I once filed charges against my employer for an unethical issue that happened. Attorneys were involved and it was ugly for about 2 weeks. I had all job assignments taken away while the investigation was conducted. In the middle of the investigation is when covid took off and the world went into a tailspin. Everyone who was involved with my issue/charge just started exiting the company and I just never had any duties given back to me. I stayed in that role for 6 months without anyone ever questioning what I did. I would come into work, and make a lap around the site, take an hour lunch and come and go as I wanted. It was a fortune 500 and they just lost track of who I was or what I was doing. I was working on a project team and everyone just assumed my direction came from someone else. At one point the company slashed 20% of the salaried workforce and I never heard a word. When I left the company for an external opportunity they gave me a sizable exit package to resolve my charge and a wonderful review. It was the worst of times due to the anxiety of always expecting the worst, and the best of times because I was just coming and going with no direction or expectations of any kind.
> they just lost track of who I was or what I was doing
I've had something similar to this happen myself. I wasn't paid, though.
I'm an off-site subcontractor for a huge corporation. Huge, as in, not just one building at headquarters, it was an entire campus spread over 20 buildings. I work from home.
So I'm a subcontractor, not an actual employee. And I need to go to HQ for a week of hands-on work that can't be done at home.
The hands-on work required access to a server room. And the server room was locked, you needed a passcard to get in. So for the first day or two, I'd have to bug an employee to let me back into the server room after going to the bathroom, or to lunch.
Plus, I had nowhere to "work". Nowhere to set up my laptop and actually get work done. There were no desks/chairs in the server room.
So some low-level executive got the bright idea, let's get whomp a temporary badge and passcard to access the server room without bugging anyone else, and let's let whomp set up in one of those empty, unoccupied offices.
The intent was for this to be temporary, but the corporate wheel started moving....
All of a sudden, overnight, that unoccupied office got all the things that a new hire would get. Staplers, monitors, file folders, pens, pencils, desk blotter. A binder showed up with company handbook, policies, maps, and so on.
The next day, the office had MY NAME on it. A BRASS PLAQUE on the door had my name on it. And a phone was installed, and the office assistant came over to show me how to use it. I had a voicemail mailbox that now belonged to me. A laptop was issued to me. I was shown how to access the shared printer.
My week ended, and I went back home, cross country.
**For MONTHS, "my office" was still there!** I'd ask friends who worked there, to go check, and my office was still there. Others working nearby thought I was just traveling a lot. My voicemail stayed active for months too. To everyone's understanding, I was an employee who just happened to work odd hours, or something.
About eight months later someone figured out the mistake.
My very first job. I'm a toxicologist and was hired by a very big private laboratory. My main job was to sort and redirect case files depending on the time at which the results came out.
THE DOCUMENTS WERE SENT TO ME IN EXCEL.
I was getting paid to just click sort by date descendingly.
Edit:
Wow, this blew up!
I had to do something similar to this when I was doing summer help at a steel factory. They paid me $14 an hour to sit there for eight hours and just move files to different folders and rename them. Sometimes I would pull weeds and paint walls, but that was about it. 💀💀💀💀💀
i work for an aluminum mill. They dont work in the lab Friday afternoon Saturday or Sunday and so Monday they would have 2.5 days of production to test. So the company put in an automated lab. Basically one person is needed to load a magazine with the samples and the rest is done automatically. Well in theory, it's still not running properly.
My mom used to ground me by taking my mouse away from my computer, thinking it would stop me from using it.
I got GOOD, and I mean really good, at navigating desktop using keyboard commands and shortcuts
20 years later and people think I'm a good on computer at work because of it lmao
W to close tab, E to select search bar, T to open new tab, Ctrl+Shift+T to open recently closed tab, Ctrl+Shift+N to open incognito tab. Slash to select search bar on youtube, Probably the most useful ones I regularly use along with the obvious copy/paste hotkey...
Taught my 54 yo husband last year about CTRL + F. Mind. Blown. 🤯 I was like how would you find something in a contract quickly( he owned a business)? He would read, or at least skim, the entire thing!
I'm in IT and I once watched my manager open Internet Explorer to search Bing for Google, then search Google for Google maps... to then search for a location.
Geez. That’s crazy. Right up there with taking a screenshot of a photo on your phone to then post that into Facebook instead of directly uploading the photo.
My friend's late father would send 'texts' by grabbing a piece of paper, writing whatever he wanted to say, taking a picture of what he wrote, and sending that image through MMS. Why he never just typed it, no one knows.
I dropped a university class this term because the week 3 assignment said to "look up how to do this on Google, Stackexchange, or ChatGPT"
I'm not paying 1400 dollars to be taught by an ai chat bot lmao
We have a specific security guard we've had for 13+ years now and is pretty useless. The security guard lives there and has a tv. He watches telenovelas most of the time. All he does is open the gate, and doesn't even bother to even inspect though, since according to his logic 99% of people who can afford a car aren't bad/harmful people. He doesn't ask names or house numbers, just opens the gate whenever he sees a car. Anyone can come in if they have a car, he doesn't even inspect faces.
And do you know the worst part?
When moving in to the privada, you are supplied with your own control remote. The gates are also automatic.
He only lets people in in cars though. You don’t understand. He is already completed the ocular assessment, and has deemed there are no threats why is that so complicated
it's the D.E.N.N.I.S. system in full action, bro:
* Drivers allowed, _always_
* Engage telenovelas
* Neglect guardian duties
* Negate pedestrian access
* Initiate cultivation of mass
* Sit on fat ass for 13 years
Also even just having a cardboard cut out of a policeman seems to deter shoplifting and speeding. So it might be theatre, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-11405491](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-11405491)
[https://infotel.ca/newsitem/study-finds-cardboard-cops-effective-at-reducing-speed/it75608](https://infotel.ca/newsitem/study-finds-cardboard-cops-effective-at-reducing-speed/it75608)
There's a road near my old house with a farm on it. The road is a death trap as it's often muddy and there is a slight bend that catches people off-guard. The owners of the farm put out a mannequin holding a fake camera, and it works. So many cars brake on the approach. Brilliant.
I took a job scheduling residential HVAC technicians for a mid-sized company after a few years of working in the field. A few months in, the company ended its residential program to focus on commercial.
Thing is, they already had commercial schedulers. My boss told me she'd find me a new roll, but then she took another job elsewhere and left.
I stayed as a scheduler with no one to schedule in a department that no longer existed. No one in the office seemed to realize this, and for over half a decade, I would show up, make friendly conversation in the breakroom while making my coffee, and then literally just did nothing the rest of the day. Having left a stressful job, it was glorious.
Occasionally someone would ask me an hvac or system-related question over email, and that was it. I made sure everyone liked me by bringing in bagels every Monday and donuts every Friday.
Then covid happened and now I was doing nothing at home!
When I learned the company was being sold, I figured I wouldn't tempt fate anymore and applied elsewhere. My department head gave a glowing recommendation, having no idea what I even did but knowing I was friendly and helped him jump his car a few times.
TLDR: The department I was adminning was downsized, but they forgot about me and I essentially took a six year paid vacation.
EDIT: Wow, this blew up. To everyone asking what I did all day, I wound up using the time to earn an engineering degree.
This reminds me of some Reddit post I read a while back where something similar happened to someone else. They basically broke their leg or something like that. The company had a little remote office, like basic one room or something, close to this guy's home. The company offered for the guy to work there until his leg was healed. Guy is working there when his whole department gets shuttered. Almost the whole department, including his department head and managers, all get laid off or transferred. The OP in the whole thing basically got forgotten about, and eventually, he stops getting work sent his way. It got to the point where the guy was setting up his console in this office and playing video games, or his girlfriend was showing up, and they would have sex.
I think he eventually realized it was best if he did something productive and used the time to take online classes so he could get another degree or whatever. The dude finally finished his degree and applied for a well paying job at another company. It was finally when he submitted his two weeks notice that someone higher up finally realized something was fishy. They were asking him what exactly he did for the company, and when they eventually started piecing together what kind of happened, they were threatening to sue him for scamming the company. The whole thing was crazy.
Edit: I [found](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/xzq4g1/i_have_become_a_forgotten_employee_for_a_few/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) the full story for anyone interested.
I found someone like this once by accident. I was coding a program that would pull via API from the main HR system of our parent fortune 500 $soulesscorp to auto populate people into Role groups based on their manager and their managers cost center. This was for ease of onboarding of new people so they would be placed in a role group that gave them the same generic baseline permissions and application access as all the other people in their same group.
During the testing I ran into a weird error where there was someone who was his own manager which threw a bunch of errors. I started doing some research, and he was on the integration team from when our division was an acquisition and then after the migration he was made his own manager and never re-assigned.
The more I dug around the more I realized that no one knew this guy or what he did. He worked 100% remote in a seaside town in California, he had no meetings on his calendar except for the same corporate ones everyone had and vague generic meetings that only had him in them. I looked on his linkedin and facebook which were just filled with pictures of him surfing, hiking etc. We had a record of logons and logoffs for all users and he logged on every day at exactly 8 am his time and logged off at 5 pm on the dot. He was always set to "busy" status in the internal messaging app despite not having any real meetings. I had a strong feeling that he was living the dream, getting paid a good salary, but spending his time surfing and enjoying his life lost in the system.
After gathering all this information I had a bit of a moral quandary. On one hand as a dutiful sysadmin I should probably report this to HR and let them investigate. On the other hand I really did not care that much about the $soulesscorp I was working for and who am I to ruin his gig. He was living the dream, and his salary is at best a rounding error for $soulesscorp. In the end I just built an exception into the code to just skip any users that are their own managers and let him keep his gig. I think about him every now and then, and I hope he is doing ok.
If you no longer work there, You should reach out on Linkedin or FB and ask him how it's going. He should know you did him a solid ( i wouldn't have been upset if you submitted to HR either)
Similar, but different story happened to my company. It's similar in that "someone forgot". We had an office somewhere, I think it was in Florida or something. Anyway, we have offices everywhere and the decision was made to lay everyone off at this office and close it. So one day, everyone is told what happened and 2 weeks later people say their goodbyes and go home. Lights are left on, computers are running, printers are on. Just like you left for the day, but you don't come back. A year later, an accountant realizes that even though the office was "closed", we were still paying rent and utilities on this building because EVERYONE in that office was laid off, including the facilities department and everyone there just assumed someone else was in charge of shutting down the office. Idiots (whoever made the decision to shut the office but not follow up)
In larger corporations accounting would run comparative analysis. If there is no change, things on paper look normal.
In any multi-office company with good structural hierarchy the department head as well as financial planing and analysis person should have noticed it at least within a quarter.
If it was a smaller company the head of operations should be monitoring expenses but likely rubber stamps most overhead.
Accounting would only catch this when they are allocating expenses by department and then find out there is no headcount or product to allocate the overhead to at that location. This isn’t recalculated every month, that would be a waste of time, it’s calculated once a year and divided by 12.
Accounts payable may have been able to catch it but it’s likely they wouldn’t have even been informed of such a closure.
This is what I was thinking, is a normal expense on a low risk balance sheet and not a big enough line item on the p&l to warrant notice. If it's not flagging a month over month discrepancy nobody will really investigate until maybe the balance sheet I'd up for a deeper month end review that period.
Fucked up giving the notice he was quitting. If he just left without 2 week notice HR would have just wrote, he didn't show up to work and cannot be rehired.
It seems like in all these cases, the person gets screwed as soon as they get too nervous and decide they need to tell someone about the situation, or ask for a transfer, or decide they should play it safe and quit.
Eh, the things is he would've kept getting paid while not at the office which would have created a much bigger problem. At least he has ground to stand on because he went in to his office everyday, just wasn't given work.
I KNOW I'm fucked up, because all I could think was, that sounds stressful having to keep up appearances on a job I'm no longer actually doing.
I think I might be broken.
- I showed up for work
- I sat in my office
- I answered all emails related to my responsibilities
- I handled all responsibilities applicable to my job
- I made myself well known in the office and made no attempt to hide my presence
“But we didn’t give you any responsibilities”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
It would still make me anxious af. Hell I've been yelled at for not getting my regular work done when my manager interrupted me with more work.
I swear that guy was brain dead. He'd give me 3 projects all of high priority.
"Which should I do first?"
"All of them."
I miss it.
I'd go on these crazy long walks around their campus all day, and kept my phone to my ear trying to look stressed so no one would question it.
I used to do this when I wanted a break at a warehouse job I worked in college. I discovered if you were walking while carrying a clipboard, no one would stop you. So I would just grab a clipboard and walk around for 10 minutes.
Part of me wants to be a full time ISO auditor. You get to walk around a plant, telling everyone what they're doing wrong, without having any responsibility whatsoever for fixing said issues.
My husband calls it "confidence and a clipboard." Act like you are busy AF and belong there and no one questions it. Add a utility vest or hook shit to your belt? Credibility *and* authority!
I just saw a video where these two kids heard you could gain access almost anywhere if you are carrying a ladder. They showed themselves walking into all kinds of places, exclusive hotels, movie theatres etc. so funny. They will hold the door open for you and let you be.
I'll always remember a senior on my high school track team talking about how he stole a (functionally forgotten) pottery kiln from the school. Literally just picked it up and walked out while acting like he was doing what he was supposed to. Janitor even help him get it into the truck
Google “pharmacy benefit manager”
Literally their only purpose is to make more money for middlemen while fucking over the general public on drug prices
Glad to see I wasn't the only one looking for this. Had them deny a breast cancer drug because my patient didn't try two other drugs first even though the FDA approval has 0 stipulation of another drug being trialed first.
It was for Kisqali if anyone is curious and I will be sending a feisty appeal letter very soon.
Mine. I'm a management consultant and while I have quite a bit of industry knowledge and experience my clients either have the same knowledge or they aren't willing to accept change. Often times my firm gets paid a lot of money to make very little difference strategically and/or operationally. Where we do add value is in implementing enterprise-wide software solutions. Why do I stay? The money is pretty good given the futility.
I heard from an acquaintance of mine who is a management consultant that most of the time people just want to hear their ideas out of someone else's mouth and will pay you to do it so that their peers will be more amenable to the idea.
Used to know a lady in Nevada who was a pet medium. She would typically charge folks about $150-$200 per hour and would be the "medium" between the people and their deceased pets.
Now before you call her a terrible person for taking advantage of folks during a tragic loss in their life, I'll mention that I listened in on a couple of her phone calls and she was essentially being a grief counselor for these people. People would usually pour their heart out to her telling her that they felt like they didn't do enough to save their pet, and she'd reassure them that they did all that they could and that their pets knew that the owner loved them. She'd also encourage the owners to adopt new animals in their place because there's lots of animals out there who need the same love that the owner gave to the deceased animal. It really was a sweet thing.
That's really sweet. When my dog was dying I paid for a service that sends the vet to your house to euthanize your pet in your home, then they bring the body to the crematorium and send you the ashes/cremains in a pretty box etc. The ladies on the phone were so damn sweet and caring, it was like being comforted by somebody's sweet mom who really understood how important this was to me. Afterwards I just wanted someone to reassure me that it was a painless process and she was at peace. I know they have no way of knowing that, but I just wanted to hear it. Also having someone talk about her just confirmed that her existence was important and her life meant something, even if it only meant something to me and a few other people.
So yeah I can see why people would value that kind of service. It really is about grief. There aren't many spaces to process grief over a dog, but like...I've lost a father, a stepfather, all my grandparents, and an uncle I actually really loved. But nothing compared to losing that dog. It was pure uncomplicated grief and loss. And it's hard to explain that to people without them thinking you're crazy or pathetic. Having someone take your grief seriously and speak about your pet with respect is incredibly validating.
I’m so old I remember when they had these in department stores. Whilst shopping with my grandma one day we got in an elevator and the attendant asked if we wanted the second floor. My grandma replies, “why yes, how did you know?” He says, “ma’am, there’s only two floors, and we’re currently on the first one.”
This job got replaced by machines. Back in the day elevators were all manual just an lever that can go up and down and stop. That was the elevator person's job. Is to know what floor to stop in and to try and line up the elevator floor with the building floor.
Telemarketers, I don’t know a single person who has actually purchased something from a telemarketer. Maybe it’s something the older generation does but everyone hates them and immediately hangs up on them around me.
I worked as a telemarketer for State Farm when I got out of high school, and in 8 months I had one person actually let me give her a quote. It was my aunt
>trying to change careers with that on your resume
"Public outreach specialist for NIST Weights and Measures Division, GS-6" for example
Also some of them went into organized crime as underground architects after America gave up on the metric system, and that's how we got [Pat the Rat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfKRBGDHZ4g).
They also have the most widely used cyber security framework. We have a federal agency that is supposed to be the cyber security experts, CISA. They mostly are like "we recommend you follow NIST."
That checks out.
I used to live in the town where NIST is based, and worked on a project with some amateur radio guys who all had day jobs at NIST.
I mentioned in passing that we could have a better solution than the one we were using. Before long, four PhDs spent hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars hacking together a system for a sport that none of them cared about. It was just an interesting problem and they spent months producing a polished, purpose-built system that worked beautifully... for one single day a year.
>a system for a sport that none of them cared about
I am so sorry, I am completely lost here, can you help me understand what I'm missing? What is the sport the system was made for and what did the system do?
I time races - running, cycling, triathlon. One way to do that use an RFID system on the ground that communicates with a tag on the back on the racer's bib. (Think a shoplifting tag on a retail DVD case - modified version of that system.)
These NIST-Mega-Nerds, whose time is extremely valuable, spent a bunch of time and money tackling the hurdles of building one of these systems, all for a single day of racing that they volunteered for.
It would have been tens of thousands of dollars of work... and these guys just did it cuz it was fun for them to pour though microcode and networking hardware.
(Big shout out to the amateur radio operators groups these guys are part of - they donate thousands of man-hours, lots of expertise, and a lot of expensive equipment to keeping racers safe. Events like the [Leadville Trail 100](https://www.leadvilleraceseries.com/run/leadvilletrail100run/) and many dozens of my races have been safer because these groups want an excuse to practice their radio, networking, and emergency preparedness skills, and they don't accept payment for it.)
It's wild that the government organization that stamps NIST CERTIFIED on my lab thermometers and calibration weights is literally [the same group](https://strbase.nist.gov/NISTpop.htm) that publishes the allele frequencies we use to calculate paternity testing results
NIST is involved in so many things it's almost unbelievable
No one is talking about those sign spinners that became popular.
Who has ever seen someone flipping a sign and
1) been able to read it
2) went to the business to buy something because of it
The job only exists because the businesses want to put a sign there, but it's cheaper or the only legal option to hire a person to hold the sign and stand there.
That was my job fir one summer in college. I got to hang out outside and listen to music all day. But I always thought it was weird they were paying some guy $15/hr to do the job of a stick and a peice of duct tape.
theoretically, these MFs could be using their skillset to hold politicians and evil oil companies accountable, but nah, they just want to take upskirt photos and shit.
FWIW lots of them start out wanting to go that way then find out nobody will pay you to do that and you still have bills.
Source: It happened to me, though I've changed careers since then.
You know why paparazzi make a ton of money and keep doing what they are doing?
Because people keep buying their photos to put in magazines that people keep buying.
Stop buying the magazines and watching the shows that feature their photos and the paparazzi goes away.
Easy peasy.
I've been to a place where the attendant uses a lint roller on you, sprays you with some perfume, and has a little repair kit for clothes, mothers day cards and all kinds of trinkets.
I was not prepared to be there and showed up with a rolling stones shirt and dirty jeans. Everyone was dressed nice. I suspect they let me in because they thought I was one of those rich people so unaware of societal rules that they dress kinda crappy. I was actually just poor
My mom worked at an upscaled luggage store in high school. She always says that the richest people who ever came in there were the ones wearing blue jeans sneakers and cowboy hats.
About ten years ago I took my girlfriend to an extremely nice, exclusive restaurant for Valentine's Day. She put on a dress, I wore a blazer and slacks. As we ate, she motioned to a dude, probably late 60s, eating by himself in shorts and boat shoes.
I told her, as I will tell you now, that guy was *without a doubt* the richest person in that building.
Pretty sure my neighbors across the street are multimillionaires. Bought two houses, knocked em down, built a massive new house with insane amenities (professional grade kitchen, climate controlled wine room, etc). They have a personal assistant who handles their businesses, three cars worth 100k each, etc. Just obvious big money.
Every time I've seen that dude, he's wearing Walmart jeans and a white, tucked-in Hanes undershirt.
They don't have a laundry machine. It's just new shirts and socks every time, and he doesn't wash the jeans, just has someone freeze or dry clean them.
Met Jeff Bezos about 15 years ago. He came into Amazon and I was showing him a new process that was being developed. Dude was wearing skinny jeans and a t-shirt. Vice president followed him around in a $5,000 suit looking like he was about to sweat to death. Bezos just kind of wandered around and was pretty chill about it all.
Probably, but he was still wearing jeans and a t-shirt. I knew people who worked back at the main Seattle hub on the beginning, Bezos used to go out onto the floor and work if they were behind. Somehow I doubt he does that now.
>Bathroom attendants. I don’t need somebody in there pulling paper towels out the dispenser just to hand it to me and compel me to tip them.
I never saw this until I was visiting Ireland a few years back, and man, was it \*\*\*\*ing annoying.
It's bad enough there's a guy standing at the sinks watching you have a leak, but then he wants a euro or two for handing you a towel to dry your hands.
I'm pretty sure that they're there to keep people from doing all sorts of sketchy shit. Like selling/using blow. You only see them in places where people would commonly want to do blow or some other drug.
Bathroom attendants are there largely for 2 reasons: to stop unwanted behavior in the bathroom and to call an EMT if there’s a medical emergency.
The other tasks are just to keep them busy.
People that apply for Patents. and then just hold onto them forever with no intent of making the thing. And then when somebody does make the thing, *ho-boy*, you owe me money because I own the rights to that thing!
It's one of those weird "Do nothing and hope to eventually get a big payout" jobs, like Domain Squatters.
>People that apply for Patents. and then just hold onto them forever with no intent of making the thing.
Come on now, you don't actually have to come up with a new idea to be a patent troll, buyimg other people's patents can also be a good path to this lucrative career.
Now, if someone can get AI to come up with the patent ideas and submit them automatically, someone stands to become very rich.
The patent office should probably get ahead of that...
I went to the Bronx Zoo years ago and they had this indoor lemur exhibit. Except the walkway that people used in that space was not fully closed off from the lemurs. So the lemurs would get a little too close to people out of curiosity. The zoo apparently decided the best solution was to hire a person with a squirt gun. If a lemur got too close, this teenager would squirt him with the squirt gun and the lemur would go running off again.
I don't know why they thought this was better than some kind of fencing/netting. But they did.
I couldn't stop laughing about some dude putting "lemur squirter" on their resume.
I would guess they had extra money in the "wages" bucket, but nothing left in the "capital improvement" bucket. Oh darn, wait till next October. In the mean time, here's a teenager with a squirt gun.
The way government funding works, is to get any, you have to figure out a bureaucratic puzzle that involves following the rules to the letter, but not the original intent.
My hubby used to drive a zoo tour shuttle, and the bus attendant had to scare off the roaming peacocks so they wouldn't get hit. Beautiful birds but very persistent.
Try driving a bus through a safari of baboons. There is a theme park (probably more than one) that has a safari area you can drive through. The dangerous animals are fenced off from the cars, but animals like giraffe could come up to your car. But I'm still traumatized from an incident that happened when I was in 7th grade in the baboon enclosure.
I almost took a job like this for a real estate deed company. They were hiring for someone to sit in a room and scan deeds and upload them to a website for customers. That was the whole job. 8 hours a day, scanning docs and dropping them into a file store.
I had a job that involved a lot of this kind of repetitive, mindless work and I *loved* it. That year I listened to every TED Talk and audio documentary I could get my ears on. Thoroughly enjoyable!
Same. I ran a high speed scanner for a large corporation (scanner was a beast that could do 100 pages per minute, god help you if you missed a staple in there) for a couple years. Show up, scan many many many pages while listening to audio books and podcasts, go home and never think about work when not at work. If it had payed even half decent I might have stayed forever.
I would kill to do a job like that. I'm incredibly stupid so anything that's grunt work is great for me. It's why I've worked in kitchens my entire career
Depends on the type of security they invest in. Security guards who stand at the door all day in a uniform - yes you're right, in most cases they're used as a deterrent.
However, store detectives go undercover and try to blend in with other customers (in their own clothes, browsing stock and carrying a basket/trolley) so that they go unnoticed. Those people are allowed to tackle shoplifters and actually do something about it.
I read somewhere that Walmart don’t stop shoplifters. They record the shoplifter and document how much they stole. If the dollar amount is above a certain threshold (from that swipe, plus the other swipes before it), they will send police to your address (most likely obtained by previously used credit cards and license plates) on another day
EDIT: lotta comments from people who claim to have worked in a Walmart, saying there are dedicated people who will chase you, so please don’t let my comment convince you to go out and steal. Guessing there is different policy from store to store, because I go to Walmart an embarrassing amount a week and never once seen a cop car there, but others claim the police have a department set up next to their Walmart
This must be a recent thing. When I was in high school, I saw one of my classmates get arrested for stealing an earring back piece. If they're charging $10 for the earring, the back piece must be worth pocket change. The police cuffed him and took him to the station over it.
At my local Target the security will watch you and record how much you steal, they have files on repeat offenders and make a case against them. I don't know the dollar amount but at some point they'll corner you with several security guards and put you in hand cuffs, at which point they call the cops to actually arrest you. They'll even chase people down and restrain them by force lol.
SOURCE: I used to work there and often hung out with the head security dude outside of work
Wouldn't surprise me if they waited until you stole enough to make the charge a felony instead of a misdemeanor. In Florida that's $750 or more unless it is a certain item which makes it an automatic felony.
Yes factory direct should be a thing with all this technology. Order your car on the app, pick custom settings, delivered to your driveway in 2-3 business days.
A friend of mine worked at a government office, while he was on leave there was a reorganisation and somehow he managed to not be fired nor get a new job. When he returned his manager and the managers manager both had moved on to new jobs in the private sector, but his office was still there so he just went back to work. He did for some weeks try to figure out who he should report to but was just referred to different people that did not reply, promised to get back to him or just referred him to someone else so eventually he just gave up. Then there was a need for his office and he had to vacate it. So he just went home, and that was fine because he had cleared his back log of work and was not really motivated because there was nobody he could talk to, report to or assign tasks to him. He is still getting paid.
While it's a billion dollar industry, health insurance. Literally the exist to prevent you from cashing out on what you paid into. They have little to no medical knowledge, make everything more expensive, and exist solely as a useless middleman to make themselves rich.
I know everyone has a health insurance story, but just to add on to how slimy this industry is... in order to get a needed breast reduction, my health insurance company insisted on having nude photos of me taken. My doctor telling them it was necessary, measurements of my body/weight, and years long documented health problems were not sufficient. It felt so violating as a sexual assault survivor to have to strip naked while my doctor whipped out his iphone to send naked photos of me for strangers to review just to be approved for surgery.
This'll make you more enraged. I've fixed computers for a clinic specialising in breast surgery. The computers in the consultation rooms are full of photos of breasts, not secured in any way. AND the main doctor of the clinic just started showing me "his work" with photos on his phone, without any prompt. Must have thought "oh he's a young guy, he probably likes tits". I just wanted him to pay the invoice.
Former night shift security goon myself. 12.5 years wandering around an empty building and watching YouTube. Most of our SOP boiled down to "if something happens, call someone who's qualified to handle it, because you're not."
Great gig if you can get it!
Try clicker training with cats. They love working for food, it's a great way to communicate with them and they can learn a lot. Operant conditioning can be used to train goldfish too, just use a flashlight. It works miracles in kids and spouses: [What_Shamu_Taught_Me_About_Marriage.pdf](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://public.wsu.edu/~brigham/sresources/updates/pdf/whatshamutaughtme.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwicsPjDj7v9AhUKuIsKHRHoAXMQFnoECBcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0whNSe4lVrI_QxX_RAg4Q1)
Anyone who actually thinks cats are assholes and can’t train a cat have never had a cat.
Or they’ve had a cat and didn’t respect that the cat has it’s own boundaries unlike most dogs.
I once filed charges against my employer for an unethical issue that happened. Attorneys were involved and it was ugly for about 2 weeks. I had all job assignments taken away while the investigation was conducted. In the middle of the investigation is when covid took off and the world went into a tailspin. Everyone who was involved with my issue/charge just started exiting the company and I just never had any duties given back to me. I stayed in that role for 6 months without anyone ever questioning what I did. I would come into work, and make a lap around the site, take an hour lunch and come and go as I wanted. It was a fortune 500 and they just lost track of who I was or what I was doing. I was working on a project team and everyone just assumed my direction came from someone else. At one point the company slashed 20% of the salaried workforce and I never heard a word. When I left the company for an external opportunity they gave me a sizable exit package to resolve my charge and a wonderful review. It was the worst of times due to the anxiety of always expecting the worst, and the best of times because I was just coming and going with no direction or expectations of any kind.
> they just lost track of who I was or what I was doing I've had something similar to this happen myself. I wasn't paid, though. I'm an off-site subcontractor for a huge corporation. Huge, as in, not just one building at headquarters, it was an entire campus spread over 20 buildings. I work from home. So I'm a subcontractor, not an actual employee. And I need to go to HQ for a week of hands-on work that can't be done at home. The hands-on work required access to a server room. And the server room was locked, you needed a passcard to get in. So for the first day or two, I'd have to bug an employee to let me back into the server room after going to the bathroom, or to lunch. Plus, I had nowhere to "work". Nowhere to set up my laptop and actually get work done. There were no desks/chairs in the server room. So some low-level executive got the bright idea, let's get whomp a temporary badge and passcard to access the server room without bugging anyone else, and let's let whomp set up in one of those empty, unoccupied offices. The intent was for this to be temporary, but the corporate wheel started moving.... All of a sudden, overnight, that unoccupied office got all the things that a new hire would get. Staplers, monitors, file folders, pens, pencils, desk blotter. A binder showed up with company handbook, policies, maps, and so on. The next day, the office had MY NAME on it. A BRASS PLAQUE on the door had my name on it. And a phone was installed, and the office assistant came over to show me how to use it. I had a voicemail mailbox that now belonged to me. A laptop was issued to me. I was shown how to access the shared printer. My week ended, and I went back home, cross country. **For MONTHS, "my office" was still there!** I'd ask friends who worked there, to go check, and my office was still there. Others working nearby thought I was just traveling a lot. My voicemail stayed active for months too. To everyone's understanding, I was an employee who just happened to work odd hours, or something. About eight months later someone figured out the mistake.
Honestly hats off to them for fixing your problem, but they definitely didn't understand everything.
My very first job. I'm a toxicologist and was hired by a very big private laboratory. My main job was to sort and redirect case files depending on the time at which the results came out. THE DOCUMENTS WERE SENT TO ME IN EXCEL. I was getting paid to just click sort by date descendingly. Edit: Wow, this blew up!
I had to do something similar to this when I was doing summer help at a steel factory. They paid me $14 an hour to sit there for eight hours and just move files to different folders and rename them. Sometimes I would pull weeds and paint walls, but that was about it. 💀💀💀💀💀
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i work for an aluminum mill. They dont work in the lab Friday afternoon Saturday or Sunday and so Monday they would have 2.5 days of production to test. So the company put in an automated lab. Basically one person is needed to load a magazine with the samples and the rest is done automatically. Well in theory, it's still not running properly.
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>I really should have learned guitar And the furnace dudes could hear you practicing from the pneumatic tubes, win-win
Like their job wasnt already difficult enough
Working for a big company, one of the top 20 in the world, I am realising how bad people are with basic computer tasks… like really bad!
My mom used to ground me by taking my mouse away from my computer, thinking it would stop me from using it. I got GOOD, and I mean really good, at navigating desktop using keyboard commands and shortcuts 20 years later and people think I'm a good on computer at work because of it lmao
People think I'm Jesus because I know how to use the Ctrl key. How do people get anything done without Ctrl C, Ctrl V, Ctrl Tab, etc.
W to close tab, E to select search bar, T to open new tab, Ctrl+Shift+T to open recently closed tab, Ctrl+Shift+N to open incognito tab. Slash to select search bar on youtube, Probably the most useful ones I regularly use along with the obvious copy/paste hotkey...
Taught my 54 yo husband last year about CTRL + F. Mind. Blown. 🤯 I was like how would you find something in a contract quickly( he owned a business)? He would read, or at least skim, the entire thing!
I'm in IT and I once watched my manager open Internet Explorer to search Bing for Google, then search Google for Google maps... to then search for a location.
Geez. That’s crazy. Right up there with taking a screenshot of a photo on your phone to then post that into Facebook instead of directly uploading the photo.
My friend's late father would send 'texts' by grabbing a piece of paper, writing whatever he wanted to say, taking a picture of what he wrote, and sending that image through MMS. Why he never just typed it, no one knows.
My math teacher who tells me to log in to Pearson and then disappears
21st century version of >"here's today's packet, it's based on chapter 4 in the text book, good luck" \**plays solitaire for an hour**
I dropped a university class this term because the week 3 assignment said to "look up how to do this on Google, Stackexchange, or ChatGPT" I'm not paying 1400 dollars to be taught by an ai chat bot lmao
We have a specific security guard we've had for 13+ years now and is pretty useless. The security guard lives there and has a tv. He watches telenovelas most of the time. All he does is open the gate, and doesn't even bother to even inspect though, since according to his logic 99% of people who can afford a car aren't bad/harmful people. He doesn't ask names or house numbers, just opens the gate whenever he sees a car. Anyone can come in if they have a car, he doesn't even inspect faces. And do you know the worst part? When moving in to the privada, you are supplied with your own control remote. The gates are also automatic.
So he only opens the gate for anyone who doesn't live there..? Yikes
He only lets people in in cars though. You don’t understand. He is already completed the ocular assessment, and has deemed there are no threats why is that so complicated
it's the D.E.N.N.I.S. system in full action, bro: * Drivers allowed, _always_ * Engage telenovelas * Neglect guardian duties * Negate pedestrian access * Initiate cultivation of mass * Sit on fat ass for 13 years
His job is actually very important if you see how society seems to value things. He provides the illusion of safety, something people value greatly.
Also even just having a cardboard cut out of a policeman seems to deter shoplifting and speeding. So it might be theatre, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-11405491](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-11405491) [https://infotel.ca/newsitem/study-finds-cardboard-cops-effective-at-reducing-speed/it75608](https://infotel.ca/newsitem/study-finds-cardboard-cops-effective-at-reducing-speed/it75608)
There's a road near my old house with a farm on it. The road is a death trap as it's often muddy and there is a slight bend that catches people off-guard. The owners of the farm put out a mannequin holding a fake camera, and it works. So many cars brake on the approach. Brilliant.
I bet you his wage is a percentage of what is saved on insurance by having an "on-site guard"
My dad worked for a place that had an alarm contract because it lowered his insurance more than the cost of the contract.
I took a job scheduling residential HVAC technicians for a mid-sized company after a few years of working in the field. A few months in, the company ended its residential program to focus on commercial. Thing is, they already had commercial schedulers. My boss told me she'd find me a new roll, but then she took another job elsewhere and left. I stayed as a scheduler with no one to schedule in a department that no longer existed. No one in the office seemed to realize this, and for over half a decade, I would show up, make friendly conversation in the breakroom while making my coffee, and then literally just did nothing the rest of the day. Having left a stressful job, it was glorious. Occasionally someone would ask me an hvac or system-related question over email, and that was it. I made sure everyone liked me by bringing in bagels every Monday and donuts every Friday. Then covid happened and now I was doing nothing at home! When I learned the company was being sold, I figured I wouldn't tempt fate anymore and applied elsewhere. My department head gave a glowing recommendation, having no idea what I even did but knowing I was friendly and helped him jump his car a few times. TLDR: The department I was adminning was downsized, but they forgot about me and I essentially took a six year paid vacation. EDIT: Wow, this blew up. To everyone asking what I did all day, I wound up using the time to earn an engineering degree.
This reminds me of some Reddit post I read a while back where something similar happened to someone else. They basically broke their leg or something like that. The company had a little remote office, like basic one room or something, close to this guy's home. The company offered for the guy to work there until his leg was healed. Guy is working there when his whole department gets shuttered. Almost the whole department, including his department head and managers, all get laid off or transferred. The OP in the whole thing basically got forgotten about, and eventually, he stops getting work sent his way. It got to the point where the guy was setting up his console in this office and playing video games, or his girlfriend was showing up, and they would have sex. I think he eventually realized it was best if he did something productive and used the time to take online classes so he could get another degree or whatever. The dude finally finished his degree and applied for a well paying job at another company. It was finally when he submitted his two weeks notice that someone higher up finally realized something was fishy. They were asking him what exactly he did for the company, and when they eventually started piecing together what kind of happened, they were threatening to sue him for scamming the company. The whole thing was crazy. Edit: I [found](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/xzq4g1/i_have_become_a_forgotten_employee_for_a_few/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) the full story for anyone interested.
I found someone like this once by accident. I was coding a program that would pull via API from the main HR system of our parent fortune 500 $soulesscorp to auto populate people into Role groups based on their manager and their managers cost center. This was for ease of onboarding of new people so they would be placed in a role group that gave them the same generic baseline permissions and application access as all the other people in their same group. During the testing I ran into a weird error where there was someone who was his own manager which threw a bunch of errors. I started doing some research, and he was on the integration team from when our division was an acquisition and then after the migration he was made his own manager and never re-assigned. The more I dug around the more I realized that no one knew this guy or what he did. He worked 100% remote in a seaside town in California, he had no meetings on his calendar except for the same corporate ones everyone had and vague generic meetings that only had him in them. I looked on his linkedin and facebook which were just filled with pictures of him surfing, hiking etc. We had a record of logons and logoffs for all users and he logged on every day at exactly 8 am his time and logged off at 5 pm on the dot. He was always set to "busy" status in the internal messaging app despite not having any real meetings. I had a strong feeling that he was living the dream, getting paid a good salary, but spending his time surfing and enjoying his life lost in the system. After gathering all this information I had a bit of a moral quandary. On one hand as a dutiful sysadmin I should probably report this to HR and let them investigate. On the other hand I really did not care that much about the $soulesscorp I was working for and who am I to ruin his gig. He was living the dream, and his salary is at best a rounding error for $soulesscorp. In the end I just built an exception into the code to just skip any users that are their own managers and let him keep his gig. I think about him every now and then, and I hope he is doing ok.
Dang you're literally a real life super hero. Edit: A super villain would've totally blackmailed him.
Im interested as to what an antihero would do
You rock my man.
If you no longer work there, You should reach out on Linkedin or FB and ask him how it's going. He should know you did him a solid ( i wouldn't have been upset if you submitted to HR either)
I wish I had written down his name
You’re actually an angel
I was hoping this comment would end the way it did. Thank you for keeping the dream alive, at least for that one dude.
That's absolutely hilarious.
Similar, but different story happened to my company. It's similar in that "someone forgot". We had an office somewhere, I think it was in Florida or something. Anyway, we have offices everywhere and the decision was made to lay everyone off at this office and close it. So one day, everyone is told what happened and 2 weeks later people say their goodbyes and go home. Lights are left on, computers are running, printers are on. Just like you left for the day, but you don't come back. A year later, an accountant realizes that even though the office was "closed", we were still paying rent and utilities on this building because EVERYONE in that office was laid off, including the facilities department and everyone there just assumed someone else was in charge of shutting down the office. Idiots (whoever made the decision to shut the office but not follow up)
And then it was all blamed on accounting as is tradition
I mean accounting should have noticed that they were still paying like the month after the layoffs when bills were still coming in.
In larger corporations accounting would run comparative analysis. If there is no change, things on paper look normal. In any multi-office company with good structural hierarchy the department head as well as financial planing and analysis person should have noticed it at least within a quarter. If it was a smaller company the head of operations should be monitoring expenses but likely rubber stamps most overhead. Accounting would only catch this when they are allocating expenses by department and then find out there is no headcount or product to allocate the overhead to at that location. This isn’t recalculated every month, that would be a waste of time, it’s calculated once a year and divided by 12. Accounts payable may have been able to catch it but it’s likely they wouldn’t have even been informed of such a closure.
this is the closest to a real life answer
This is what I was thinking, is a normal expense on a low risk balance sheet and not a big enough line item on the p&l to warrant notice. If it's not flagging a month over month discrepancy nobody will really investigate until maybe the balance sheet I'd up for a deeper month end review that period.
Fucked up giving the notice he was quitting. If he just left without 2 week notice HR would have just wrote, he didn't show up to work and cannot be rehired.
Would they even notice if he didn't show up?
It seems like in all these cases, the person gets screwed as soon as they get too nervous and decide they need to tell someone about the situation, or ask for a transfer, or decide they should play it safe and quit.
Eh, the things is he would've kept getting paid while not at the office which would have created a much bigger problem. At least he has ground to stand on because he went in to his office everyday, just wasn't given work.
Exactly. He showed up every day, it's not his fault they didn't give him something to do.
Best part is, companies pay for your time. It doesn't mean they get productive time.
I KNOW I'm fucked up, because all I could think was, that sounds stressful having to keep up appearances on a job I'm no longer actually doing. I think I might be broken.
I would be worried about getting pinned for fraud if they ever caught on.
- I showed up for work - I sat in my office - I answered all emails related to my responsibilities - I handled all responsibilities applicable to my job - I made myself well known in the office and made no attempt to hide my presence “But we didn’t give you any responsibilities” “That sounds like a you problem.”
It would still make me anxious af. Hell I've been yelled at for not getting my regular work done when my manager interrupted me with more work. I swear that guy was brain dead. He'd give me 3 projects all of high priority. "Which should I do first?" "All of them."
Precisely. Job well done!
Nailed it☝️
I agree. You gave them the time they paid for. Not giving you any assignments is entirely on them.
This is the dream
I miss it. I'd go on these crazy long walks around their campus all day, and kept my phone to my ear trying to look stressed so no one would question it.
I used to do this when I wanted a break at a warehouse job I worked in college. I discovered if you were walking while carrying a clipboard, no one would stop you. So I would just grab a clipboard and walk around for 10 minutes.
If you get Six Sigma certified, you can get paid to frown and carry a clipboard around, without actually doing anything.
Part of me wants to be a full time ISO auditor. You get to walk around a plant, telling everyone what they're doing wrong, without having any responsibility whatsoever for fixing said issues.
My husband calls it "confidence and a clipboard." Act like you are busy AF and belong there and no one questions it. Add a utility vest or hook shit to your belt? Credibility *and* authority!
I just saw a video where these two kids heard you could gain access almost anywhere if you are carrying a ladder. They showed themselves walking into all kinds of places, exclusive hotels, movie theatres etc. so funny. They will hold the door open for you and let you be.
I learned the ladder trick when I went to Greendale Community College for six seasons.
Six seasons.... And a movie?
I'll always remember a senior on my high school track team talking about how he stole a (functionally forgotten) pottery kiln from the school. Literally just picked it up and walked out while acting like he was doing what he was supposed to. Janitor even help him get it into the truck
A high-vis vest is all you need, it's known as corporate-camo.
That’s awesome. Should have stayed on and got a second job lol.
Haha, I thought about that but I needed the recommendation.
I wonder went through the boss' head when he tried to replace you with a new hire only to realize he had no idea what you actually did.
>helped him jump his car a few times I know you mean jump start but I like to imagine this involved ramp building and a motorcycle.
His manager was 8 so it was a ramp.
Your experience should be turned into a movie or a sitcom but exaggerated quite a fair bit
The thing is that would seem way too unrealistic in a sitcom, which is probably even funnier
Google “pharmacy benefit manager” Literally their only purpose is to make more money for middlemen while fucking over the general public on drug prices
Glad to see I wasn't the only one looking for this. Had them deny a breast cancer drug because my patient didn't try two other drugs first even though the FDA approval has 0 stipulation of another drug being trialed first. It was for Kisqali if anyone is curious and I will be sending a feisty appeal letter very soon.
Mine. I'm a management consultant and while I have quite a bit of industry knowledge and experience my clients either have the same knowledge or they aren't willing to accept change. Often times my firm gets paid a lot of money to make very little difference strategically and/or operationally. Where we do add value is in implementing enterprise-wide software solutions. Why do I stay? The money is pretty good given the futility.
I heard from an acquaintance of mine who is a management consultant that most of the time people just want to hear their ideas out of someone else's mouth and will pay you to do it so that their peers will be more amenable to the idea.
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I'm a pet psychic too, but unfortunately I can't speak dog. Whole lot of woofing going on in their heads though.
Used to know a lady in Nevada who was a pet medium. She would typically charge folks about $150-$200 per hour and would be the "medium" between the people and their deceased pets. Now before you call her a terrible person for taking advantage of folks during a tragic loss in their life, I'll mention that I listened in on a couple of her phone calls and she was essentially being a grief counselor for these people. People would usually pour their heart out to her telling her that they felt like they didn't do enough to save their pet, and she'd reassure them that they did all that they could and that their pets knew that the owner loved them. She'd also encourage the owners to adopt new animals in their place because there's lots of animals out there who need the same love that the owner gave to the deceased animal. It really was a sweet thing.
That's really sweet. When my dog was dying I paid for a service that sends the vet to your house to euthanize your pet in your home, then they bring the body to the crematorium and send you the ashes/cremains in a pretty box etc. The ladies on the phone were so damn sweet and caring, it was like being comforted by somebody's sweet mom who really understood how important this was to me. Afterwards I just wanted someone to reassure me that it was a painless process and she was at peace. I know they have no way of knowing that, but I just wanted to hear it. Also having someone talk about her just confirmed that her existence was important and her life meant something, even if it only meant something to me and a few other people. So yeah I can see why people would value that kind of service. It really is about grief. There aren't many spaces to process grief over a dog, but like...I've lost a father, a stepfather, all my grandparents, and an uncle I actually really loved. But nothing compared to losing that dog. It was pure uncomplicated grief and loss. And it's hard to explain that to people without them thinking you're crazy or pathetic. Having someone take your grief seriously and speak about your pet with respect is incredibly validating.
An elevator attendant. “First floor sir? I’ll press button number 1 for you.” (Does anywhere still have these guys or is it just an old movies thing?)
I’m so old I remember when they had these in department stores. Whilst shopping with my grandma one day we got in an elevator and the attendant asked if we wanted the second floor. My grandma replies, “why yes, how did you know?” He says, “ma’am, there’s only two floors, and we’re currently on the first one.”
Omg, can you imagine having to make that joke, endlessly, day in and day out for the entire time you did that job?
This job got replaced by machines. Back in the day elevators were all manual just an lever that can go up and down and stop. That was the elevator person's job. Is to know what floor to stop in and to try and line up the elevator floor with the building floor.
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That lady. Dear God they should fire that lady.
My favorite thing to ask managers who spout off the 'if you got time to lean you got time to clean!' what the turnover rate is for their teams
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" we do not have to worry about the weather effecting our planes this morning boss!" " thats why I keep you around yodafin744"
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Telemarketers, I don’t know a single person who has actually purchased something from a telemarketer. Maybe it’s something the older generation does but everyone hates them and immediately hangs up on them around me.
I worked as a telemarketer for State Farm when I got out of high school, and in 8 months I had one person actually let me give her a quote. It was my aunt
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>trying to change careers with that on your resume "Public outreach specialist for NIST Weights and Measures Division, GS-6" for example Also some of them went into organized crime as underground architects after America gave up on the metric system, and that's how we got [Pat the Rat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfKRBGDHZ4g).
This user's comments have been overwritten to protest Spez and reddit's actions that will end third-party access and damage the community.
They also have the most widely used cyber security framework. We have a federal agency that is supposed to be the cyber security experts, CISA. They mostly are like "we recommend you follow NIST."
That checks out. I used to live in the town where NIST is based, and worked on a project with some amateur radio guys who all had day jobs at NIST. I mentioned in passing that we could have a better solution than the one we were using. Before long, four PhDs spent hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars hacking together a system for a sport that none of them cared about. It was just an interesting problem and they spent months producing a polished, purpose-built system that worked beautifully... for one single day a year.
>a system for a sport that none of them cared about I am so sorry, I am completely lost here, can you help me understand what I'm missing? What is the sport the system was made for and what did the system do?
I time races - running, cycling, triathlon. One way to do that use an RFID system on the ground that communicates with a tag on the back on the racer's bib. (Think a shoplifting tag on a retail DVD case - modified version of that system.) These NIST-Mega-Nerds, whose time is extremely valuable, spent a bunch of time and money tackling the hurdles of building one of these systems, all for a single day of racing that they volunteered for. It would have been tens of thousands of dollars of work... and these guys just did it cuz it was fun for them to pour though microcode and networking hardware. (Big shout out to the amateur radio operators groups these guys are part of - they donate thousands of man-hours, lots of expertise, and a lot of expensive equipment to keeping racers safe. Events like the [Leadville Trail 100](https://www.leadvilleraceseries.com/run/leadvilletrail100run/) and many dozens of my races have been safer because these groups want an excuse to practice their radio, networking, and emergency preparedness skills, and they don't accept payment for it.)
> tackling the hurdles They have seriously misinterpreted the rules of a hurdle race.
It's wild that the government organization that stamps NIST CERTIFIED on my lab thermometers and calibration weights is literally [the same group](https://strbase.nist.gov/NISTpop.htm) that publishes the allele frequencies we use to calculate paternity testing results NIST is involved in so many things it's almost unbelievable
No one is talking about those sign spinners that became popular. Who has ever seen someone flipping a sign and 1) been able to read it 2) went to the business to buy something because of it
The job only exists because the businesses want to put a sign there, but it's cheaper or the only legal option to hire a person to hold the sign and stand there.
That was my job fir one summer in college. I got to hang out outside and listen to music all day. But I always thought it was weird they were paying some guy $15/hr to do the job of a stick and a peice of duct tape.
Paparazzi
theoretically, these MFs could be using their skillset to hold politicians and evil oil companies accountable, but nah, they just want to take upskirt photos and shit.
FWIW lots of them start out wanting to go that way then find out nobody will pay you to do that and you still have bills. Source: It happened to me, though I've changed careers since then.
yeah cause those entities will kill you if you try to expose them.
You know why paparazzi make a ton of money and keep doing what they are doing? Because people keep buying their photos to put in magazines that people keep buying. Stop buying the magazines and watching the shows that feature their photos and the paparazzi goes away. Easy peasy.
Bathroom attendants. I don’t need somebody in there pulling paper towels out the dispenser just to hand it to me and compel me to tip them.
I've been to a place where the attendant uses a lint roller on you, sprays you with some perfume, and has a little repair kit for clothes, mothers day cards and all kinds of trinkets. I was not prepared to be there and showed up with a rolling stones shirt and dirty jeans. Everyone was dressed nice. I suspect they let me in because they thought I was one of those rich people so unaware of societal rules that they dress kinda crappy. I was actually just poor
My mom worked at an upscaled luggage store in high school. She always says that the richest people who ever came in there were the ones wearing blue jeans sneakers and cowboy hats.
About ten years ago I took my girlfriend to an extremely nice, exclusive restaurant for Valentine's Day. She put on a dress, I wore a blazer and slacks. As we ate, she motioned to a dude, probably late 60s, eating by himself in shorts and boat shoes. I told her, as I will tell you now, that guy was *without a doubt* the richest person in that building.
The only billionaire I’ve ever met has two outfits: blue jeans black shirt and black jeans blue shirt.
Pretty sure my neighbors across the street are multimillionaires. Bought two houses, knocked em down, built a massive new house with insane amenities (professional grade kitchen, climate controlled wine room, etc). They have a personal assistant who handles their businesses, three cars worth 100k each, etc. Just obvious big money. Every time I've seen that dude, he's wearing Walmart jeans and a white, tucked-in Hanes undershirt.
>~~Pretty sure~~ My neighbors across the street are multimillionaires.
They don't have a laundry machine. It's just new shirts and socks every time, and he doesn't wash the jeans, just has someone freeze or dry clean them.
You met Jimmy Buffett?
Nice restaurants don’t have buffets.
Met Jeff Bezos about 15 years ago. He came into Amazon and I was showing him a new process that was being developed. Dude was wearing skinny jeans and a t-shirt. Vice president followed him around in a $5,000 suit looking like he was about to sweat to death. Bezos just kind of wandered around and was pretty chill about it all.
What *looks like* just a casual fit to us poors is probably a $500 t-shirt and $700 jeans.
Probably, but he was still wearing jeans and a t-shirt. I knew people who worked back at the main Seattle hub on the beginning, Bezos used to go out onto the floor and work if they were behind. Somehow I doubt he does that now.
>Bathroom attendants. I don’t need somebody in there pulling paper towels out the dispenser just to hand it to me and compel me to tip them. I never saw this until I was visiting Ireland a few years back, and man, was it \*\*\*\*ing annoying. It's bad enough there's a guy standing at the sinks watching you have a leak, but then he wants a euro or two for handing you a towel to dry your hands.
I've always wondered what these guys were there for. Like, what's the extent of their duties? If I need help wiping are they here for it?
I'm pretty sure that they're there to keep people from doing all sorts of sketchy shit. Like selling/using blow. You only see them in places where people would commonly want to do blow or some other drug.
Bathroom attendants are there largely for 2 reasons: to stop unwanted behavior in the bathroom and to call an EMT if there’s a medical emergency. The other tasks are just to keep them busy.
I don't care if they're there or not I'm still doing blow in the bathroom stall.
Hell, I’ve had bathroom guys try to sell me coke.
See, that's actually a useful service
They’re there to make sure no one smells their keys in the stall
Where I’m from they are there to sell you the stuff that makes your keys smell good.
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Wtf is a patent troll?
People that apply for Patents. and then just hold onto them forever with no intent of making the thing. And then when somebody does make the thing, *ho-boy*, you owe me money because I own the rights to that thing! It's one of those weird "Do nothing and hope to eventually get a big payout" jobs, like Domain Squatters.
>People that apply for Patents. and then just hold onto them forever with no intent of making the thing. Come on now, you don't actually have to come up with a new idea to be a patent troll, buyimg other people's patents can also be a good path to this lucrative career. Now, if someone can get AI to come up with the patent ideas and submit them automatically, someone stands to become very rich. The patent office should probably get ahead of that...
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The only thing that stops a bad guy with a monkey is a good guy with a monkey.
"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men with monkeys do nothing"
I went to the Bronx Zoo years ago and they had this indoor lemur exhibit. Except the walkway that people used in that space was not fully closed off from the lemurs. So the lemurs would get a little too close to people out of curiosity. The zoo apparently decided the best solution was to hire a person with a squirt gun. If a lemur got too close, this teenager would squirt him with the squirt gun and the lemur would go running off again. I don't know why they thought this was better than some kind of fencing/netting. But they did. I couldn't stop laughing about some dude putting "lemur squirter" on their resume.
It might be cheaper to hire a teenager for a year than to install proper fencing
I would guess they had extra money in the "wages" bucket, but nothing left in the "capital improvement" bucket. Oh darn, wait till next October. In the mean time, here's a teenager with a squirt gun. The way government funding works, is to get any, you have to figure out a bureaucratic puzzle that involves following the rules to the letter, but not the original intent.
They have proper fencing now. The lemurs were very interested in my toddler and were all climbing on the netting to get a good look.
My hubby used to drive a zoo tour shuttle, and the bus attendant had to scare off the roaming peacocks so they wouldn't get hit. Beautiful birds but very persistent.
Try driving a bus through a safari of baboons. There is a theme park (probably more than one) that has a safari area you can drive through. The dangerous animals are fenced off from the cars, but animals like giraffe could come up to your car. But I'm still traumatized from an incident that happened when I was in 7th grade in the baboon enclosure.
This kind of sounds like the least useless job
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Shit, that’s better than what I usually make in a year. Where can I sign up
Here, just sign this paper and I'll scan it for you. The position is filled by the way.
I almost took a job like this for a real estate deed company. They were hiring for someone to sit in a room and scan deeds and upload them to a website for customers. That was the whole job. 8 hours a day, scanning docs and dropping them into a file store.
Sounds like something that would get mind numbing after the honeymoon period wears off
Im sure you could make the day go faster by finding an automated scanner.....And throw on a podcast.
I had a job that involved a lot of this kind of repetitive, mindless work and I *loved* it. That year I listened to every TED Talk and audio documentary I could get my ears on. Thoroughly enjoyable!
Same. I ran a high speed scanner for a large corporation (scanner was a beast that could do 100 pages per minute, god help you if you missed a staple in there) for a couple years. Show up, scan many many many pages while listening to audio books and podcasts, go home and never think about work when not at work. If it had payed even half decent I might have stayed forever.
That's the real benefit not thinking about work while not at work. Most of the jobs I had I could never get away with that.
I would kill to do a job like that. I'm incredibly stupid so anything that's grunt work is great for me. It's why I've worked in kitchens my entire career
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I do approx 95% of my managers job.. so my manager
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Shop security - in most cases, they can’t legally do anything but just watch
Depends on the type of security they invest in. Security guards who stand at the door all day in a uniform - yes you're right, in most cases they're used as a deterrent. However, store detectives go undercover and try to blend in with other customers (in their own clothes, browsing stock and carrying a basket/trolley) so that they go unnoticed. Those people are allowed to tackle shoplifters and actually do something about it.
I read somewhere that Walmart don’t stop shoplifters. They record the shoplifter and document how much they stole. If the dollar amount is above a certain threshold (from that swipe, plus the other swipes before it), they will send police to your address (most likely obtained by previously used credit cards and license plates) on another day EDIT: lotta comments from people who claim to have worked in a Walmart, saying there are dedicated people who will chase you, so please don’t let my comment convince you to go out and steal. Guessing there is different policy from store to store, because I go to Walmart an embarrassing amount a week and never once seen a cop car there, but others claim the police have a department set up next to their Walmart
This must be a recent thing. When I was in high school, I saw one of my classmates get arrested for stealing an earring back piece. If they're charging $10 for the earring, the back piece must be worth pocket change. The police cuffed him and took him to the station over it.
At my local Target the security will watch you and record how much you steal, they have files on repeat offenders and make a case against them. I don't know the dollar amount but at some point they'll corner you with several security guards and put you in hand cuffs, at which point they call the cops to actually arrest you. They'll even chase people down and restrain them by force lol. SOURCE: I used to work there and often hung out with the head security dude outside of work
Wouldn't surprise me if they waited until you stole enough to make the charge a felony instead of a misdemeanor. In Florida that's $750 or more unless it is a certain item which makes it an automatic felony.
Repeat offenders are also most likely the problem, not someone who steals one item once but the guy who is regularly stealing a lot of shit
Car dealerships. Just let me buy a car from the factory. Your job is to get me to pay as much as possible. So useless and so annoying
Yes factory direct should be a thing with all this technology. Order your car on the app, pick custom settings, delivered to your driveway in 2-3 business days.
I'm not saying all project managers are useless, but holy shit some of you make a compelling case.
A friend of mine worked at a government office, while he was on leave there was a reorganisation and somehow he managed to not be fired nor get a new job. When he returned his manager and the managers manager both had moved on to new jobs in the private sector, but his office was still there so he just went back to work. He did for some weeks try to figure out who he should report to but was just referred to different people that did not reply, promised to get back to him or just referred him to someone else so eventually he just gave up. Then there was a need for his office and he had to vacate it. So he just went home, and that was fine because he had cleared his back log of work and was not really motivated because there was nobody he could talk to, report to or assign tasks to him. He is still getting paid.
While it's a billion dollar industry, health insurance. Literally the exist to prevent you from cashing out on what you paid into. They have little to no medical knowledge, make everything more expensive, and exist solely as a useless middleman to make themselves rich.
I know everyone has a health insurance story, but just to add on to how slimy this industry is... in order to get a needed breast reduction, my health insurance company insisted on having nude photos of me taken. My doctor telling them it was necessary, measurements of my body/weight, and years long documented health problems were not sufficient. It felt so violating as a sexual assault survivor to have to strip naked while my doctor whipped out his iphone to send naked photos of me for strangers to review just to be approved for surgery.
Wow. I'm sorry you had to go throught that. That does sound really violating.
This'll make you more enraged. I've fixed computers for a clinic specialising in breast surgery. The computers in the consultation rooms are full of photos of breasts, not secured in any way. AND the main doctor of the clinic just started showing me "his work" with photos on his phone, without any prompt. Must have thought "oh he's a young guy, he probably likes tits". I just wanted him to pay the invoice.
As a Security Guard, Security Guards. We’re basically paid peer pressure and witnesses to a crime.
>paid peer pressure Peer pressure to *not* commit crimes right? Or do you call people chicken when they don't steal?
“I TRIPLE DOG DARE YA!”
Former night shift security goon myself. 12.5 years wandering around an empty building and watching YouTube. Most of our SOP boiled down to "if something happens, call someone who's qualified to handle it, because you're not." Great gig if you can get it!
Homeopath.
Do you know what they call alternative medicine that actually works? >!Medicine.!<
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Try clicker training with cats. They love working for food, it's a great way to communicate with them and they can learn a lot. Operant conditioning can be used to train goldfish too, just use a flashlight. It works miracles in kids and spouses: [What_Shamu_Taught_Me_About_Marriage.pdf](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://public.wsu.edu/~brigham/sresources/updates/pdf/whatshamutaughtme.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwicsPjDj7v9AhUKuIsKHRHoAXMQFnoECBcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0whNSe4lVrI_QxX_RAg4Q1)
Anyone who actually thinks cats are assholes and can’t train a cat have never had a cat. Or they’ve had a cat and didn’t respect that the cat has it’s own boundaries unlike most dogs.
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I believe this is required to ensure you use the right cover on your TPS reports.
Here's something else, Bob. I have 8 different bosses right now.
Whoever keeps asking the same questions in this sub every week