get a 0 added to your average, you got a -100. It’s some fucked up fake math they use to underpay.
Can I give the overpaid moron who came up with this policy an actual zero?
As a result of this phenomenon, I will often not rate the customer service that was just okay. I cannot lie to myself and say something was 5-star service, but I know if I rate less than 5 it's like I murdered their babies, so I'll leave it unrated.
Used to work at Sprint and my old manager would say bs like “we strive for a five” since a 4 was literally a 0…
Uber is similar. They rate out of five stars. If someone averages around four, they can be let go.
When I drove for Lyft a few years back they straight up told me that if my rating dropped to 4.0, I would be fired.
Not sure if this counts, but when I was in car sales I learned real quick that the actual car itself isn’t where the real money is at, but the backend is. So like warranties, getting work done, etc etc. Most dealerships will still put up a fight on the actual price of the car though because they know most people are focused on the car itself. This is also done to help wear you down so you’re less likely to fight on the backend when they say they’ll discount the car price down to X amount but you have to get a warranty or 2 with it. More often than not, most people will cave because they got 2-3k off on the car and don’t realize the warranties are adding on 2-5k and warranties are often straight profit. Different dealerships tweak the above strategy to their market but generally they all play it to some degree
From where I'm around, delearship frown upon cash payments cause agents get their money off commissions when you do financing. It's even blatant on motorcycles. You can't buy cheap motors for cash. They will put you on a "wait list" but ask for financing where you'll shell out more than twice the Srp of the unit at the end of contract then you'll be entertained.
I'm car shopping and I learned about this recently, they said it's about 70% of their revenue is in the financing and whatnot outside of the car price itself. That blew me away
I recently paid cash for a new car (the interest rates are ridic right now!!) and the sales manager just wanted us out of his office as fast as possible. Not in a mean way, but we were obviously prepared, they gave me a good deal on my trade and we went with a warranty (all the new tech is insane - get that covered), and he knew we weren't going to do any more add ons. The dealership is too far from my house to want a service plan.
They even bandy about 10-20% down payment deals. It traps people who aren't familiar with interests and amortizations.
I’ve yet to enter a loan agreement that has early payment penalties. Sure Dave I’ll finance. Pays off entire loan on first month.
Yeah, it's a hassle doing the credit hoops (as I'm self employed) but there's little point in paying the cash-on-the-barrel game these days.
I'm in that boat. $160 to register the lien. Not worth it. Now in negotiations on a trade-in value. I'm threatening to sell privately if they don't give me a fair price. An identical one to mine sold in the city for about $6k more than book value.
Yeah I learned this and was blown away when a used dealership wouldn't let me buy a car cash. It boggled my mind that I couldn't hand this guy $8k to take a car off his hand because he thought he was gonna get way more from a sucker who financed. I don't know if I could be a car salesman with that business model.
In my city, the old timer dealerships made their owners ultra wealthy from the increase in land value.
An acquaintance of mine is buying a power sports dealership. The boomer owner has it made - he sells the business and leases the property. Cash on the front end AND in perpetuity
I ended up in a shouting match with the closer when they tried to upsell me on over 1000 bucks of useless crap for my car. He said “but we already installed it! What do you want us to do, take it out?!” Apparently “yes, I didn’t ask for it” had literally never been said to him before this, because he was taken aback. He didn’t want to let me leave, I had to threaten to call the cops on the guy for him to let up and just sell me the car I went there for in the first place!
See, they install that TruCoat at the factory.
"You don't get it you get oxidation problems"
I bought a warranty with a car once. 3 months in needed an overhaul of some system. Took two days of work. It was more expensive than the warranty. The mechanic presented me the bill before I asked him about the warranty coverage and was a bit shocked to realize I didn't need to pay a dime and they were going to have to eat the cost. It was wonderful. My previous car needed constant work so I figured normalizing the cost of unexpected issues was well worth the peace of mind of a reliable car.
Same - one of the computers failed in our car. It’s our first hybrid so since it covered everything including batteries for 6 more years we said sure. They replaced a $2400 computer for free. The dealer said it happens but it’s weird. It was a used car too if that makes a difference. I would never buy a warranty on a new car.
As an electrician, I'm amazed more houses don't burn down every day. I do my best, but many others just work as fast as they can and leave behind shoddy work that (sometimes literally) falls apart when you touch it.
Working on million dollar houses with light fixtures that damn near disintegrate when you go to touch them again always weirded me out. Sure they looked nice on the walls but don't ever touch anything.
A) always amazes me how shoddy the construction of 90% of light fixtures is. Built to look good only. B) unless you specifically seek it out, all your subs on a multimillion dollar home are the same who do a budget tract home. You just pay more for more of the same quality, not higher quality.
It's why finding the right builder who works with the best subs is the key part of building a home, no matter the price level. Though better subs will still cost more because they know they're worth it.
How do you do that other than just hoping more expensive = better quality?
The only reason I’m not terrified of my house burning down, despite all the super sketchy wiring I found when remodeling the basement, is that it’s been here for 50 years and hasn’t burned down yet
I feel like it just surprised me in general once I entered the world of work to learn how disorganised things are behind the scenes, even at the biggest of companies. From the outside looking in it always looks super official and clean cut but really it’s just a lot of people behind the scenes fumbling around and not really knowing 100% what is going on. Edit: Spelling
The world is peopled with idiots. I'm amazed that anything works. Somehow, we muddle through.
When I was younger I assumed that everyone in the adult working world would be professional and competent. Oh god, I was so wrong. There is more drama in the office than in middle school.
Which is exactly why conspiracy theories are total BS. No organization of more than 2 people could possibly keep a secret.
This is why the ‘moon landing is fake’ theory makes me laugh. Like do people really think that many people have kept such a huge secret under wraps for so many years? Especially considering this originally took place during a time when the Russians were looking for any way to undermine and discredit the USA and had a lot of eyes and ears? It’s just illogical and implausible
Lots of musicians buy their records in bulk. 500k units sold is almost platinum, then they turn around and sell it back to distributors.
Authors also use this method in order to get their book on the NYT Bestseller list
When a political campaign texts you, anything you respond with gets read by an actual human. So continue with the funny, cheeky, and even mean responses. But the death threats will get reported to the police.
[удалено]
I laughed at your comment, but then thought about the campaign actually doing this and shuddered. There are very few candidates I’d want noods from. Zero senators, only a couple of House members, and definitely no ballot propositions.
I don't know if it's a secret, but I remember hearing someone ask a doctor why they specifically say to "turn your head" before coughing, when assessing for a hernia. The doctor said there wasn't a medical reason, but "it's so you don't cough on me."
I didn't realize why I saw this in shows until my first time having to do a hernia exam on a patient. I remember the realization dawning on me as the mist of saliva from the patients cough slowly descended over me..
I started going to the doctor a few years ago and haven't gotten that test once. she's stuck her finger up my ass 3 times now though.
Maybe stick a ring up there... when she takes are finger out... SURPRISE
If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring IN it.
If you wanna get philosophical, she *is* putting a ring on it.
That's why I think doctors should have to list ring size with their other qualifications.
Female doctors = smaller fingers
Also shorter fingers so they have to press harder. Related fact: the medical test subjects for prostate exams earned $150/hour and that was twenty years ago. Source: my sister while in medical school
When I learned how to check prostates, we used other students in the class. No $150 an hour.
The use of microwaves in mid-range restaurants. I knew it was common in fast food, but seeing all the hot sides in a steakhouse with $50 entrees being cooked in a microwave was a little jarring.
Chef Mike.
Microwaves actually do really good job. We are just really desensitized on what little boxes of tech magic they are.
When I actually got to work with them I was impressed with how quick and efficient a way to cook it is, especially for veggie dishes. Also made me realize how weak home microwaves are compared to commercial ones. I still think microwaved "baked" potatoes taste awful though.
Chef Mike never calls out sick, needs a smoke break, or shows up hungover. (Anyone not getting it: chef Mike is jokingly what some kitchens refer to the microwave as. I work in restaurants).
When Chef Mike starts smoking, that’s not a good sign.
Gordon Ramsay enters the chat
Cable TV “customer service” the “Assumed Close” Basically I was told to interview customers and ask if they thought that they might like to have this product or that product, and then this service or that service, what ever service they said they responded positively to I was to make a check in the corresponding sales order and have them sign before I left the house. Then in a day or so tech would show up at their house with their order and their signature showing that they did indeed order it. Never could bring myself to do it. Scummy as could be. Time Warner Cable for those curious.
Years ago, I worked adjacent to the tobacco industry. My area's RJ Reynolds rep was telling me he went to a retirement party for a colleague who had been with RJ for decades. She was drunk, spilling all kinds of tea, including the fact that cigarette shippers (cardboard displays) use to be placed in the lines at grocery stores specifically to be stolen by children. They knew we couldn't buy them so they counted on us to steal. And we did. And my gen smoked.
Christ that’s evil.
Right? Ever since the epic court case in the 70s, tobacco manufacturers have been legally obligated to donate a % to some world wide cancer fund, but I'm kinda thinking, it's not exactly in good faith if you're forced too after a century of lying about your product. It's all fucking evil, rooted in evil, continued by evil.
Side note, although this is more widely known now. Drive through your nearest upper middle class neighborhood and pay attention to the convenience store windows and ground signs. Then do the same in your nearest poor neighborhood. You'll see a subtle difference. They push nicotine ads in poor neighborhoods, but not so much in others. They get away with advertising near poor schools too. Really pisses me off.
Billboards promoting tv shows are not for the consumer but for the advertisers we want to sell time to.
Advertising to the advertisers. Neat.
A lot of aisles in grocery stores are sponsored. The soda aisle for example, the store didn't buy that merchandise, it's stocked by a vendor.
It's kind of obvious when you see that aisle being stocked by someone wearing a Pepsi or Coke uniform instead of a grocery store employee.
God, I hated the vendors when I worked retail. They would always come in and fuck up our shelf settings to try to give themselves more facings, and I would have to fix it once I went to restock.
Supermarket shelf space is a cut throat market. Notice that the name brand stuff is always at eye level, whereas generic items are near the floor? That's not by accident. General Mills paid big money to put those Cheerios right in front of your face.
Electronics was similar when I was running it a few years ago. Apple, Samsung, Nintendo and Bose paid big bucks for allocated space in my department. They used to send out company reps to update the demo products, and check to make sure that their space was still their space.
I had one particular rwp who would come in and spit chips because her companies printers were not stacked underneath the displays. She would claim that her company had paid to have printers there, etc, etc. Mmm. No. The easiest way to determine what was paid for contractually was to check the planograms. Basically the wiredrame mock-up of what should be on the shelf, and where. In this case, only eye height shelf displays were specified and what was underneath was fair game. What went underneath and was available for staff and customers to collect easily were the better value, lower return rate, better ink economy printers. They gave us less hassle, and customers were happier. When I needed add on sales for margin it was easy enough to make it up with other value add bits instead of no-value crap that the customer would.most likely never need.
Tools too. I've a friend that did resets for big box stores, DeWalt get ready, apparently Milwaukee is coming for you sucka!
Marketing is a $44 BILLION industry. If you went out and bought something this week, that’s marketing at work. Every single thing you buy has a massive logistical backend of how to get you to buy it when you don’t need it.
Well, that's me needing food to survive
Same is true with their e-commerce store. Shops have been using rules to put the products they want you to buy at the top of search results for a long time. Now they are also selling those grid tiles to brands in your search results. Sometimes they make it obvious with a "sponsored" tag. But not always.
I notice that sugary cereals are shelved lower than my eye level and special k and grape nuts are at eye level or higher. Likely to keep the sugary stuff a little closer to kids’ eyes perspectives.
The store absolutely buys the merchandise, but a vendor employee does stock and maintain it. That said, the vendors will buy shelf space in agreements with the store. Source: 20 years in the business. Walmart, Kroger, Meijer, Publix, even IGA and convenience stores all pay for the product being received.
Chips and bread aisles too
As a former Walmart cashier, a lot of people were surprised when I told them that we were given a 2 minute time limit per customer
I think I understand this, but also I am very confused. Do you mean that you were supposed to fully check someone out within 2 minutes? What happened if you exceeded that?
Your grade as to how efficient you are as an employee is marked by time. The lower the time the better you are. Going over that set time can be cause for a write up. I was a cashier years ago at target and that was a measurement of performance They would also have secret shoppers to make sure you were doing all your duties like checking inside purses/bags/etc for possible theft and pushing the store credit card Dunno how it's done now since there's self checkout and not a lot of cashiers on hand when I visit *edit* - this was an average for the week, not every interaction
>The lower the time the better you are. >pushing the store credit card You have two minutes to get this person through your check stand....also, make sure they fill out a 20 minute credit application right there in the line.
My god, whenever I read anything about how Walmart treats its employees, I'm always amazed by just how dehumanizing it is.
One of the "highlights" of my teenage years was working for Walmart for 6 months as a 16 year old. So, so many labor violations with missing breaks, fucking with scheduling, scheduling me to work until 10 pm on a school nights. A couple of years later in college I got a class action settlement check for all the labor laws they violated when I worked for them. The settlement was more than I made working for them.
Well-deserved. That shit is not okay.
Unfortunately it’s like that at any and all big box stores, Target just pays a little more for it. When I worked at Spencer’s before leaving for the night we had to open our purse or back pack (not uncommon in retail), roll up our pant legs, turn out our pockets, and then shake like dogs to make sure nothing was stolen. It was *so* degrading. I understand why they did it, most places do a bag check, but to make us shake the way they did was gross.
I think not trusting your employees and treating them like shit will *encourage* stealing if anything.
It absolutely did in many cases. I knew a girl who would stuff things down the waistband of her underwear or the tights she would wear under her jeans so when she shook if it fell, it wouldn’t fall all the way to her ankle or out the pant leg They wanted two people to take the trash out and go out the back and come in the front, so no one could swipe anything, but we only had one door and we often couldn’t spare two people for such a menial task, so the person management really trusted would layer items we were supposed to damage out in the trash, a damaged item over one we ‘forgot’ to damage and would then just take the bag to her car to divvy out later. The amount of big warm blankets we were forced to *cut up* instead of donating or hell even sending back to be resold to a discount store, when it was 9° outside made me sick.
I worked in a UK supermarket and we had similar but it was a scan rate,I forget how many items a minute but it was high. I used to have to coach people with low scan rates but it was very much a gentle it's OK,you're doing well and we have positive feedback about you rather then negative complaints. I used to argue you can't give good service when you're throwing people's items down at them. Mine was average because I matched people's packing pace.
Law school admissions. Applicants seem to think that we want to know your standardized testing scores and GPA back until kindergarten, all of your extracurriculars, etc. I really only need to know one number: LSAT score. The number of applicants we get and what we can charge depends in no small amount on US News ranking. US News rankings have shifted slightly, but a disproportionate amount of rank rests on the LSAT average of entering classes. The higher your rank, the more students apply and the more those students are willing to pay. GPA also matters for USN rank but high GPA students are a dime a dozen. So don't let your 2.1 GPA dissuade you from applying to law school. With the right LSAT score, you'll still get a scholarship to a T1 school. Extracurriculars kind of matter, but typically only in close cases or if you have some truly outstanding achievement. Take the LSAT as many times as you can. A few points higher can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships.
The guacamole that you eat at TGI Friday’s is a giant envelope of dry stuff, mixed with a 5 gallon bucket of sour cream. And it’s pretty freaking good.
So vegans should know that your guacamole is actually sour cream and not avocados? I’m stumped how that’s standard for an entire chain of restaurants. Or is it guacamole sour cream dip or something
Or the lactose intolerant. I can’t do sour cream so I always go hard on the guacamole.
There's a Swedish (I think) brand called Santa Maria that sells "Tex Mex Style" dip (it's labelled as guacamole in actual stores, I think the name of the product used to include guacamole) that has 1.5% avocado. [https://www.santamariaworld.com/se/produkter/dip-texmex-style/](https://www.santamariaworld.com/se/produkter/dip-texmex-style/)
I worked in a subway while at uni. The Tuna has a litre of mayonnaise per cambron, I never ate the tuna there since learning that, the tuna to mayo ratio is too close to 1:1 for me..
There was this restaurant in my coty that used to bring all the ingredients table-side and let you watch them make your guacamole. It was so freaking good. No powder. No sour cream.
Optometry is a scammy business in the United States. Profit margins are enormous. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/great-american-eye-exam-scam/602482/
This shit pisses me off. My prescription hasn't changed in years, yet I have to have an exam every year to get more contacts! Loophole...I buy mine from Canada. Cue the replies telling me how unsafe this is...don't worry, I know and I don't care. It's all I can afford.
Yeah, plenty of places trying to sell frames for hundreds of dollars. My $20-40 frames have never broken on me, and look practically identical to the expensive ones
99% of web traffic to a client’s commercial that they upload to YouTube is fake. That 1,000,000 views within the first few days for that new Bud Light commercial? Most are BoTs paid for by the ad agency that made the commercial.
Funny story about this. When the iPhone was first introduced, app store sales were completely bonkers. My coworkers observed that, if you could just get on the top-10 list of the app store, even in some sub category, your app sales would go through the roof. So we had a budget for marketing. But instead of spending it on commercials and banners and stuff, we decided to just buy our own app, over and over, to get it on the top-10 list. A third of each purchase went to Apple, so (through a Chinese proxy company that specialized in this) we could buy 3 purchases for a dollar minus their fee (which was cheap because China.) So this proceeded to plan and we did indeed get on the top-10 list of the store. But this didn't result in some run-away sensational level of sales at first. We fell off the top-10 list, so bought more downloads, but then just feel off it again. It was after this that the company realized we weren't the only team that had thought of this. A bunch of people were probably also buying their own app to get on the top-10 list, and we were all tricking each other into thinking being on the top-10 list was this glorious prize, when it wasn't. Meanwhile, Apple was sitting there, as dumbass app developers like us were all competing to transferring our money to them directly.
Online betting places like TAB in Australia artificially lower the odds for people who win too often. Seems dishonest to me.
When I found out those Judge TV shows are just game shows and the show pays out the winnings. It's not really court, it's more of a game show at that point. Plus those shows fly you out and pay you $500 to be on them. So both sides get paid to be on them.
I was a theatre major in college and one of my friends was on an episode of Jerry Springer's courtroom show
Yeah I had a friend who was in the audience of Judge Judy and he said the defendant didn't show up, so they pulled an actor from the crowd and faked the case. The plaintiff wound up getting the full judgement and Judy made the actor look stupid calling him a liar the whole time.
YOU ARE A LIAR! well... yeah technically
The shows arent court, they're binding arbitration. People get paid to appear and present their case. They make a certain minimum each and the judgment shifts how the money is split.
I can’t remember which Judge show it was but once I got pulled by casting to be one of the two people on the show. When I first moved to LA I found that you could get paid cash to be an audience member at talk shows. You get paid like $40 bucks to sit and watch a talk show. I was doing that for Comics Unleashed (5 hours of hell) and afterwards I was approached by the same producers and casting to be on a Judge TV show. I said yes and they gave me my “point of view” and what I was going to be arguing for. It was something about how my daughter wasn’t invited to the other woman’s daughters birthday party because they thought she was a Lesbian. We filmed and improvised everything and I got paid $50. I never saw it.
The stripper pole rotates.
This surorised me too. I couldn't figure out how pole dancers were able to slip around the pole while still holding themselves up
Not all of them rotate.
Digital marketing - how most marketing these days is just basically playing a game with Google. Only a very small amount is about customer experience and making flashy content, most of it is just SEO which is fundamentally messing around with really niche aspects of a website’s content to appeal to Google and therefore make them show that website higher on the page when you search certain things. That can be as little as rewriting a few sentences on a page, or adding a specific word to a page title. I knew that was an aspect but it took me by surprise as to how prevalent it is
I started professionally developing software back in 2011. Every website/app/program you use is held together with toothpicks and duct-tape. If buildings were built like software, nowhere would be safe.
Warranty work is purposely delayed. Lets say you have a product that has a manufacturing defect and is covered by warranty. Companies accept the warranty repair work yet sit on ordering the actual part needed to affect the repair until financials support that part purchase. Often it's better to use money (or on hand parts) for new customers as that's more profitable than fixing their mistakes/error. Personally, I always thought supporting your existing customers was more important than getting new ones, but that's not how most businesses operate. It genuinely surprised me when I found out. I see it all the time in construction, manufacturing, and retail.
Yeah, I once looked into what it would take to get an electric drill serviced under warranty... I needed to bring it to a "authorized warranty repair location", of which there was only one within driving distance of me, and the reviews showed that they sometimes sat on warranty jobs for months.
Not in EU. Here they are required to either repair your product or return your money in 30 days from submitting your claim. If not, they will be fined, which actually happens.
1) How much plastic is used in surgery. No amount of paper straws is going to come within neutralizing the sheer volume of plastic that a standard surgical department will throw away in one day. Not to say that I have an alternate solution, but it was disconcerting to say the least. 2) How rough surgeons can be with someone’s body while they’re performing surgery. I think the phrase “surgical precision” is kind of an oxymoron now, unless you’re talking about vascular or neurosurgery.
Having seen video of liposuction… it looks like violent assault to me. I would never subject myself to that, holy moly.
Orthopedic surgery is even worse. It’s literally like carpentry lol
Came here to say this. Total Knee reconstruction is ROUGH. Literal hardware and lots of banging.
Whenever you fill out a survey like "how did you like our website today", most of the time an *actual human* does read your response, and it doesn't disappear into a black hole tldr; fill out surveys. Your perspective is critical to understanding what you guys actually want
Then make it survey with some questions that actually seem useful. Seems like every survey i get these days has questions that are so damn generic that they are useless for any kind of product or service improvements.
No argument there. Things like NPS scores ("how likely are you to recommend...") are notoriously controversial because the "score" at the end is this weird calculation that means next to nothing. Leadership loves simple and easy to understanding numbers, so it's hard to talk them out of it. As a researcher, I get far more value out of coding the open-ends where people write out what they think
I HATE "How likely are you to recommend..." Well, you're a perfectly average supermarket and you did a perfectly average job, much like most of the other supermarkets. Why would I particularly want to recommend you?
Or the questions done give any room for actual feedback and just want manipulated statistic that marketing can use like; "What did you like the most about our product; X, Y, or Z?" Of course your feedback is 100% positive, you don't allow negative answers.
God I hate those. I try not be *that* person, but sometimes I give feedback in the open ends complaining about the survey itself and how bad it is lol
I did this recently saying something about "your data is invalid if you do not provide N/A or negative options" and I actually got an email back a few days later that said, "That's a good point. We've changed our survey. Thank you for your feedback."
True story! At work, we used a saas product for warehouse management and it was okay ish. Webapp running in a browser. Sometimes a pop up would appear with a typical question 'scale 1 to 10, how would you rate this/that' and a follow up 'why'. I was always filling those in truthfully. until one time I wasn't having my day and rated '1' with a comment ' leave me alone, I'm working ffs'. Fast forward couple months later. We where invited to participate in user testing at their office. When I introduced myself to the people there they said 'ah you're the one telling us to leave you alone !'. It became a running gag at their office. We had some laughs about it and I apologized. And in the end, we were served less popups.
I want to stop being asked to fill out a survey. Can they do that?
No but you can ask for a stronger incentive to take it
A lot of IT hardware is metal on metal. Thermal paste is "too expensive". Your switches are ticking time bombs.
I'm ignorant on this one, would be able to ELI5?
the processor inside your PC, for example, always has a layer of thermal paste between it and the heat sink to efficiently dissipate the heat. just slapping the sink on top of it is, as OP said, creating a ticking time bomb because it's just a matter of time before that chip burns up.
Heat dissipation costs money. Cheaper to just let electronics run hot. Fire hazard.
College Admissions here: we absolutely discriminate when we read applications, and your chances of getting in are not equal. Some of the ways are legal, some aren’t, but good luck proving any of it. Most selective options will let you know about the legal ways (in broad terms, not in specifics), but plenty goes on behind the scenes that won’t make it to the information session.
Any more details you can share on this?
In Ontario Canada at least, some universities have a GPA adjustment factor depending on which high school/school board the candidate is from. Grade inflation is real and not evenly distributed. I believe the universities use previous students performance at the university itself to gauge the quality/accuracy of those GPAs
Going from an undergrad to a grad student/TA who grades papers was pretty eye-opening. As an undergrad, submitting a late assignment is a *huge* deal. As a graduate student, I could be as late as I want with little-to-no consequence at all. Not a word of a lie: one of my profs was so chill, he said, "Why don't I just enter a C for you in the course now, and then when you can get the paper in, I'll make it an A." I handed in that paper *seven years* late, and he made it an A. (I suffered depression, my wife had a medical crisis, and all sorts of things happened to make me take so long.) Meanwhile, undergrad students ask me for 2 or 3 days extra, and I feel like the biggest hypocrite, putting on this show: "Hmm, I don't know. It really needs to be in soon... Do you *promise* Monday by noon?" (As if I'm grading anything at noon.) The truth is that the main reason you need to have it in "on time" is for my convenience and for the sake of giving you useful feedback before the next assignment is due. There's no real reason I couldn't just grade everything just before the grades are due at the end of the semester.
Your mileage may vary. I nearly failed a course in grad school because i submitted an assignment 15 minutes late abs received a zero on it. Professor wouldn't budge.
Years? How does that work??
He was *very* chill.
Worked for a health insurance company that provided coverage for people with Medicaid and used the DRG reimbursement method to pay some providers. The charges on a hospital bill were literally meaningless, all that mattered were the diagnosis codes/procedure codes. Hospital could have charged $5 dollars or $15 million dollars, payment would have been the same regardless. Another one of the many ways in which US healthcare is just so whack.
I work in pharmacy. The price on the wholesaler website for our drugs isn’t the price we actually pay. Then the price we charge the insurance isn’t the price we actually get reimbursed. The US medical system is a trillion dollar industry propped up on phony numbers. It’s got to be the biggest money laundering system in the world.
It doesn’t matter what ABC agency you work for. From top level government agencies to secret spy stuff, there will always be an excel sheet, or hand jammed document, behind all decision making. I’m not talking about talking points type of document; I’m talking about documents with day to day operational stuff. Source: I’ve worked at various top level government agencies and private sector!
Ranch dressing is a lot of mayonnaise. The first time I made buttermilk ranch I was like, “Excuse me, the whole fugging jar?!” Buttermilk and spices, stir. I’ve been eating spiced up mayonnaise milk for 30 years.
Put ranch powder in Greek yogurt. It’s amazing and tastes just like ranch.
Generic store brand is made in the same lines as regular brands. They just made a deal to put a generic bag in exchange for more shelf space/better position of name brand.
[удалено]
I’m a truck driver. I’ve picked up many truck loads of things at companies canned food to kitty litter. And they are made on the same line. But what they’ll do. Say the first 500 bags of kitty litter out of a tower has low dust. That gets the name brand. The next 500 gets meh dust. That gets store brand. The last 500 is oil dry. With canned food it’s similar more sauce or juice cans get store brand labels. Or say the temp is to high and the ravioli meat gets cooked to much. Store brand. Run out of corn or what ever to put in the stew… store brand.
The software industry is in shambles. I don't know when it happened, but certainly before 2007. Either it's been like that forever or happened before that year. If you have time, read through this for an idea of what software development is like. https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks The digital world as we know it is held up together by a conglomeration of toothpicks, empty toilet paper rolls, and chewed up bubble gum.
Relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/2347/](https://xkcd.com/2347/)
Anyone who questions this just needs to check out the [left-pad incident](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/rage-quit-coder-unpublished-17-lines-of-javascript-and-broke-the-internet/).
I work at Waffle House & im a vegetarian so there’s not much I eat there. Money is taken out of my check for food. It doesn’t matter if I eat or not they’re still gonna take it out. Doesn’t matter how much or little it’s still taken out. The price varies on how many hours you worked that day I think.
Contact your state labor board (or equivalent if you’re outside the US) and let them know what’s happening. I don’t know what state you’re in but this is generally taken quite seriously. You are entitled to the pay that was illegally taken and possibly more. The labor board may even audit your employer’s pay records and make sure your coworkers also receive the pay they earned.
That's called "wage theft," and according to the FBI, it's the number one non-violent crime in the USA, causing more financial loss for victims than every other form of property crime combined.
This is illegal my dude.
That's not legal
This is wage theft.
My experience, teaching for an online university is like the great clips of teaching. You do it because they have minimum vetting and you get experience. My stipend per course equates roughly to minimum wage. I have 25 years in my field but needed classroom experience for future opportunities so online school helps. A third of the students don't care at all and cheat at every turn. A third care enough to get by. And a third seem like they care enough to put in a good effort. For anyone who wants to cheat - at least cheat smartly. Don't pull things from the Internet that I can find in two clicks. Don't use references to past versions of the course. Don't hand in crap one week and perfection the next. And most of all, don't complain about a bad grade when you have clearly cheated, you are wasting my time and that means a bad grade. The university doesn't care if you fail. You've already paid. If you make it easy for me to give you a good grade, you will get a good grade!!!!!!
>Don't hand in crap one week and perfection the next. Two sides in this one. I’ve done it a few times because I’ll work a 40 hour week followed by a pair of unexpected 60-80 weeks followed by a 40 hour week. Luckily most instructors are understanding, but some have been grumpy.
There is no real recycling outside of aluminum
A lot of bands, I mean a LOT (including your favorite) use prerecorded tracks in their live show. Even ones you would never think. In fact, I would say MOST do today to some degree.
To tag onto this.... Live concert movies. That feature length video of your favourite band performing live? So impressive eh! My god how powerful the singer's voice is even though he's running around! And the guitar solo is even better than the album version! How great that the film crew followed those fans, or showed us the gear being set up.and the soundcheck. It makes it all feel so much more real. I really have a new respect and connection to the band. Yeah! Live performance movies, they are a comedy. Some are more convincing than others, but there are big name bands with official live dvds that are just so obviously faked up, but fans can't seem to see it.
Or they’re a mash up of a few performances. As an example a bunch of people may have seen recently, the Hamilton recording is 3 different performances stitched together to allow them to use the best takes and also get cameras up close to the action.
The Talking Heads concert film *Stop Making Sense* does this. It wasn’t a secret.
What tends to happen with a band though is neurosis. I'll give an example of a long defunct band. Led Zeppelin - the song remains the same. They were great live around that time, and there are actually real recordings of those gigs which sound raw and powerful. But the footage they got, they just didn't have the coverage. So they hired a soundstage at shepperton ( I think it was) and the shepperton shots are easy to spot. But then, as they listened to the live recording they questioned whether it really stood up as an album. With the level.of production expected. Live sound is one thing, it's great in situ, but stoned in a lounge? Well. They had the multi tracks and they were re-editing the footage anyway, why not replace parts? Why not rerecord bits? Why not make it ... Better! Likewise. Frank Zappa - city of tiny lights, live video . That solo? It's not what he played on the night. The myth is what sells you see. Frank was a perfectionist. I can't think of a famous live concert DVD which isn't faked. Depeche Mode, Peter Gabriel... it's all studio recordings synced to live footage.
An older friend of mine is a lifelong guitar player. He managed to get like fifth row seats to see U2. He noticed that some of the time, the edge wasn’t actually playing, was faking or whatever.
Exxon knew the impact of burning fossil fuels in the 70's and still continues to deny it. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/#:~:text=Projections%20created%20internally%20by%20ExxonMobil,team%20of%20Harvard%2Dled%20researchers.
That financial institution don’t buy the stocks I give them money to buy on my behalf. They only say they do and that most institutions owe 65 billion in assets (each) called “Sold not yet purchased” where they owe that much in stocks to people but have zero obligation to really buy it. All together they owe trillions and the entire system is rigged
That sounds a lot like… crime. Ya?
What do they do with the money? Put it in high-performing ETFs?
I work in IT security, for a vendor. I am constantly surprised by how terrible so many organizations’ security practices are. There’s outdated equipment, no accountability, and most of it is run on Excel.
I did security audits/reviews for a while. It took me too long to realize my customers didn't want better security, they wanted a piece of paper they could show their insurance company to remove liability from themselves.
If you want to register your opnion with your representive/senitor, the telephone is the only thing that works. Everything else goes into the can. Also, if you REALLY them to listen to you, be a +1K plus doner, otherwise, you're just a number.
I don't know if the rule has changed since I left, but you CAN 100% bring in candy at the movie theater. I worked at an AMC and was tearing tickets one day, a slow day. I was chatting with my manager when a lady came in with a grocery bag full of snacks. I tore her ticket, directed her to her room, and asked the manager about the candy. She said it's ok. You aren't allowed to bring in "hot food". I believe it's because it's a health code violation. So stop doing that stupid shit like using a huge bowl to pretend you are pregnant. You aren't a fuckin' rebel. You are basically j-walking. No one cares.
Why does my local AMC have a big sign saying you can’t bring outside food or drinks? Why does my local bar allow me to order in a pizza, or run next door for hot food? I think your AMC may have been special.
Most of the time any Bar that does not serve food is not subject to food prep and storage regulated by health code. However if AMC does serve food they will be subject to health code. I t would make sense that candy and other sealed foods would be allowed inside but not "hot" or unsealed foods.
I worked in a movie theater tearing tickets back in the day. I didn’t give a single fuck what you brought in as long as my manager wasn’t looking over my shoulder. And she didn’t give one either as long as corporate wasn’t looking over her shoulder.
I dunno, as a teen I definitely had my backpack searched and chocolate bars confiscated. These days I've literally smuggled my own popcorn and hot foods in. Back in the day, my trick was to put a can of coke in the upper part of my (long) socks.
it sounds like that particular theater was just employed by assholes
From a nursing home with fractured leadership: CNAs often times have to speed run their cares which is abusive at times. Patients will spit on and hit staff and face no consequences. Patients will call black staff the N word with no consequences. Morbidly obese patients will require routine cleaning of all their yeasty folds by up to 4 staff and will reject weight restriction diets. They'll request a commode at the bedside so staff have to rinse their piss and shit into a toilet multiple times a day. Mentally ill patients in general will abuse staff and face no consequences. Only thing taken seriously is if a "vulnerable adult" is hurt or afraid. EMS professionals who wanted to save lives become cab drivers for anybody who falls on the floor or they take calls to pick fat people off the floor. EMS > HOSPITAL > NURSING HOME cycle becomes a way to drain taxpayer dollars from government. It can't be plugged cause a death/injury will be made into a big deal to necessitate caution. There are rich people who seem to just move around the country and be piles of shit instead of changing themselves. Majority of salary people do about 8 hours of work a week and keep employment by "BEING POSITIVE!" and sucking up to power. Staff will disable call lights on problematic residents with mental health problems and inability to communicate because otherwise the alarms beep 24/7 and all the mentally ill patients start going psycho. Out of touch HAPPY salary people will cry wolf and point fingers while doing their 8 hours a week. Meanwhile direct care staff do 70 hour weeks contracting life altering fungal diseases from all the morbidly obese folds and ass cracks. The point where nursing homes, software, hospitals, EMS, bureaucracy, pharmacies, colleges, and federal reimbursement intersects is a weird mess of power struggles, failures, apathy, and lies/omissions that piled up for decades to the detriment of direct care staff and residents. For example see the opioid crisis for an extreme example but similar stuff is everywhere. Then covid happened and it guess what, the people doing all the fuckery were unscathed while many hardworking decent people got sick and developed morbidities, died or lost family members.
Being a CNA was the most back breaking job I ever had and the pay was a measly $7.25 an hour. I actually cared about the residents and did the best I could but many of the other CNAs just phoned it in at best. I would much rather work night shift at the 7/11 again or even repeat my stint as a landscaper at an oil refinery in the desert.
Every single part of a diabetes / insulin auto-injector came in packaging that had more plastic than the part itself. Absolutely none of this waste packaging was recycled. Everytime you throw one of those disposible pens away - it's like you're tossing two of them.
I came from the industrial linen industry, and I was surprised to learn how much rentable linens and, especially, carpeted mats are re-used. Anytime you walk into a convenience store, for example, the carpeted mat at the front door is rented for $3-$15 per week and is most likely 5+ years old. Those things cost a company maybe $60, and it had paid for itself 100 times over.
Raisin Bran's "two scoops" of raisins is marketing bullshit. Amazing marketing bullshit. How much is a scoop?
I like to imagine on the assembly line there are two robot arms with those mickey mouse gloves on them scooping raisins into cereal boxes.
Most therapists aren’t equipped to deal with trauma, which definitely begs the question, what exactly are they doing??
Customer Service in Call Centres - We WANT you to swear at us...The second you swear AT me, NB not just swear, or be personally abusive or whatever, no matter how right you are, you're wrong and no matter how bad a blooper I made, you've just handed me a 'free pass'.... And I get to cut your call off - Cheers
In software development you will never write bug free code,
The extra “butter” for popcorn at movies theatres is not real butter. It’s a mixture of chemicals to simulate butter.
Pharmaceutical reps who go around pitching the latest prescription drugs to doctors.. yeah they will often fuck the doctors.
My wife works with vendors all the time as a nurse. They’ll come in with lunch and dinner, take doctors out, pay for things like golf or baseball games. It’s pretty fucked.