26 Sneaky, Shady, And Surprising Industry Secrets We Were Never Supposed To Know
by Hannah Dobrogosz · BuzzFeedReddit user SpottedGelato started a fascinating thread by asking the r/AskReddit community, "What's a secret in your job that people aren't supposed to know about?" People from various industries filled the thread with tips, warnings, and useful nuggets of information. Here's what folks revealed:
1. "I worked at a massive internet provider in the early 2000s. They had a single master password that could be used to access anyone's account. I couldn't access it, but a friend who worked there did. Everyone from movie stars to politicians was having their emails read without their knowledge."
2. "I'm a bridal stylist. A lot of times, if you ask nicely, some small amount can be taken off your dress. I've seen 10% off given, and I've seen a few hundred taken off. In my experience, the salon would rather sell a gown for a couple hundred less than not sell the dress at all. The thing is, though, the manager has to approve it, so your stylist has to go and actually ask. If you were rude, snotty, mean, or bridezilla-ish in any way, you have a snowball's chance in hell of getting any money off."
3. "It's ridiculously easy to be a 'bestselling' novelist, and just because you are doesn't mean you make any money. I'm a true-blue USA Today Bestselling Author, and I've made about $5 in 2024."
4. "I worked as a stripper on and off for 16 years. Any dancer worth her salt will convince the customer that she is actually attracted to them. Are you certain that you had a connection with that dancer? It was all a con. We are in the business of making people feel good. This seldom goes hand in hand with telling the truth. If you're wondering if you should 'let' your boyfriend/fiancé/husband go to the strip club, only say yes if you're fine with him being humped by naked women (at the LEAST). These customers never behave in ways that nearly any monogamous partner would be okay with."
5. "When I tell you to turn the router off and on again, it's not because I have no idea what is happening and hope the issue will sort itself out. There are all kinds of logs where I can see what the problem is. When you restart the router, these logs get updated. Also, when you lie and tell me you restarted the router a bunch of times and it didn't resolve the issue, I can tell you didn't. The logs are right there, and the last time it was restarted was three months ago. I can't tell you that I know you're lying, but it definitely goes in the documentation so that everyone knows everything you say needs to be double-checked."
6. "Most elevators in the United States are not maintained properly. I used to work for an elevator company, and they would only limit us to a few calls a day because they didn't want to give the impression that something was wrong with their elevators. They didn't want to lose those contracts. Once in a while, maybe three or four times a month, we would find an elevator in bad shape. We'd put it out of service, and the next day, it would be in service again. I'm not sure who put those elevators back in service, but someone did. Even if we reported it, nothing would get done. It was better to take a risk so people wouldn't complain about having to use the stairs, even if it cost them their own safety. I learned to keep my mouth shut and do what I was told. I was close to retirement and didn't want to lose that."
7. "The IRS doesn't have the budget to enforce tax law and will drop any issues they feel would cost more than they will collect. There's been more than one instance where a client comes to us after years of arguing with the IRS, and we will literally just reprint their prior letters on our letterhead to get the IRS to drop the whole matter."
"The IRS has a set budget to go after compliance. Poor people have nothing to go after. Rich people have attorneys that can make it too expensive to pursue. This means that they primarily pursue easy-to-win cases against the middle class."
8. "That fancy touchscreen thermostat we installed in your office is just a screen you change numbers on. The logic controller we installed in your heating/AC unit uses a different sensor and predetermines what temperatures it's set at."
9. "If you politely ask internet customer service reps to credit you for every day of an outage in your area on that billing cycle, you can easily get a 70% discount on your bill. Most outages happen overnight, and nobody notices, but most providers keep records of them."
10. "I used to work at a major hotel chain. In the summer, the housekeeping manager directed his staff to dry the towels left by the pool instead of cleaning them because it was so busy."
11. "I fix the lottery equipment for my state. This includes lottery ticket vending machines, Powerball terminals (the ones at literally every convenience store/bar, etc.), and keno vending machines. There is zero technical documentation of any kind. There's no wiring schematics, no blueprints, nothing. There are no more new Powerball terminals. If something breaks, we cannibalize parts from other machines. I've sat there scraping BBQ sauce off machines so we can give them out to new bars. Also, the lottery ticket vending machines run XP and are connected to the internet."
12. "Every service or product a funeral home offers is heavily marked up. Get an urn from Amazon and a casket from Costco!"
13. "The mark-up on supplies in the medical field is criminal."
"I used to work in durable medical equipment coverage (DME). It's outrageous what they charge for things. You know that walker grandma got when she went to the hospital? She was probably charged $150 when our cost was around $12. That applied to almost everything we offered, which, if you're familiar with DME, is a whole bunch of stuff."
"I broke my ankle earlier this year and was issued a pneumatic boot by the doctor's ortho assistant and later billed over $700 for it. The exact same boot (right down to the packaging) was available on Amazon for under $70. When I pointed that out to the doctor's billing department and offered to pay $70, they accepted."
14. "Radio stations don't take caller number nine. They take whoever sounds like they will be good on-air or can be used in a show promo. Source: me, former breakfast host."
15. "If your 2-year-old doesn't want to paint because they'd rather do something else, we can't force them. If you keep complaining and being nasty because you want fridge art, we will do your child's art and put their name on it so you stop complaining."
16. "I work for a hotel chain, and your membership levels are meaningless. It doesn't matter to us if you're in the top or lowest tier. If you're nice to us, that's what we mostly go off of. I don't even check half the time. If you're cool, I'll hook you up with what you need, even if you're not a member. Every hotel I've worked for is owned by a property management company that has very little, if anything, to do with the brand. The brand names only care about good reviews and getting their cut, so most of us just care about you having a good stay with few issues."
"Side note: If you walk into my lobby acting like you own the place, guess what? Every item you need is out of stock, all those cool amenities are out of order, and the maintenance guy is on vacation; sorry about your luck."
17. "We regularly come this close to either poisoning everyone within 50 miles or blowing a football field-sized crater in the ground, then poisoning everyone within 50 miles. Source: operator at a midsized chemical plant."
18. "You don't have to (and shouldn't) add your newly licensed son or daughter to your auto insurance policy. Legally, they are automatically covered whether you list them or not. Most insurance companies run newly licensed driver reports and will eventually catch on and add them, but that could take months or years, saving you hundreds (perhaps thousands) of dollars."
"My parents did this. They told my siblings and me to say that we were just borrowing one of our parents' cars if we ever got pulled over or in an accident. It worked every time. Eventually, we each got our own car insurance policies as we got older. The insurance company did send multiple letters during that time suggesting my parents add us to their policy, but my parents always declined, and nothing happened."
19. "The 'social media intern' is actually a full-time 40-year-old man."
20. "I used to work for a bank. If you were getting paid on a Friday and scheduled your bills to be paid the same day (hoping your deposit would cover the bills), the bank would intentionally pay the bills before depositing your paycheck to make money off the overdrafts. Banks love overdrafts. Basically, it's free money for them."
21. "Working for giant companies, it's comical how many systems are raggedy messes of bare-bones functionality. All available money gets thrown at certain projects, leaving everything else to work on complete shoestrings."
"Piggybacking off this: I worked for three top-tier tech companies in the last 12 years. There's so much waste and gross inefficiency. The people who complain about government inefficiency and worship privatization have no clue that it's simply because corporate inefficiency is entirely hidden from public scrutiny. If corporations had to be as transparent as government agencies, their shareholders would skin them alive at every earnings call."
22. "I'm a security guard working for a homeowners association. We aren't here to keep your cars from being broken into or to keep people from breaking into your house. We are here to keep your property values going up, your insurance slightly cheaper, and to report you for petty stuff so your HOA can fine you and make money off of your year-round Christmas decorations."
23. "You can call multiple, entirely separate company customer service departments and talk to the exact same agent at the exact same desk who has been trained in all of them."
"This is true! I once worked at a call center, providing customer service for two different insurance companies and two different banks. I also sold identity theft protection services. The calls came in randomly, and I didn’t know how to answer until the script popped up on my screen! We also made outgoing calls, and those numbers were automatically dialed for us. We didn’t even have phones — just a computer and headset. We couldn’t physically hang up the call."
24. "Don't order ice for your drinks in bars. They'll be cold due to the mixer anyway, so just don't. Most ice machines have mold. I've seen bartenders clean their hands with ice cubes and chuck them back in the scoop tray. I also worked in bars that had to have their beer taps flushed before starting because roaches used to crawl in and stay there when they weren't in use. The owner knows; they just don't care."
25. "A lot of major banks and credit unions are running on decades-old software because the disruption to upgrade can be so detrimental."
26. And: "I work for a corporation with several field offices, and there's basically nothing I can't see. I see who's surfing the internet, what year we bought your chair, your middle name, how much the sales guys are bringing in, etc. Anything I can't officially see, I still hear about at some point or another. If you work for a big company, your privacy lasts until it doesn't. People have access to your business, and they're not looking only because they don't have a reason to right now."
Do you have any work-related tips or secrets to share? Tell us in the comments or submit anonymously using this form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.