Not me but the inside dope that Billy Piper didn't exactly get round to
My current best friend and former lover (sigh) was a very high class escort (1,500 pounds a night guys!). The truth - she felt almost all the guys were freaks, that they were pathetic for having to pay for sex and all of them thought they were the best lovers in the world when strangely for her it was the fat ones that she only ever got orgasms off and then not that often.

I once was in the room (the guy wanted her to be there with her boyfriend for a 3sum and I was up for it not ever being the jealous type) as he called out "Take it bitch, take it hard" as he was behind her doggy fashion - she gave me a big wink and rolled her eyes and I nearly burst out laughing at the unfit, small cocked guy thinking he was an amazing shag.

One guy paid her to domme him (ie female dominatrix) and she had no idea how to do that since it wasn't her thing. So she got some superglue took a china cup and saucer and glued the latter to his back - and sat drinking cha with her pinkie out as he served as a table for her kneeling at her feet.

You would be amazed at how many clients thought she really liked them and would send "loving" texts day and night for weeks afterwards. You self-delusional idiots she only did it 'coz you could afford her. Pay for sex and that's the deal - sex as quick as possible and no love: don't pretend it is anything more than that.

Oh god the 'length' jokes here were most of the guys....
(beaverwastemanagement a real company. I want to work for them!, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 12:34, Reply)

I work for a particular insurance company...
If you start off saying you'd like to pay monthly, we'll land you with an 8% admin fee*. But that's before anything is actually finalised. So once we go through your quote and get to the payment screen, we'll pop another 8% on there just for good measure.
The trick is to always say you want to see how much it is before you make up your mind. Otherwise we'll rip the arse out of you.


*Admin, my arse. We're not getting as much interest out of your money as possible, so we're going to charge the fuck out of you to make up for it.
(baldylocks, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 12:33, Reply)

Liquid gold
Many years ago I worked for one of the booze providing companies at Ascot racecourse.

If you have a box at the racecourse you HAVE to buy your booze from this mob, no choice. You ain't allowed to bring your own. And boy, can those fuckers charge - they make a wounded bull look like a cute kitten.

Anyway, this mob had a couple of really good scams. In the bowls of the cellars they had a couple of rather useful machines that allowed them to do two thigs.

Number 1.

Re-cork champagne bottles. Very simple - take cheap bubbles, add a small amount of red food colouring and say Abracadabra! Hey presto - pink champagne, that you can charge double the price for.

Number 2.

Put new screw caps on spirit bottles. This ones very handy. Every day starts with virgin bottles of gin/rum/whisky/whatever. The night before, the partially empty bottles are replaced with the new ones. Alas, not a virgin bottle, they've been well fucked. Todays bottles are yesterdays, topped up and re-capped.

Why is that a scam? You are charged for a full bottle, regardless of how much has actually been drunk. And, as I'm sure you will have guessed, what it gets topped up with ain't the good stuff. Cheapest crap they could get, bought in bulk.

So, there ya go. When you're rich enough to have a box at Ascot, there's some syphilitic scrotes who are going to rip you off.

I wonder if anyone will be surprised to learn that this mob pay absolute bare minimum wages. You aren't surprised? Well ain't that just spooky.
(trunkles, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 12:32, Reply)

more IT secrets
i like being in control of massive data resources, at work my secrets are

1. my support tracking software, through which u can see the progress of your outstanding puter issues is prgrammed (by me) to automatically add fake "actions" to the details so that u think i've been working on it.

2. computers can be sent fake commands to break them if i want to sit in a certain area for a little while and hide out, like wise certain mates know how to 'break' computers sufficently for me to sit and slowly fix it while having a good chat.

3. if you happen to have a job that for no other reason then you want to assert some kind power over me, becomes urgent.. another very major system in the building WILL suddenly fall over in spectacular style !! and take 3 hours to fix.

4. in return for the favour of fixing the home pc you brought in, you automatically agree to letting me execute a specially designed (again by me) piece of software that runs from a USB memory stick and scans for any useful files (music, video, images, jokes, cracks etc) and copies them back to the memory key (but nothing personal !) the program looks like an ordinary harddrive error checker

*note* this last one has yeilded at least 3 lots of 'special' home movies... and tonnes of very good music

5. the email filtering is set to block emails containing the funny/nasty/pornographic content everyone sends from getting to your inbox and stopping u working !! no reason why it can't then redirect it all to my inbox tho !

hmmm reading that, ive scared myself about what kind of person i am !
(maxumus HEY!.... diddly dee, de de de de de de, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 12:30, Reply)

Recruitment Cuntsultants
I worked in IT recruitment for about 6 months before I found out I was shit at it. But long enough to know it's all about being a sly, cheating cunt and not much else.

If your ever looking for a job and you post your CV on a website then your gonna get calls from said cuntholes. They'll pretend they have the perfect job for you and lie about which agency there from and all their trying to do is find out where you've been interviewing and names of managers that you used to work with. They then try to get their own candidates into the job YOUR interviewing for and hassle your ex managers to find out if their looking for staff. Multiply this by 20,000 cunsultants and you get a melee of cunt juice in every corner of your face.

The job generally involves:
-Calling other agencies pretending to be candidates and trying to steal information.
-Trying to steal jobs from candidates
-Sucking blood from puppies
-Bashing grannies

You get the idea.

So don't trust a fucking word they say the lying bastards.
(Happyday, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 12:26, Reply)

Contrary to popular belief...
In a petrol station there is NOT a button behind the till to push your £20 of diesel up to £20.01 if we don't like you, just to make you angry! The amount of stares I get from people who are too impatient to pull the trigger slowly, and jab at the trigger only for it to jump 5p!

Also, it is NOT illegal to sign for something on your card instead of using a pin number. It just shifts the responsibility to the establishment instead of the bank if fraud occurs.Supermarkets that make you leave your shopping and go home are money-grabbing bastards who couldn't give two shits about the customer, losing £100 in their billion pound turnovers!
(r2b2 has ear cataracts?!?, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 12:15, Reply)

Public Money
I used to work on a very expensive project in which over £200,000 a year of European money was spent in doing bugger all. Where do I start?
- Public funding is normally matched by other funds. In this case, the university put 50% of the money in. This "money" came in the form of fake staff. The head of finance would forge their time sheets.
- You have to give the number of people you've helped at the end of a project. Not enough? No worries, someone will fill in fake forms for them! Don't want to be found out? Tick the "I do not wish to be contacted" box. Easy.
- Retire? Why do that? Move 350 miles away and still claim a salary even though you're not doing any work.
- Want to run a happy clappy Christian church? Take a job as a project manager on this project - don't even bother coming into work. No one will mind! You're just replacing the last person who did this, didn't turn up in the office once in 6 months and took £30k home for the privilege.

I've left now, thank god.
(lofichic, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 12:08, Reply)

Local Programming
Local programming? Have to satisfy the TV regulator that you're putting out enough regional programming?

Easy - make it in London and then play it up to Manchester where someone records it, then plays it back.

Welcome to Tonight with Trevor McDonald. A Granada Manchester production... made in London...
(BSMO BSMO, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 11:25, Reply)

Chin stroking
When you see a doctor standing with one arm folded stroking his chin while looking at some notes with a nurse or other doctor, 99% of the time, the thoughts include:

'Who else can I get to take care of this?'
'I haven't got a clue what's wrong with you'
'What random test can I send you for now to make you think we're doing something?'
'You should have been dead months ago'
'God these nurses are incompetent'
'Well if you weren't so fat...'
'I need a coffee'

Finally, nurses might not shag in linen closets but doctors do.
(quantum raspberry quizzically quashing Quebecans, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 11:21, Reply)

You're missing the point gibletgravy
It's not a question of whether it's a secret to you, it's whether it might potentially be news to anyone else.

The (boring) fact is that there aren't that many dirty secrets in the IT world, or at least no huge conspiracy. Sometimes people pay through the nose for something that takes little effort, other times there's no profit in it. There's lots of lies and marketing about how good each product is, people follow the products that make the most money rather than the technically efficient solution.

I'd look very carefully indeed at value for money of large enterprise software (such as Oracle or SAP), and even more closely at the consulting services for those and other very large consultancy firms which have - oh shock - been known to bump billable days up further than required.

There's no magic software which fixes all the problems. All software and hardware is broken in different ways. Don't buy cheap crap, but also avoid kit where the manufacturer just sticks a different badge on it.
(We do, however, know you're going to buy the cheap crap anyway, and then moan about it)
(EssY, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 11:19, Reply)

ART DEALER INSIDE DOPE
Oh loads of nasties none of which will get me in the mailout (since they lack humour) but should be told.

The very senior head of a National Gallery who was renouned for buying artworks worth millions using the public purse (including public appeals to raise the money) but then privately got sold an expensive thing from the same dealer for quite a lot less than the going rate!

The way gallieries don't print prices (especially on the internet) and wait and see how rich the client is before coming up with the amount they want - something I don't do but it is pernicious in this area of work. My advice go in scruffy if you are going to buy something expensive.

The Russian booksellers who lent a set of very rare books to a US dealer on consignment (ie sale or return I guess) and then turned up asking for the money immediately even thought the books hadn't sold with a friendly warning of an impending bookshop fire sale without the "sale" bit should the money not be forthcoming quickly enough. Oh the Russian mafia don't cha just love em.

Forgeries - well there are fewer than people imagine going around but just go on Ebay and type in Kurt Schwitters - a famous and very expensive artist - and see if you can see original works for about 800$ - a Schwitters for 800$!!! - well if it is too good to be true then it probably is. (Ask for full provenence before buying - where did it all come from, who owned it before and was it ever exhibited anywhere).

Theft - also possible - I've had the odd dodgy thing offered to me - but thankfully I've always just said no - but it was tempting I have to say especially if I collected that particular artist myself so anything I bought would have only been for myself. But the vast majority of such thefts are small scale worth not very much and I can't say anyone has offered me Munch's The Scream in the 3 times it was stolen from the Oslo museum (To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: "To lose a painting once through an open window may be called unfortunate, to get it nicked 3 times - well your security is bloody fucking awful!")

Drink and drugs and sex also figure. Like any business where there's money then plain old fashioned bribery works. Sadly I don't get offered this stuff.

And my own confession it's pretty pathetic - well I once gave an arts reviewer a free 50 quid artwork: It worked a treat we got a 5 star review (which the work deserved anyhow) and a picture of a piece in the paper. That's all I'M admitting to - honest gov - but anyone out there has any stunning hookers and high class coke on offer in return for a fake Warhol do get in touch......

Selling rare art by the length for 10 years ....... girth doesnt matter when its all avant garde.
(beaverwastemanagement a real company. I want to work for them!, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 11:18, Reply)

Browser
You're not alone.
Someone in the building where I work EVERY MORNING WITHOUT FAIL drops a large, heavy foal into the pan in trap number 1 which several flushes will not shift.
It's generally been evicted by 11am, but it limits my choices for location when I chose to release a morning chocolate hostage.
(Vic Flange, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 11:17, Reply)

crackhouse
Perhaps you forgot to tip her?

Where I work the only dirty secret is the identity of the person who urinates with both the seat AND THE LID down.
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 11:14, Reply)

smear campaign
Thanks to this QOTW I spent ten minutes this morning lying on back wondering what the hell the nurse doing my smear test was actually thinking, and what she meant when she used the word "tight".

I took it as a compliment. Please don't disillusion me.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 11:06, Reply)

Dirty Secrets of Management
I work in international business publishing, in a managerial capacity.

I am meeting targets, and running a team. My team is working hard at the moment, whipped into the shape of a fine feature producing greyhound.

I, on the other hand, have met my targets and have been calling Polish food shops asking if they sell Polish-related foodstuffs. For example in the last call I enquired about Mr. Sheen Crisps, Windolene Sauce, Brasso Pizzas, Beeswax Mustard, Silver Polish Sausages, Boot Polish Soup, and in the household department Polish Polish.

It's not big, it's not clever but it keeps me looking busy.
( disasterprone "Pyjamas caused the Holocaust", Fri 28 Sep 2007, 11:02, Reply)

Socialist Worker
This wasn't exactly a job, because only the editor gets paid. But Jesus, dirty secrets aplenty. Like adding people into pictures to make demonstrations look bigger. Or running pictures that had nothing to do with the story; for example we might have a story about a big protest in South Africa, and have a picture of some of our black members from England, demonstrating about something completely different, and label that as a picture from the protest in South Africa. All so readers would think we had an international presence that didn't actually exist. Also interviewing people and cutting out the 'wrong' answers, or even making the answers up...

The thing that made me finally snap, and leave never to return, was when I eventually found out that this photo, in a story about George Bush's far-right-wing connections, was actually completely fabricated!


(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 11:01, Reply)

Mort
Your secrets might not be dirty but I'm sure you make great tables for people to get dirty on
(quantum raspberry quizzically quashing Quebecans, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 10:44, Reply)

A friend works for a small airline cuisine contractor.
The things she's told me about are..

1. During the production of a lamb curry dish it was found that they didnt have enough lamb to serve the 200 portions they needed so management decided to pad it out with rolled up newspapers soaked in gravy. Apparently the independant tasting team who check the meals before they go out thought it was the 'best lamb they'd ever tasted'

2. The fish cutlets are often so small they get lost in the folds in the foil tray. Sometimes they find adding more bones gives it more body and substance, but nothing does the job quite as well as re-fried offal. This is why you dont opt for the fish on a long haul flight.

3. Cost cutting abounds in this environment. Occasionally the used foil containers are returned, deep fried and reserved to passengers as the crackling on a roast pork joint.

4. Gravy browning can often be expensive. To combat this woe, they often create a substitute consisting of brown woodstain and sawdust. It's delicious and contains essential inks.

5. She tells me that quite often it would be healthier to eat the inflight magazine and safety card than try one of the meals. It would certainly be easier on the palate.
(Vic Flange, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 10:39, Reply)

Interviews
Whilst working for a rather low end recruitment company (i was the IT guy, not a recruiter) one guy had an approach to finding the 'right' person which I believe he still uses, and I found to be rather brilliant the more you thought about it.

He would pick up a pile of prospective employees CV's and dump a random amount of them in the bin without reading them. The basic premise being that our clients probably wouldnt like to hire anyone who wasnt lucky.
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 10:33, Reply)

Doity tricks
tech support people are amongst the most judgemental groups you will meet. Just like any other profession that deals with members of the general public, it is up to *you* to convince us that you are *not* a cunt. If you are, no matter how slight the offence, you will get led around the houses.

Not so long ago, an engineer called me up to have a VPN service installed on his laptop. He had to go into one of our branches to have it done, so I knew he wasn't going to be working and was effectively having some time off.

"Can I leave you to it? I have some work that needs doing." he said

"I'd rather you didn't, mate, I'll need you to log on again in a few minutes."

"Oh, ok"

A few seconds later and *click, brrrr*

I was remote accessed to his machine, so let the install finish and then logged out, locked out his keyboard and mouse, left the connection open and went on my lunchbreak.

He called whilst I was gone and asked me to call him back. I finally did at 4:30pm. If he hadn't ignored me, he'd have had his laptop back before 1:00.
( Kroney, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 10:32, Reply)

nurses
When we say "Don't worry, I've seen it all before", quite often we haven't seen anything *exactly* like it before and we frequently go and laugh about it in the staff room.
(Mary Mandolin still had it on, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 10:22, Reply)

Research? Nah.
Back in my early post-doc days, my boss used to come up with ideas for experiments which we knew wouldn't work. But we used to do them, and they wouldn't work, and we'd report back. (In fairness, he did come up with his share of good ideas too - we just got good at sorting the wheat from the obvious chaff!)

Later, we used to say "That'll never work" when he came up with a daft idea, but he'd insist it would so we would go off and do the experiment. It didn't work. We reported this back.

Eventually we got fed up, stopped saying it wouldn't work, stopped doing the experiments, but just reported back to say that we'd done it, and it didn't work.

Meanwhile we were getting on with things which did produce results, showing the boss (who was impressed that we had the foresight and time to do all of this work!), writing it up, and publishing it.

Except on one occasion, where with a submission deadline looming, we fabricated an image (actually put in an image of one thing purporting to be another) and submitted it.

The paper was accepted with no revisions, and published. Job done, we thought.

Except then it got cited by other people, which meant a lot of quick thinking and talking bollocks was required.

Got off with it though.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 10:04, Reply)

Dry cleaners
Ok I admit this isn't funny and is more of a top tip from my days as a dry cleaner.

If you have clothing that can be dry cleaned or washed, wash it, yourself, I'd only wash it anyway. Oh and my secret amazing stain removal tip? A bar of Vanish. Yes the same stuff you can get in supermarkets nationwide. Instead we'd charge you £4 for a pair of trousers you could have cleaned yourself lazy bones!

I think the stuff people brought in was more of a dirty secret give away. I've cleaned more pairs of old mans trousers that stank of piss than I care to remember, an overcoat covered in dog shit* oh and not to mention the blood stained bed sheets of a local high court judge. Oh and if I found stuff in your pockets, I'd make sure you got the money back, some of the time.

*This was the most disgusting and vile smelling thing I ever cleaned. The owner brought it in on a Saturday morning and very sheepish. The consensus was she'd had a quickie in the park on the way home from a night out, the dirty bitch. I left a note on her coat telling her not to do it again. She wasn't pleased.
( abefroman skating on the thin life of modern life on, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 10:03, Reply)

Computer programmers...
For those programmers who think it's a dirty secret to not comment or otherwise obfuscate your code? Thank you. It's an amateur mistake to think that this is a secret.

All you've done is provide real programmers with the justification to extend the contract by several months in order to re-write the code, "as it's clearly in such a mess". Even the most tech-illiterate IT manager, when confronted by such a mess of uncommented code, finds it hard to argue otherwise.

Real programmers include comments and indent code properly. Those comments, however, may only be of use to someone who's familiar with the program flow and its position in the overall system being developed. Thing is, showing code like that to anyone else gives the impression that it's easy to follow and full of helpful comments, until they try to modify something and it all falls over.


As for over-estimating timings, that's a standard practice. Again, if you think that's a secret, you're deluding yourself. Take the time you think it'd take to do the work and multiply it by 2.5. That will take into account all those disturbances like people talking to you about other work, fixing the little niggly problems that take so much time, changes to the specification, etc. It's not a secret, it's effective time management.
( S tr app y, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 9:36, Reply)

Can't sing?
Remember the 1989 smash hit single "Girl You Know It's True"?

We didn't even sing on it!

Thanks,
Milli Vanilli
( abefroman skating on the thin life of modern life on, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 9:31, Reply)

Computer Technicians
Have seen your wife naked. Yes. Even the ones you deleted from the Recycle bin before you formatted the disk. All of them.

(By the way, the only way to forever erase data is to literally smash/slice up the hard drive.)
(Marmite Omelette ...but I feel better having screamed, don't you?, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 9:21, Reply)

Belkin Routers
My boyfriend is a computer technician/salesperson/general dogsbody. Occasionally he'll get a callout to deliver a new monitor or something for someone's computer, and he'll offer to take the old one away and dispose of it safely. Then his boss sells it in the shop, for probably about half the price of what the new one cost.

This scam works particularly well with Belkin routers, which most people don't realise have a lifetime warranty. So the router dies, customer buys a new one for around £80 and boyfriend takes the old one away to be recycled. They send the broken router to Belkin and get another free of charge, which they can then sell for £80.

Pure-profit merchandising! And I got a fantastical free computer out of it too. The only thing that's wrong is it needs more RAM but apart from that it's the best computer I've ever owned :D
(Marmite Omelette ...but I feel better having screamed, don't you?, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 9:05, Reply)

Dirty, dirty secrets.....
Traveline (on all the bus stops in the bloody country)

If you live on the Isle Of Wight, guess what, we're in DEVON! ahahahahahah, not on 'the island' as you love to refer to it as.

Also, if you're anywhere else in the SE of England, regardless of what their literature says, we're not bloody Arriva busses!! We're not a bus company and we don't know why your bus is late.

And as you, as customers have secrets too, keep them. If you want to go by bus from Uckfield to Heathfield, we don't need to know WHY! It matters not that your aged husband is in Hospital or your car broke down, or your cat has to go to the vet.
(The Cosmic Fool Became aware that the bird is indeed the word on, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 9:04, Reply)

Dirty Chefs
I used to be a chef in quite an upmarket establishment. It will probably be of no surprise to you how dirty some of the food is that goes out, but if you're ever thinking of eating out again, think again - in my time such activities were carried out -

- all the chefs gobbing huge greenies in the local conservative mp's soup. He said it was delicious.
- all the chefs gobbing and putting pubic hair in designer David Emmanuel's dinner. Again, delicious, he came back many times.
- one chef knocking one out into the dinner of an ex staff member who had left us in the shit one night, and fancied coming back for dinner a few months later
- one of the French waiters regularly performing his party trick of stirring customers coffee with his cock
- Shooting kitchen porters with air rifles
- Putting Daddy long legs in the microwave with food to see if when it stopped flying around it would fall in. If it did, it stayed there.
- Using fish that had worms on it, scraping it off and cooking.

There's a fair few more, which disgust even me now, but fair to say every single table in that restaurant had seen some waiter/waitresses/chefs/kp's arse making the beast with two backs on it. And probably not cleaned afterwards.
(RickGrimes Quite frankly, disappointed on, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 9:01, Reply)