Dirty buns
When I was an A-Level student I has a Saturday job, for my sins, in the McDonalds in our local town. It was one of the worst jobs I've ever had, and as soon as I turned 18 I left for a bar job. They had slogans which were supposed to motivate you to work even when it was quiet such as "Don't relax, Ajax" and "If you've time to lean you've time to clean". As you can imagine, that certainly motivated the spotty teenage workforce.

Anyway, one Saturday I was stuck working in the backroom where all the trays, frying baskets etc were cleaned with extremely hot water & detergent, and where all the bins were along with the trash compactor - the only thing that made that particular job worthwile. It beat doing a litter patrol as the big McD anorak made you an instant target for whatever the '80s equivalent of hoodies were.

So, there I am up to my elbows in grease when one of the burger "chefs" comes running in in a panic. He'd dropped a quarter pounder bun and it had been trodden on so he needed a spare and didn't have time to wait for a new one to toast, so of course the obvious place to source it was the bin. I watched as he rummaged, muttering, searching for a bun that wasn't completely mangled or half eaten. Eventually he found one that just needed a bit of a wipe down to get rid of the fag ash clinging to it and he was set. Of course, being a well brought up girl I didn't let him serve it, but when he assured me they did this all the time I vowed never to eat anything there I hadn't either cooked myself or seen being cooked.

Terrible place, terrible food & terrible employers.

Length? I work in TV and we call it duration.
(I Love Your Shoes, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:33, Reply)

Sometimes
...when we software developers argue really, really vehemently that something is a bad idea and come up with lots of clever-sounding reasons why whatever you're asking for would be a mistake...

...it's just because it would be hard and frankly, we just can't be arsed.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:31, Reply)

Putting the 'Fun' In Funeral
I worked for a couple of years at a firm of undertakers. Most grieving relatives thought we were the paragon of virtue but would they have choked on their post funeral vol-au-vents if they had know of the following malpractises.

1) A young drunk funeral director who photographed himself naked with an also naked corpse of a recently departed local councilor. He had adjusted her face into a gurning smirk, placed a raw haddock in her mouth and and a multicoloured clown wig on her head. It looked like a promotional photo for the Little and Large Summer tour.

2) The Funeral Director who stole all the gold fillings from a deceased businessman's mouth and had a large, and I felt, rather unsightly sovereign ring forged from it by a goldsmith in the next town.

3) We used to provide a cremation service as well. Quite often the ashes would get spilt or lost, so we'd burn off a pile of newspapers in the furnace and fill an urn with that. Relatives would sometimes question why their deceased relatives had been cremated with a copy of Razzle.

4) Have you ever wondered what funeral directors keep under their top hats? Well one of my colleagues kept 2 smoked salmon rolls, a bag of smiths salt and shake and a yorkie bar. One summer, the yorkie melted, and rivulets of chocolate dripped down his head and into his eyes, making it look like he had a small creature under there which was having some sort of dirty protest.

5) When the mortuary was out of space, we used to dress the deceased up in evening wear and leave them propped up around the showroom, to make them look like customers. Every so often some doddery old codger would try and hold a conversation with one, and would be slightly non-plussed when one of my colleagues would turn up and load the body onto a sack barrow to take them into the chapel.
(Vic Flange, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:26, Reply)

If Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness....
...God must have bum germ hands because when I worked as a cleaner at a local church, we had to use the same cloth to clean the sinks and surfaces in the bathrooms as we used to scrub the chutney chute chowder splats from the toilet bowls.
( gypsy turnips, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:23, Reply)

Re: Weetobix
It doesn't matter how long you estimate, because the client will change their mind at the last minute, and senior management will just arselick them instead of pointing out it's too late, so you'll have to rewrite all your work anyway, which will cost double the time you estimated.

I'm a senior software engineer. I speak from experience.
( Stevedix http://www.stevedix.de/blog, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:23, Reply)

Radio
In no way at all did a major national commercial radio station keep people calling in once a winner of a competition had already been picked.

No Way. And even if they had, I'd definately not have been the winner they'd already chosen, listening to them encouraging people to call.

Still, nice telly.

Stu

Oh, and Length? 40 inches, across the diagonal.
(bluestu, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:22, Reply)

IT, dirty secrets
Actually, not that many.

We won't read your mail, unless it starts hitting spam catching keywords or lots of people take the piss. However, you can't hide what you're doing, and clearing your browser cache will not help.

The reboot advice is either because we're a) crap or b) it takes too long to diagnose the real cause

We'll always slightly over spec machines, because requirements will always expand, never reduce.

Don't be too much of an arse, because you'll get asked to replace software or hardware, rather than us spending our time doing extensive investigative work. Never expect v1.0 to be error free..

All hardware sucks. All software sucks. Just in different areas. If you want it to be stable *don't mess with it* once set up.

Whilst we may know a fair bit about applications, diagnosis, programming, operating systems, networking and so on we don't know everything about specific cases (i.e. how a Quadro and ServRAID copes with a shared interrupt on a 975X board). We won't specify any old crap, because we know claims of a product being fully tested with verified drivers are always bollocks.

There are tools which can make things faster, or give you more control. With practically no exceptions this comes at a risk of breaking other stuff, which is why they're not immediately available to plebs.

Sometimes software is an utter ripoff, but sometimes it isn't. It's especially not a ripoff if you have to have more than one emergency fix. You're also paying for future release development, and the money has to come from somewhere.

We find a lot of this stuff boring too, so don't think every nuance of computing excites us.
(EssY, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:21, Reply)

long long ago at a careers fair far far away
I sold* my soul away from engineering, away from good honest computer technocracy and became, well I’ll be blunt, a management consultant.

And having enthusiastically joined the dark side I’ve successfully pillaged my way across various projects, clients and companies over the intervening years in a ruthless pursuit of cold hard cash. To be honest it’s been more fun that a barrel full of greased monkeys and a family sized tub of methamphetamine, spurn those who seek to advise you away from such a career, it’s well paid, you get to travel business class a lot and female management consultants are all incredibly dirty in bed.

Anyhoo, there are only a few, self evident, dirty tricks to this trade.
1 Never ever ever say no**. e.g.
Q: Can you fly the F-15e?
A: Well as you can see I have years of experience with paper aeroplanes and cunningly shaped party balloons and the parallels are clear.
2 Always appear to be only slightly smarter than the customer, even if they are as dumb as a box of rocks and dribble. This makes it much easier to take all the money out of the building.
3 The words “intelligent client organisation” guarantee the exact opposite, so change 50% more.
4 The words “PRINCE2” used anywhere in a project spec doom the whole enterprise, charge 75% more.
5 Be like the Borg, assimilate everything and everyone into your way of thinking, or if possible your organisation and then start charging for managing your own teams.
6 There is always a handy client-side scapegoat, your first task is to identify that person.
7 Never get knowingly caught delivering anything, that’s the job of the scapegoat in #6.
8 A well written strategy is worth approximately 1000 times per word the effort in a well written procedure. Charge appropriately.
9 Business change is easy if you actually ask the end users or mid level business managers what they need. Ruthlessly expunge anyone found doing this.

Of course few of these are ever expressed in such clear language but the basics are there.
Enjoy.

* and believe me I got the better side of that deal I can tell you.
** unless money is involved, feel free to say no to requests for free stuff, but do it nicely.

Some of the above may not be true, remember #11 is always lie, always.
( edz314 smelled the glove on, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:15, Reply)

Beauty Therapy
Me personally and a laod of my mates are filthy chain smokers yet we promote good health.
Don't believe beauticians.
(shellziimoo89, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:13, Reply)

Cold Calling
Whilst unemployed, I worked for a shit-hole of a phone poll company in Leverkusen. The "Training" I was given was laughable. I just had to sit in a room for half a day whilst some idiot wittered on. I actually did listen to it, and can report the following :

It's an utter waste of time having your phone number put on a list by BT so that you won't be called up by someone trying to sell you stuff or ask your opinion for some fairly useless survey. This is because telephone companies allocate phone numbers in blocks of 1000. It's fairly easy to randomly pull out phone numbers from these blocks, which is essentially what the call centre software does.

From experience I can tell you this :

As these "opinion polls" are shift (remove the f) work, if you're given a poll for people in the 18-30 age bracket for the day shift, it's fairly obvious that anyone who answers the phone is going to be a crusty old pensioner who doesn't know what the hell you're on about. If you don't complete a significant number of successful calls, however, you're out on your arse, and they will cut your money at the slightest excuse, so you usually end up making fake data just to keep the job.

Some of the senior staff were friendly, but the immediate supervisors were power-mad fascist bastards, particularly one of them who had a face like a pizza and a haircut like a dead skunk stapled to his head.

I lasted about a month, but had the pleasure of telling them where they could stick it when I got another, infinitely better-paying proper job.

Length. A month, but it seemed like a year.
( Stevedix http://www.stevedix.de/blog, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:12, Reply)

Re: Work Estimates
Weetobix, I've gotta say I wish my time estimates were so easy to calculate.

At the start of a project I have to give craploads of estimates for every part of a task over the project. Unfortunately, given the randomness of what I'll be doing, I'm giving a definite answer how long it'll take to do something completely intangible. Needless to say, everything is as stretched out and vague as possible, for two reasons.

One, skiving (natch), and two, occassionally, the three week gaps between project milestones get shortened to three days, with no variation on the work entailed. So it kind of evens out.

If the car industry were ever as cowboy as the games industry, George Ford would still be working on his second car, the first one having had wheels randomly fall off, killing everyone aboard.
(ShiftyBastard won the World Cup on World Soccer Champs 2010!, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:11, Reply)

Special offer? Special offer my bum
When a student, I had a horrible job working at a reasonably well-known cash and carry. Oh, all right then: Makro.

Every now and again, I had to stick the reductions stickers on various already-terrible items for sale. Legally - Ms Swipe, can you help me out here? - goods have to be on sale for a certain length of time at a certain price x before you can say that they've been reduced from x to y.

In practice, what this means is that you look up the new price x, and make up the pre-reduction price y. Make y too high, and noone'll believe it - but keep it plausible an noone'll ask.

OK - it's hardly up there with the Barlow Clowes swindle, and nothing that you didn't already suspect. But it's therapeutic for me to make it public, so tough.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:07, Reply)

All us down the library, after closing time, huddle in the old smoking room and read Lady Chatterly's Lover
Edith even has a laminated page number guide to all the filthy bits!
( St. Defenestration The REAL one, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:59, Reply)

Petuniadb
*shakes head and giggles*
( girlinthehole, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:59, Reply)

A while back
When I was a chef, we'd often spill the beans.



What?
( petuniadb, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:53, Reply)

Work estimates
I'm a computer programmer.
If your boss asks you how long a task will take, use this method:

If it will take 1 day, then say it will take 3 days. Now you can do the task in 2 days and your boss is happy as you're ahead of schedule having spent a day skiving :)
( Weetobix, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:50, Reply)

foodstuff
I once had to paint the "sell by" date off a load of packets of cheese, that were about a year out of date; we also bought battery eggs, but asked if we could have ones that were covered in chicken shit, so we could pretend they were free- range and charge more.
Also, don't ever eat "genuine Whitby scampi";it's possibly a worm tied up in a ball and chucked in the batter.
(Bear Pookie The Frankly Challenged. Halloween is coming to town., Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:50, Reply)

If...
...you’re a fairly senior accountant at a large Higher Education establishment and you’re working on your financial projections, it’s probably best to remember that you get the money for undergraduate students from the Student Loans Company in February, not September when people actually register.

It’s also a good idea to bear in mind that if you abolish the 5% reduction in fees to foreign students for paying up front, then the chances are that said students will take advantage of the ability to pay in instalments, thereby further decreasing the amount of cash you’ve got sloshing around at this time of year.

That might have something to do with why every payroll run sends you further and further into the red.

And yes, that’s you I’m looking at, University of Manchester…
(Mattblack Has a Program Alarm, 1201, on, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:37, Reply)

o and
special gift sets of wine bottles for christmas. The cheapest, filthiest plonk possible. You're paying for the wooden box & straw combo - happy f*ckin xmas suckas!
(shanvishnu, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:36, Reply)

ESL academies in South Korea
Right now I work at a decent company but I've tangled with some pretty brutal companies in the past.

The ESL industry in Korea is a joke. The first secret is that the ultimate goal of most people studying English is to get a good TOEIC score so they can land in a higher salary bracket at work. Companies do not care about your English ability, just your score on a multiple choice test. I strongly believe they see it as your ability to commit to a difficult challenge and do your best in the face of total incompetence. One of my former students worked at the DMV and said she needed to study English for her job. I asked if she needed to interact with English speakers at the DMV; she said no, just that she needs to pass a test to get a promotion. At best it's a measure of your obedience and your standardised-test abilities.

One other important thing: these tests do not help. They are largely vocabulary tests, asking you if you know the meaning of words like "conflagration" or "angioplasty" rather than any demonstrable skill.

At my current job I had a gifted student who was 14 who had a rare passion for creative writing and storytelling. She would post her stories on my website for me to proofread, and we would have a ten-minute conversation each day which was like talking to an actual English-speaker. It was successful so her twelve-year-old sister was signed up also. This girl was less skilled than her sister, but she shared her zest for writing and loved speaking. This lesson also was successful, so their 16-year-old cousin signed up. This girl didn't understand basic English questions like "How was your day?" and "What's your favourite food?" She would answer with an ear-piercing "Uhhh?" One day, I was talking with my first student, the 14-year-old writer, and mentioned that I was having trouble communicating with her cousin. The conversation went like this:
HER: No, my cousin is very good at English.
ME: Well, she's not good at writing. Or speaking. Or understanding what I say to her.
HER: Oh. Well, she's good at English because she gets good test scores.

I rest my fucking case.

Most academies geared toward kids have a few techniques to make it look like the kids are learning a lot. This impresses their parents who control the pursestrings for tuition. The most credible academies are the ones that assign the most homework, because it makes the kids look the busiest. This is a major problem, because kids spend more time on academy homework than actual school homework. The academy workload is pushing school work out of the way. And what does doing well at an academy get you? You graduate to the next grade. Nothing else. No school credit, no university scholarships, just a new book. That you must pay through the nose for. Studying at these academies is more likely to set you back in your real schoolwork. More importantly, children in Korea have no free time, thus no chance to develop important social and creative faculties. The life of a Korean youth is just periods of anxiety between ball-buster tests.

I had a job at one of the worst academies, just for a few days as a favour to a friend. The boss was a very strict woman who spent more time disciplining teachers (in front of students) than the students themselves, many of whom were out of control and whose parents were paying a small fortune for them to sit in a corner and scribble graffiti for four hours a day. The singleminded curriculum was getting the students to phoenetically memorise a page-long speech about an ancient king of Korea, which they would recite as a chorus at the end of the month in front of their parents, who would then be so impressed by this performance (which demonstrates no practical skills) that they would extend their contracts with the academies.

It's a con. If you have kids in Korea, don't work them to death. The kids of the future are the ones who don't commit suicide by age 12 because they're stressed out about the workload.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:36, Reply)

Various places I've worked:
Industrial Laundry: surgical greens, picked up off floor, dusted down and stuck in an oven for a bit to 'disinfect'

Large supermarket chain grocery: on orders from management, changing sell-by dates on chicken & ham cutlets to sell off the excess stock

Kitchen in large hotel chain: the usual emissions ending up in the usual sauces & soups. Not even I could bring myself to partake in this practice (stage fright more than anything)

Multi-story car park: "Sorry we've no spaces left. What's this, a 50 quid note? Why drive on in good sir. Please use one of our 'reserved' spaces"
(shanvishnu, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:32, Reply)

I used to work in a camping shop
(the kind that sells tents, walking boots rucksaceks etc. Not the kind of shop where one sells 'I'm freeeeee' slogans)

When bored we used to play throw the hunting knife into the tents in the store room meaning many people got very very wet on their holiday.

I also sent people all over the world in inappropriate camping gear. Basically we were told to push whatever had the highest margin regardless of it's suitability. This resulted in me sending a man to the alps in a non-waterproof tent with a rucksack that had all the strength and durability of an anemic fart. He never came back but I'll never get accused of his murder as long as they don't find his inappropriately clothed body in the upper alps until after I die(I also sold him a coat that was as waterproof as a net!). This is the real reason why I'm worried about global warming!

Oh and if you find yourself in a camping store buying walking boots, please don't ask advice from the shop staff on whether they think your boots fit. If your boots are too small they'll tell you the leather will stretch (it will but only by the tiniest amount and never in the length). If your boots are too big they'll give you the 'well you'll be wearing two pairs of socks and your feet expand when they hot as you walk'.
( sneep used to date Freddie Starr's hamster, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:31, Reply)

Well!
Can I just say - I'm loving this qotw.
( girlinthehole, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:26, Reply)

Interesting to read about the car industry profit margins......
.....perhaps you ought to try Audio as an industry. Almost without exception the following margins are applicable on stereo gear;
Manufacturer- 20-25%
Distributor-35-40%
Dealer 40-50%
Thus a £800 stereo amp will be £160 worth tops and that usually includes shipping it from the Far East as well. At the seriously high end where I used to sell gear, we had a £22,000 digital to analogue convertor that had a cost (less VAT) of £6600. Given that the manufacturer- selling direct in this instance habitually enjoyed making 60% on his sales as well, you can see that life isn't too arduous for all concerned.
In other words, don't try and haggle for your car but go nuts when choosing your next stereo.
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:21, Reply)

PROFIT MARGINS....
I work in customer services for a wholesale medical company and had been on at a colleague to write some literature on new magnifying loupes from a Dutch supplier. After badgering him on numerous occaisions here was his `literature' for our customers......

****** Medical MAGNIFICATION LOUPE



Following a long and exhausting fact-finding mission to the coffee shops and brothels of Amsterdam, ******* Medical is proud to present the latest innovation from our crazy Dutch neighbours.

Utilising cutting edge design, cheap plastic and velcro, you too could look like the mad professor out of “Back To The Future”.

In the words of Henry Ford this attractive headwear is available in any colour you like so long as it is black.

With two different magnification lenses you can see things BIG or even BIGGER.

For instance with the 2.5x lens you can see things this big, and with the 4x lens you can see things this BIG!

Try wearing one loupe over another to make things seem
absolutely massive

Make those big jobs look much smaller by wearing your loupe backwards……….
The new Lactona Loupe, does exactly what it says on the box – magnifies things……ooooh the work of Satan!

“****** Medical, taking the piss and selling it on at 100% mark-up.”

I never did send it to our customer...Shame really!
( DUMBLONDE is a rubber lover girl, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:17, Reply)

Not really a trade secret
More a way of making things easier!

We provide an electronic product reference tool for our biggest client: basically an ActionScript Flash app compiled to an EXE. We used to farm this project out to a freelancer who knew nothing about OOP and created a big, fat, bloated application that was frankly shite. Any minor update would literally take the freelancer hours to implement.

Until I was asked to redo it. Now the data is held inside the app as a multi-dimensional array and, as such, is very easy to update. One minor change is as simple as changing a bit of code. And, the way I've written it, updates to the app take very little time at all. So the turnaround is quicker and the client is deliriously happier and I got a loverly new Mac Pro as a thank you.

We still charge the client the same amount of moolah for it though, as much as we used to when it would take over a week for any updates! But they can afford it...
(Ghostlight, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:15, Reply)

Whether the weather is hot...
I study meteorology, and thus I can tell you that everything you hear coming out of the mouths of TV weather people and on the radio is GUESSWORK!

See, forecasters stick all the data into their models, look at what comes out and say 'pfft, that can't possibly be right', then they change it and make the forecast. Then it turns out both the model and the forecaster were wrong.

Et Viola, that is why we always blame it on the weatherman.
(Stu Moo winner of five nobble piece prizes, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:13, Reply)

estate agents
yes, we make up fictitious viewings so that we can have sex in your house when you leave the keys with us. if there's time we have a shower before getting back to the office and we do it again in there, too.

sadly i'm not an estate agent any more, i'm a lawyer. and lawyers? lawyers never get laid at all...
( rachelswipe with a fork, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:10, Reply)

International Pre Paid calling cards, the ones you buy in the newsagent
I used to design the pricing modules for these cards. You know the way it says Australia 2p a minute but when you use them it seems to be cost an awful lot more? Well that was me, I could do whatever I wanted as long as I justified it in the small print.

I still feel twangs of guilt when I'm in a shop and someone buys one of them. Not so guilty as to actually say anything to the unsuspecting poor punter.

Don't blame me...they made me do it.
( sneep used to date Freddie Starr's hamster, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:09, Reply)

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaar
My dead dirty secret of the trade is that "indian call centers" are actually in england, they just can't be bothered doing their job properly so they put on an indian accent!

*don't tell anyone!* :P
(Squid83, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 15:09, Reply)