Pointless gloves
Further to the post below, at Maccas we were instructed to always wear plastic disposable gloves when flipping the boigers.

Unfortunately they made it too slippy to hold the gherkins etc, so top brass came up with a great solution - we were advised to snip the fingers off.
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 14:50, Reply)

High Street shops
I'd forgotten about this, but one of my jobs when i worked in a clothes shop years ago was to slash holes in all of the shoes that hadn't been sold at the end of the summer season sale.

The reason they weren't just thrown away was that homeless people were taking them from the bins and wearing them, thereby "damaging the brand"!
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 14:47, Reply)

'erbicides
A famous US company took out a patent on the most popular total erbicide, but a company I used to work for decided that they'd try to muscle in on the market and make it via a different route.
They couldn't, despite many attempts, a whole plant dedicated to manufacture and thousands of hours of work.
So on the quiet they bought it from their competitor, rebranded it and sold under a fancy name for three times the price, as theirs. The chap responsible for the initial idea , which wasted millions of ££, was promoted...
(Countryslicker, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 14:44, Reply)

Amorous Badger (and Jolly Amusing Made Up Name)
Couldn't agree more.

Anyway, I've actually got a relevant answer this week...

For a mercifully brief time when I left school I worked in a food additives manufacturing plant.

My job was running the Gum Arabic line. Gum Arabic is the stuff they put in anything sticky to make it bind together - Mars bars, pork pies, paint, anything like that.

Some of the stuff in there was quite quite revolting, and it was a bit of a shock to think it was stuff you ate on a daily basis.

As an aside, many of the brainless cretins people I worked with did indeed declare stuff like "Uuurgh, I'm never eating another Mars Bar as long as I live!".

Now, I'm 34 - I've probably eaten several hundred Mars bars in my life, and they've never made me sick (apart from that time I ate a whole one in one bite, but that's another story). Knowing what's in them isn't suddenly going to make them disgusting is it, you morons? Just fucking eat it and shut up!

Likewise all the people who've posted stuff on here about eating in restaurants. I've never (knowingly) tasted any jizz, blood, pus, mucus or otherwise in my food, or been made sick by it, so until I do I'll keep going out to eat.

And finally, not all competitions are scams - courtesy of Guitarist magazine I won a rather lovely ESP guitar earlier this year! \o/
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 14:36, Reply)

POINTLESS GLOVES
In the town where i work, there is a sandwich cafe, they make well nice sandwiches, but the birds that all work there, wear these "special hygiene" gloves.

What's the point if you hand them the money (money, apparently carries the most germs and crap) into the same gloved hands that made the sandwich.

The clucking dumb bitches, why bother, at least you can wash your hands from time to time unlike the one pair of gloves they wear allday!

not that i care, it just fucking pointless.

rant over.

my trade is not in sarnies...
(burkymurk likes to jerk, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 14:34, Reply)

Ooooo. Political.
Rather than pay a decent wage and attract intelligent recruits, we use a entry test easier than a GCSE and rely on bullying megalomaniac thugs happy to do the job for the power they could never earn otherwise.

Saves us a rake of cash unless they get overzealous and we get fined (and here's the pisser - if we do, someone else picks up the bill!)
(Sir Ian Blair, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 14:33, Reply)

Lube it up
I used to make a certain lubricunt product that goes into your car.
Having quality control is useless, everyone knows every way around it, even to keeping a drum of lube to use as samples for another tank of st00f.
Why did your car sieze again?

Probably cos you used a competitors product. Ours was way better despite the undue efforts we made to get it into the marketplace.
(Bluffboy South Africa! World Champions!!!, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 14:30, Reply)

financial advisers
1. are crooked
2. do take a huge amount of commission and then fuck off and leave the client to it for a number of years
3. do churn
4. should not be trusted with your nan

anyone need any advice?
(Jim the Cat, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 14:11, Reply)

Promotion within the NHS(and quite possibly any other large organisation)
Work like this : If someone is not competent at their given job, promote them until they are.
( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 13:55, Reply)

Ok, just one more.
Within my job (in the NHS), I come across people quite often who have no idea what they're doing - these are different from the people I mentioned below who appear to do nothing.

These people have clearly defined roles, they just never seem to actually do them.

Projects grind to a halt with "Oh, we're just waiting for so-and-so to get those figures" or "We asked such-and-such to find out how much it would cost and he hasn't got back to us yet", etc.

Why aren't these people sacked?
(Marvin Kettle is boiling, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 13:47, Reply)

Final one for now.
Being promoted to a new project in the NHS:

"We want you to run this amazing new flagship project for us. It'll be a real feather in your cap, and it will be great on your CV."
"Oh, except that you need a team of 12 people and we can only give you 8, so you'll have to make do..."
"But that's okay, because we've only got room for 7 desks."
"And 6 PCs"
"Also, they're not quite up to minimum spec for this new system, but they're pretty good so it should be okay."
"Oh, and there's no-one to take over your old position so could you keep an eye on that too?"

Ace.
(Marvin Kettle is boiling, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 13:44, Reply)

Another NHS one...
The NHS (at least where I work) seems to be at least 40% staffed by people who appear to have no discernible purpose whatsoever. You see them all the time; they never appear to be doing anything, they wander around all over the hospital, sometimes looking purposeful and sometimes just wandering... sometimes they send out emails reminding us to do stuff that they clearly don't understand, and that's it.

The really galling thing is that they earn far more money than me for doing this.
(Marvin Kettle is boiling, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 13:42, Reply)

It's probably not so much a "secret"...
...but I work for the NHS.

(I'm actually a /board regular, I've made this account in case someone spots this post and I get sacked...)

The new computer modernisation program that's under way is an utter shambles. It's over budget, behind schedule, and in the vast majority of cases, leaves hospitals with a new system that isn't as good as their old one.

Where I work we went live with a new Patient Admin system earlier this year. This system is supposed to keep track of where patients are, when their appointments are, stuff like that.

There's no audit trail, so if someone dies and the family sues us we've got no way of telling who recorded stuff or when - the stuff that we can find out is unreliable because the server changes the information when it runs scripts and backups, so one day it could look like a patient's appointment was booked on the 15th of May at 3 o'clock by Jane Smith, the next day it will say that it was booked on the 31st of August by "Administrative User".

The users hate it - one secretary spoke to me and said "It used to take me 4 clicks to get into this screen on the old system, now it takes 18"... 18 clicks, just to access one piece of information!

/rant
(Marvin Kettle is boiling, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 13:40, Reply)

in addition to phone "support" we have to deal with a metric fuckload of emails
there's a half hour response time on answering these.
However if you send a reply, say if we asked you for more information then the mail would land in our personal queue rather than the group one.

We have to make sure the group queues are empty when our US overlords colleagues come on shift at 1
so that email reply that you send in, it doesn't go to the back of the queue, it goes into the "ignore" queue until one o clock
even if it's really urgent
even if you sent it at 7.05

our asses are covered as we responded within 30 minutes

all the more reason to send all available info with your initial request and not to send mails like "I can't access the tool" or "my router is broken, fix please" or the ever wonderful blank email with a blank subject line and blank attachment
( VampireMonkeyOnSpeed a super sexy sexual sex terrorist sex, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 13:25, Reply)

Lots of years ago I used to be an operator for a large company that is British and does lots of telecoms stuff.
If you were a nuisance caller or had upset one of the girls with abuse you'd get yours. Many people would be repeats offenders and be rather evil and obnoxious. With lists of people, family members with phone numbers noted, you could have a lot of fun with phone system.

CLI, Caller Identity can be changed. Some folk would call up one nuisance caller with another nuisance caller's number and visa versa (Like a conference call which they were not expecting) They'd both accuse the other of calling them and have fight. They'd be displaying each others number :)

More fun was had with overriding the line when a person was on a call and making ghost noises. They call us up and say the line was faulty or haunted. We'd connect them to an engineer, not another operator of course, the problem would go away.

If you leave the phone off the hook; an operator could override that and listen in. Typically people leave the phone off the hook whilst fucking. If a wife/husband is calling up to find out why the line is engaged, at a push of a button you could let them listen too. Or change the CLI of a nuisance caller whose fucking, call their wife/husband and let them listen to their partner having fun.

There is a lot more.
(waxdart hello., Tue 2 Oct 2007, 13:08, Reply)

Sainsburys
Don't bother taking your recycling to Sainsburys. As soon as the recycling bins get full at the front of the store, the excess just gets wheeled round the back and slung in the skip.

A lot of things go into that skip, a lot of things that could be of use to others less fortunate.

Virtually every food item that goes in is near-perfect and could have fed the homeless. Every single non-food item is the same; I'm sure charity shops would have been happy to take things like toys, books and sunglasses, (Prada sunglasses that is, with RRPs of £50+ on them), but we were expressly forbidden from giving them to anybody.

Some fruit and vegetables went to the local animal shelter, if they were past their best and humans wouldn't eat them. Anything else just got slung; including about 100 loaves of bread every day.

You're not supposed to put meat in the skip because of health and safety. You're supposed to pay for a wagon to come and pick it up. You're also supposed to store it in the freezer so that it doesn't rot. Guess where we put it?

It's not surprising that environmental health visited us on no less than five occasions during a single year. Not when you consider that the management had, in their wisdom, installed the skip behind the main intake vent for the store's air-conditioning.
( HexShaped remembers when this was all fields, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 13:02, Reply)

Curious!
Now we know what a lot of people on this site look like and what jobs they do - what next?

Inside leg measurements?

Mines 31"
( girlinthehole, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 13:01, Reply)

Spud packer
I had an awful summer job working in a spud packing factory many years ago.

No matter what super market you go to. Its the same spud, just different bag.

And as for those spuds that look freshly dug up and dirty. It's the same batch of washed spuds, as all the rest, just some arse got paid minimum wage to shovel a bag of earth bag back in before its sealed and sent off.
(waxdart hello., Tue 2 Oct 2007, 12:51, Reply)

Planned obsolescence
@k2k6

I was chatting to a friend who's tight with people inside the car industry (as in, the car manufacturers, not mechanics), and he was explaining that modern cars are designed to last five years. Meaning, all the components are built with a planned five-year life span -- anything beyond that is a bonus.

That's why car warranties are usually for three years or fewer: that gives a comfortable cushion before any parts are likely to start going wrong. And why a car that's approaching the five-year mark is likely to start costing considerably more than it's worth.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 12:41, Reply)

Dirty secrets of being a parent!
...and believe me, there are plenty.

One of my favorite stories is on my son. I have a hard and fast rule in my house: no food outside of the living room or kitchen. With three kids, it takes no time at all to trash furniture and rugs as they slobber salsa, pizza sauce, soda and other mess when they eat while watching TV. So food is banned from the living room and bedrooms.

One night my son was telling stories on getting away with stuff, and bragged about how he and the others used to eat in the living room when I wasn't home, and if they spilled something they scrubbed it up so I never found out about it.

I smiled at him. "It worked, then. All I was trying to do was to keep the living room clean. The end result is the same, right?"

He went from gloating to outraged in less than a second.

Result!
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 2 Oct 2007, 12:12, Reply)

Back in the 1990s...
I worked for one of the "Big 4" firms of civil engineers.

The office was an old 1960s block, consisting of 4 floors and a carpark underneath.

On each floor was a vending machine which served tea, coffee, iced water, coca cola, and something laughingly referred to as Chicken Soup.

The firm employed 2 guys to maintain the building which included the vending machines, and they did their job with surprising gusto.

One month, several of my team, including myself were ill with a seriously upset stomach, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. At one point I was hallucinating, but it all stopped within 24 hours and I returned to work.
This spread to many other staff in the building.

On my return to work, being too fragile to drink tea or coffee, I got water from the cooler next to the machine, just as the maintenance guy was vigorously scrubbing and cleaning the nozzle with liberal quantities of Mr Muscle.

I kid you not, when the next person came to get a cup of coffee out of that machine, there was a good quarter inch head of froth on that cup.
(Vic Flange, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 11:40, Reply)

McDonalds vegetarian fries
I worked in McDonalds in Australia for a bit, and there seemed to be an inconsistency betweem the promotional leaflets which read "our fries are pure potato cooked gently in sunflower oil", and the room sized cardboard boxes they came in, which had about 15 ingredients written on the side including "animal fat".

What was weird was that it took the protestors so long to notice.
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 11:39, Reply)

And still they come
I worked in a breadcrumb factory a while back. It made the 'breadcrumbs' that went around, well, anything that had a crumbed finish to it. In all fairness the place was well-run and very tight on hygiene - but the cleaning had been farmed out to a separate company.

While the cleaners themselves were very careful to don overalls and overshoes on entering the 'food' area, the mop, bucket, etc. they were using were exactly the same as the ones used to clean the outside offices, changing rooms and lavatories.
(uncle whippity, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 11:28, Reply)

McDonald's
I'm not sure if the ice is the most expensive part of a large drink, but when you factor in the electricity to power the multiplex which chills and pumps the stuff downstairs where it mixes with the syrup, plus the ice machine and the CO2 cannisters, I doubt the syrup is the most expensive part of the drink.

It's probably the petrol to have the stuff delivered to the restaurant. Plus the wage of the poor disenchanted student as they dawdle over to the drinks machine, press the button then dawdle over to the fries. Then stop and talk to the drive-thru worker while the fries drain, by which time the drink is now flat and you need another.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 11:27, Reply)

onlineamiga
Don't drink the water either. it's a well-known fact that any glass you drink has been pissed out by around 7 people before you.
( Kroney, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 11:17, Reply)

I work in a hair salon.....
Just your average inner city salon, not a poncy you'll-be-charged-5-times-more-because-we-are in-the-city-centre-and-flip-our-scissors-about-abit-to-make-us-look-competent-and-justify-the-charge-salon. We dont get up to half of the rancid things all you other b3tans get up to. We do though;
Make the colour up out of whatever bits of left over colour are close enough to what it says on the record card, as we cant be bothered to walk down to the stock cupboard and get the correct colour.
Tell people we cant fit them in if they look like rancid tramps and are asking for something that doesnt require a hair wash first.
If a junior is making coffee for a client they dont like, they rinse the spoon in the mop bucket of dirty water first.
We talk about the clients when we go into the staff room, even if we have just been told something in confidence.
We send juniors out to get our shopping so we dont have to go after work.
We say a cut wouldnt suit your face shape if it will take more than our allocated half hour to cut, instead we will suggest a funkier (quicker) cut to flatter.
We do, however, work extremely hard, for hardly any money.
( randomwomanwholikespink, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 11:09, Reply)

When I worked for DYNOROD
I used to find a lot of crap in my food.
I never used to wash my hands a lot.
(Vic Flange, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 11:04, Reply)

Rachelswipe
All this crap in our food is actually helping our immune systems.

Google immune system j curve.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 10:55, Reply)

Retail/ NHS
Retail - as Frankspencer said; also....
* When you are told that there is no more of what you want in the stockroom there is, we just cant be arsed looking.
* Never buy anything from a High Street fashion retailer that rhymes with balloon - that skirt may cost 80 quid but after 1 wash the hem'll come down and it'll look shit.
* If the girl behind the till tells you she is phoning another store to see if they have that necklace you DESPERATELY NEED - she isnt, shes phoning her home phone, then will tell you they havent got it.
Everyone who works in a shop hates customers with every ounce of their being, and sees them simply as grasping materialistic douchebags.

NHS - in stark contrast to the above - we are doing our best, ok? We are short staffed and often work unpaid overtime. So dont complain. And if you come in to A&E with a foriegn object jammed up your jacksie, the staff will laugh. Sorry. Wouldnt you?
(insomniac girl all my best things are in hock, Tue 2 Oct 2007, 10:54, Reply)