Ask Lemmy

Yes, in the mid 1990s, large banks in the USA were being electronically compromised so often that they wouldn’t investigate or pursue a loss if it was under $50k.

The dealership I worked for gave out loans they knew people couldn’t afford, ignored safety items, slapped inspection stickers that didn’t match vehicles to get them on the lot. Ran a lift that was jerry rigged because the wiring busted along with the hydraulic tank.

Employee bought a vehicle and his manager watched where he went on his lunch (via GPS installed by said company into sold vehicles). Funnily enough it was to an interview.

Oh another one. School bus company 1 is one of the largest in the US. In between runs a buddies transmission starts leaking on his bus. He calls the terminal on my phone to let them know.

“Keep driving keep it going, we are not sending out another bus to you.”

Transmission in a 45ft flat nose busts fully in the middle of one of the busiest intersections in the town. He calls over radio letting them know it busted as he told them.

“What do you mean this is first time I’m hearing about this”

Flat nose I drove kept writing up for not having heat and turning it into the people I was told. This went for an entire winter and I didn’t have heat until after the thaw and spring started. Mechanic never knew that bus had been being written up. They were hiding slips. Same bus, folding door let go and was flapping in the wind with a bus full of students. Over the radio they said to keep driving and refused to send a replacement.

I don't have any interesting secrets or facts from my current ex-jobs, so I'll share an interesting fact from a buddy's. It's one of those companies that offers automated phone systems (and chats, nowadays) that listen to your options rather than taking number inputs.

This may no longer be the case, but these systems were not actually automated. There are entire call centers dedicated to these phone systems, whereby an operator listens to your call snippet and manually selects the next option in the phone tree, or transcribes your input.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if advances in AI have made this whole song and dance less in need of human intervention, but once upon a time, your call wasn't truly automated - it was federated.

I worked for a pretty popular magazine back in the late 90's. One day near the beginning/middle of 2000, we were all called down to the bullpen for a last minute meeting by management and marketing. (That's never a good sign.)

We were told that we have a great product with amazing writing, but marketing doesn't know how to sell it so they're closing us down. Instead, we went online only. I was the web developer so I survived the firings.

So then we figured that we were set because our website produced more content and had more traffic than any of the company's other websites. However, in March of 2001, we had another emergency meeting. Again, we were told our content was great, but the company was going in another direction. Instead of producing our own content, the company was going to just repost other sites' content. I and everyone else in my team were let go.

Needless to say, the whole "we'll just repost what other people posted" plan didn't go so well. Last time I checked, the company wasn't doing very well at all.

When I worked at Bob Evans I watched a manager peel the expiration dates off of expired food and replace them with dates in the future to avoid waste.

That I made their DropBox account, and they can't access it anymore..

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

i worked in a place where we put journal,magasin in leters and film. we got a DISGUSTING porn thing like... i dont even think it was legal (zoo ect) i personaly refuse to put that in envelope. and you know what? the most common adress we got? religious person. yup most recieve it was the one in church reading you the bibles...

I know this thread is old but: so many HIPPA violations, oh my God. I am a pediatric therapists/child psych, and the clinic I used to work at constantly stored client data in the most insecure ways, and therapists and staff would discuss client names, diagnosis', address, EVERYTHING openly in the break room. I complained at one point, but it went nowhere. Turns out nobody cares, lol. They also frequently ignored the best interests of our clients to maximize profit from insurance (leaning towards fraud). I ultimately left the company when my boss blatantly violated the safety of one of my clients by refusing to send her home when she had a fever of 104 F. Sure, working with kids means everyone gets sick a lot, but when the child is THAT sick, they need to be in a hospital, not in a hot, cramped room with a therapist.

My wife worked at a pretty well-known hiking supplies store in our country. The retail price is sometimes over x4 the manufacturing cost and extremely marked up. The amount of faulty products with manufacturing faults is really high, with the suppliers 100% aware but gave the stores discounts on the wholesale price just to push units, even though the clothes/bags/shoes would break after a year or so of light use.

I work for a MSP that works a lot with very large tech companies. Most of these companies outsource a lot of work to India. I frequently have to remote in and help them with our product. You'll see passwords in plain text being thrown around in teams chats, .txt documents on the desktop and emails like candy. I will frequently work with individuals with titles like "Cloud Engineer" to "Solutions Expert" that I swear have never opened a terminal window in their life and unable to follow basic IT instructions. I have worked with a lot of very good Indian engineers, but I swear chronyism has a lot of people put into positions that they aren't really qualified for.

One company I worked at had more full-time collections people than sales people. Our products were a lot cheaper than our competitors, and it attracted a lot of customers with no money.

Another company I worked at ignored all "first notice" bills they ran up. CFO told me that if a company wanted paid, they needed to send a second notice.

Back when I managed a Blockbuster Video, most stores ran at a loss thanks to theft.

The real reason most stores failed wasn't because DVDs were going out. It was because we couldn't stem the flow of money out the door thanks to thieves.

I worked for lumber liquidators, and their point of sale software seemed to be surplus navy because if you dug deep enough you could order nuclear sub parts.

Alesis, creators of ADAT Type 2 digital audio tapes hired none other that James Doohan to promote it playing the “Famous Engineer” because they didn’t get the rights to anything Star Trek.

It was only played during trade shows, but someone I know got a copy.

https://youtu.be/oHB_Dyad4cg

A friend of mine was a manager at a fairly upscale women's clothing store.

She said that even at 95% discounts, they could turn a profit.

I used to work at a hotel and they never changed the duvet covers guest to guest, only the other sheets.

Military equipment is sold to the PRC and mislabeled as COTS, i.e. civilian.

Battersea Dogs Homes senior dog carers are employed based on their PR experience and not at all on their experience at looking after dogs