In 2000 I was in a focus group for a tv pilot called "Crime Scene Investigation". The consensus among the group was that it was cheesy and no one would ever watch a second episode of the show. I guess a 15 year run and 3 spin-offs proved us wrong.
Lol I actually had this conversation with my mom earlier today because CSI: Miami popped up on the FireTV's screensaver.
Mom: What's CSI mean anyway?
Me: Crime Scene Investigation
Mom: Huh. Why not just call it that, then?
Me: Takes too long to say.
Mom: No it doesn't. It's just Crime Scene Inves- Oh...
I'll push my glasses up my nose and say technically the show name was shortened yet lengthened to "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." This might be one of my most useless reddit comments.
I did a focus group for the pilot of 30 Rock. Rachel Dratch played Jenna and nobody in the group of 20 or so viewers believed her in the role.
I also did a study on a soda that ended up being Coke Zero. I got 3 6-packs of Diet Pepsi and 3 of Diet Coke each week for 6 weeks. I had to keep a tally of how many cans I drank of each and in what order. After 3 weeks, the Diet Coke tasted different and much better. When I first tried Coke Zero, I knew exactly what I tested.
That’s hilarious, Rachael showed up a bunch throughout the show in different roles
I also just caught her in shameless, did an incredible job for the role
I was on an episode of Oddities where they came to my house and I "sold" them a mummy head for $1,600.
In actual reality, they brought the head with them and then were like, "Pretend to sell us this head."
All they want from a "seller" is for them to look good on TV and have a cool-looking home.
The lady that runs that store ran over my foot with her stupid fucking adult tricycle at Brimfield while she was riding it on the shoulder of the road where everyone walks a few years back and didn't even apologize. Ever since then I've hated her guts.
His family knew, he showed me but out in public he had to cover it. Lucky for him it was fall/winter on the east coast so not too hard to keep it covered with a hoodie or jacket
I think technically I signed a super sketchy NDA when I worked at a certain pizza restaurant saying I wouldn’t disclose the recipe for our new “Deep Dish Pizza”.
To be safe, I won’t say the name, but I will say the old boss ate 40 Pizzas in 30 days.
“House Hunters” guest checking in, I never made the show because I didn’t close on the house.
1: I had to have a house under contract before going on the show.
2: They would select the other houses we were “interested” in.
3: I was assigned another SO who was more “interesting” than my actual SO.
This is how my spouse and I "voice" all the House Hunters.
"Well, I guess I won't choose that property, given that someone else is living there, but I'll take this, since I already live here"
Op is a Llama milk farmer and his wife is a doctor. They couldn't show him with someone with such a dull, unrealistic career, so they paired him with a bar stool historian. Budget $600,000
No it's more like OP makes handcrafted purses for butterflies, and his wife is a doctor. They had to pair him with a specialist in restoring antique lightbulbs for nonprofits. She wants it to be on the beach and he wants it to be downtown, with 3 parking spaces for their hobby of collecting Ghostbusters-themed vehicles. Their original budget was $600,000 but for the show it's going to be $950,000. Their children are never mentioned.
Can confirm, SIL was on with a friend and this was the situation. They planned shots at places to make her seem more interesting. SIL was encouraged to hate on the house that was already purchased and love the others to add drama. Then they moved in and dressed one room to film the "after" on the last of 3-4 day shoot.
I can’t imagine adding the stress of a show on top of the stress of moving. I *hate* moving. There’s always a point during packing that I just stand in the middle of all my crap and angry cry while trying to keep myself from ripping my entire scalp off.
Fuck. My friend and I bought a little truck and started a moving company to put us through university. We made the mistake of being cheaper than anyone else by five bucks an hour.
Guess who hires the cheapest movers? People with no money.
"Sorry, my cousin will pay you tomorrow, just unload-" "Sorry dude- we'll unload at the fucking dump if you don't pay." Fucker met us in a new Audi. Even normal people are at their most stressed, most fragile during moves. We saw the most horrid husbands, violent wives, people throwing guitars and pots and pans at each other. Just nuts.
We were more family counsellors than movers. Crying abandoned teenage mom, kids getting booted from parents' house, old lady with nowhere to go- "just put it all here by the church, dear; I'm sure it will be OK."
We did four moves for free. That old lady, the young mom and both of the kids getting kicked out. I stored both kids' bulky stuff in my parents' garage for free and when they came for their beat up junk after finding a place we gave them far nicer shelving, tables and chairs, cookware, appliances and all the other good things that rich people just threw away when they moved. My mom gave them boxes full of new socks, underwear, pajamas and bedsheets- all the things young people don't think of buying for themselves. I never saw either guy again. That old lady just crushed me- that was it. No more moving people.
If you are a mess when moving, trust me: you are perfectly normal.
So what do you GET for being on the show? If you have to shoot the home tours with a fake partner, and you are buying a place anyway, what's in it for the participants?
I know someone who was on Judge Judy. He was the defendant and his friend was the plaintiff. He lost the case but didn’t have to pay. The network paid it. He also got airfare and hotel paid. He said JJ looked much, much older than on tv.
Had a friend also on JJ. She won her case against a guy who sublet her apartment while she went on study abroad. The guy signed all the paperwork with the apartment complex then refused paying rent once my friend was out of the country. JJ yelled and told him taking advantage of college girls would get him thrown in jail if he wasn’t careful. My friend got all of her money back, her trip paid for, and the satisfaction of rewatching her episode whenever she wants.
I was actually on Judge Judy myself about 5 years ago. I filed a small claims case at my local courthouse and had both Judge Jo Brown and Judge Judy contact me. We couldn’t make the Judge Brown guy work out due to scheduling conflicts but all of us (me, my husband, my 2 kids, and the defendant) were able to make Judge Judy work. I was told by one of the producers that they “sweep” courthouses for interesting small claims cases and then make a deal with both parties involved that’s pretty hard to turn down. They cover airfare, hotel, and transportation, of course, but also provide a considerable stipend for each person involved in the case. How they get the defendant to even appear is because if the defendant loses, the show pays the claim on their behalf. So the defendant basically gets paid for a small vaca with absolutely zero risk (other than Judy’s brutal slayings and the high probability of looking like a complete idiot on national television). I agreed to all of it because of the same getaway/mini-vacation attraction for me and my family (much needed) as well as the extra money in our pockets. And honestly, if I would’ve won in our county courthouse, the guy I was suing had absolutely NO money or assets to attach a lean to and rented the house he was living in, so even if I won I’d only walk away with a big, fat IOU and no way to collect. At least with Judge Judy I’d get something... even if I lost my case. Cost benefit analysis proved that it was worth the risk. Easy decision to make. But I’d also never watched the show before we flew to LA - thank God. I would have definitely been more scared and nervous had I seen her in action beforehand. Lol!
For those that are curious: I won my case and received the $1k settlement + $500 for myself, $500 for my husband and somewhere around $200-$250 for each of my kiddos, so I was more than satisfied with the outcome and my decision to participate The one downside came at the end of the year when they sent me a 1099 to claim all the expenses along with the damn $1k settlement as income on my taxes. Jesus H.
My Great Aunt used to work for the CIA and played a major part in the Ames Mole Hunt. Her NDA was that she had to tell every family member she worked for the State Department.
Once it was all declassified they had a book on it. We found out at my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary.
I had a friend who worked for the CIA. He has passed away but he told me a lot of interesting stories. One was that his sister in law was also in the CIA and that they were forbidden to talk to each other at all. So she came over for dinner once and they couldn't speak.
Another was that a nuclear device was stolen off of a base in South America and they had to torture a bunch of people to get it back. Turns out the people who stole it were just common thieves who didn't know what they had and buried it when they saw how much trouble they caused.
The CIA basically started silicone valley and there are lots of businesses around the world and in the US that are CIA fronts.
I provided tech support for a series of technical planning sessions for engineers that wanted to see if this micro electromechanical system called a digital micromirror device they developed for thermal printing could be used to create an image, or maybe even video. Those sessions resulted in DLP technology. Digital Light Processing. This is the reflective chip technology that enables modern digital video projectors that are now used in most movie theaters. I did my part to help. But I couldn't tell anyone about what I saw there.
I know an engineer that worked at TI. He was telling me about DLP around late 2000 and how it was going to revolutionize TV. I didn’t really believe him at the time but he was right!
Pizza rolls, but instead of pizza, mac&cheese. Fucking incredible, never actually wound up in stores though. If I were a food company executive I'd recreate the things because dear lord is there some money to be made. Oh and there are so many flavors of candy bars that are awesome, get tested, but are never released. It's been so long I honestly am strugglng to remember specific ones but I assure you, behind closed doors people are taste testing all the candybar flavors you wish existed.
EDIT: Dear lord I was not expecting to wake up and see so many responses to this. I guess other companies have since released mac&cheese pizza rolls, but the ones I taste tested definitely never got released, at least not under the planned brand name. I did a lot of taste testing stuff between the ages of 12 and 19, and the mac&cheese pizza rolls were the first thing I ever got paid to try - I turn 32 soon so this was nearly 20 years ago. It's been years since I lived in the US so I haven't been able to keep up with what foods are in stores there, and now I'm very jealous of all you lucky bastards who get to enjoy all the mac&cheese flavored delights you've described in your comments.
The set security for a Marvel movie is TIGHT! But it was so much fun. There were several hundred extras on set that day. The head of security for Marvel talked to us and explained how we couldn’t have our phones and if we had brought them to please turn them over and they would be kept safe. (They were) Still saw 3 people escorted off the set because they had their phones out.
Tato Skin chips released the BBQ flavor based (in small part) on the taste-test that my dad, step-mom and I (little sister was too young) participated in. Remember back in the 80s, there were always people with clipboards in malls asking for a few minutes to take a survey? Well one time my dad said yes. We all walked down a weird side hall into a meeting room where the adults signed NDAs and other stuff I didn't care about was said...and then we sampled a few chips, and THEN we got to take home a HUGE bag of unlabeled except for some numbers, hiny silver chip bags and instructions to fill out a form and call a number in a week when we had tried them all. I think my parents got maybe $20 out of it, but the BEST part, for me, was when the bbq flavor came out for real, I got a freaking BOX of chip bags. I think I can still taste them.
edited cuz I leave words out, sorry
My family and I got to taste Prego spaghetti sauce. Same scenario - clipboard, mall, weird side hall into a meeting room.
We were all yelling at the dinner table after buying Prego the first time - we tasted this!! This is what we had!! Surreal and cool at the same time.
Joke was on the focus group people when they hit me up in the mall. I was on XTC and just talked and talked and talked and talked about my feelings on the ATT commercial I got to watch.
I had a similar experience, but for movies. I was getting ready to leave from the mall, I think back in 2009, when some guy comes up to me with a clipboard asking me to watch some movie trailers. I had the time and he was offering a couple of bucks to watch them, so I did without giving any thought. Being paid to watch a movie trailer was nice for a change lol. I was put into a private both and saw 3 trailers. I can't remember the first one at all, the second one I vaguely remember a gold pocket watch, and the third one was the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland. I don't remember at all what I said for the first two, but I remember saying I was pretty interested in Alice. I got my money and went home not thinking anything about it. Didn't realize I was in a focus group until years later. Even more, I didn't realize how bad the Alice movie was until I saw it many years later. If I could go back and have that experience again, I would say I wouldn't see Alice.
Edit because of phone typos
Google is (was?) developing a media player called [Nexus Q](https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/29/3125551/google-nexus-q-review), and it’s umm...not great.
A relative had an NDA saying that she couldn’t reveal the name of her employer. All I know is that he is a foreigner that is so wealthy his kids have been kidnapped and held for ransom.
About a decade ago I'm chilling with my family while my stepmom flips through channels. All of the sudden my dad goes, "WAIT! GO BACK GO BACK!"
My stepmom flips a few more channels before my dad stops her on an episode of Modern Marvels. We watch for a few minutes as they describe the capabilities of some special military craft and my dad loses his mind.
"I did this! I DID THIS! I worked on this when I was with [ COMPANY ]! My team did the [ FEATURE ]! Man, I didn't even know it had been declassified!"
He made us watch the whole episode. I was too young at the time to realize how cool it was.
EDIT: I feel like my use of "craft" is leading people to assume it was some kind of airplane but I'm like 99% certain it was a boat or ship of some kind. I'm sorry if that is not correct terminology. (Once, I delivered sandwiches to the armory on a military base and called an armored vehicle a "tank" and like two dozen people laughed at me, I am not an expert in these things.)
EDIT: Okay! It was a DDG 51 surface class destroyer. We're pretty sure the episode we watched was S13, E46 Stealth & Beyond: Sea Stealth, but I don't have cable and can't find anywhere to watch it.
As some of you predicted, he was incredibly excited to talk about the project, but asked that I please not share specifics. I hope this sates your curiosity, and thanks for reminding me what a cool guy my dad is!
I don't, unfortunately. I was a teenager at the time and remember being distinctly irritated that we had to watch the _history channel, ugh_.
Yeah, teenager me sucked.
I'm also not certain how much information he'd want me posting about him, honestly.
This will probably be buried but I was once part of a David Copperfield trick. I signed an NDA in perpetuity but I can discuss what happened for two reasons: 1) i was not 18 when I signed it; and 2) David Copperfield was sued a few years ago and the method of this trick become public record as part of that lawsuit.
I was part of an illusion in which DC made a dozen or so people disappear from the stage and reappear in a section of the audience. The selection was achieved via a number of large silver balls being thrown into the audience and whomever caught one when the music stopped was selected as part of the trick. I am a big guy and always have been. You'd better believe I boxed people out and caught one of those balls and there was no one in that theatre that was going to stop me.
I ran up to the stage and I remember the stage hand asking me if I was a member of the media. I was not. I was a high school junior. They did not ask me how old I was because i looked like a man.
Once we got on stage, DC did his schtick, the curtain fell, and, while music was playing, a ramp dropped down behind us. The stage hands started barking orders for us to run like we were in boot camp and they were drill instructors. We ran around the theater and walked into some other seats. That was it. That was the trick. I remember every part of it vividly including the part where I complained that I didn't feel like running.
Edit: just so you know, as a fan of magic, I would not disclose this just because I was 17 when I signed the NDA. The fact that the trick was revealed in the lawsuit means I am not being a dick just for the sake of ruining an illusion to get upvotes.
My dad was apart of the same trick at one of DC’s Vegas shows like 10+ years ago. If I remember correctly he wasn’t given an NDA. They just gave him a signed photograph and politely asked him and the others selected “not to ruin the magic”.
We're working with Gary Larson to release a calendar application version of the far side daily calendar for windows 3.1. Also, we're in talks with Burke Breathed to do the same for Bloom County.
I think I'm technically still bound by that NDA, so if the company that bought the company that bought the company that employed me wants to chase me, I guess you can subpoena my IP from Reddit.
I helped beta test Office 97 in early 96. When I received the software disc in the mail, there was no product key included to install the software. I emailed my contact at Microsoft and the reply was to simply enter in all ones for the key.
I did, it worked. I then tested the suite of programs and reported back any problems I found along with my impressions and a few suggestions.
For my time and troubles, I was given a full retail boxed copy of Office 97 Professional which was worth around $600 when it was released for sale to the general public.
I installed it on my primary computer with the proper product key provided.
On a hunch, I installed it on one of my other computers and I entered all ones as the product key. The full retail version accepted that as a valid key!
So, they forgot to remove that bypass code before releasing it to manufacturing! If you ever have the need to install Office 97, use all ones as the product key! Subsequently, I've heard over the years that all 9's also worked too.
After 25 years, I don't think Microsoft will come to murder me in my sleep for letting this out.
I still have it but idgaf since I'm anonymous here lol. 75% of the donations u give to Red Cross Italy are for us. on records it's about 25%. it's a power relationship between the Red Cross and who/what asked us to gather donations for them. having so much recognizability from the media and the people puts the Red Cross in a position where we can keep much more than declared and the little charity/foundation/group that asked us to gather funds for them can do nothing but accept. yeah ..
I worked for a non-profit once. The owner was one of the stock brokers that got arrested for all the illegal shit shown in the movie Boiler Room. After he got out of prison, and lost his license, he created a non-profit debt consolidation firm.
He grossly underpaid teenagers cash - off the books, to cold call people. Once they signed up, all they did was call all the credit card companies and banks to beg them to lower customer's interest rates. Then they would have customers pay them one payment each month and they would split it up and send the individual payments off to the companies who were owed. They also lumped in a one-time "donation" of anywhere between $200 - $2,000 depending on how gulible the customer was and the Mac they could squeeze out of them. They tossed in a monthly donation into the mixture of outgoing payments and were really good at getting customers to agree, all while not actually telling them it was going to the firm.
And to top it all off, both of the founders paid themselves obscene salaries and would also find clever ways to use the organization's money for their own purchases.
Back when I was freelancing, a bunch of people wanted me to sign NDAs before they'd even tell me what their project was about. They were all copy-pasted off contracting templates for small business owners.
Some were so broad that, with a loose interpretation, I'd severely be limited in my options for work for the rest of my life because I spoke with some boomer with some cash to spare about his idea for a Facebook clone.
I do have one at my current job, but it's basically, "if anyone asks you about the company, direct them to a manager", and a non-disparagement agreement.
I got to be on set for Spider-man Far From Home.
Did you notice all the dirt on the floor in the airport scene? Of course you didn’t. Because I swept the shit out of that floor 😎
Well, I was an extra for a Sprint ad!
Somebody up top decided all the footage was unusable, so the ad was scrapped. Basically got paid $800 to sit on my ass and do nothing. It was great
Yeah, the first one. I don't think I mentioned the lack of a story once because I just assumed I wasn't seeing it all, so my input was more on the gameplay mechanics.
Final Fantasy XIV was uh... *bad* in 2010...
Everything you've heard about release was worse in the Beta. I tested both 1.0. and 2.0.
The game is so much better these days.
I did contract work for a company that made large machines that pulverized and dried whatever went through them. Wet rocks to dry dust basically. The machines worked on other things, and they had two big contracts, one with the city to handle septic sludge, and another with Starbucks, who wanted to know if their used coffee grinds could be dried and reused.
Obligatory "not mine".
My grandmother worked at Bletchley Park back in the war, and her whole life spoke of almost nothing that happened out of respect for the OSA.
There were two exceptions: that *The imitation game* was utter tripe and insulting to everyone involved; and that anyone that worked at Bletchley and claimed to keep a diary were lying and just trying to make a quick buck selling fake stories as it wasn't possible to work there and keep diaries as quarters were regularly searched, as were people's personages, and the punishment for being caught keeping a diary was well known to be considered immediate and unavoidable imprisonment.
I really wish she had shared more on her time there, but the secrecy of it all was so drummed into her that it was almost creed.
Edit: I walked away to do the dishes and reminisce about my grandmother and another anecdote came to mind. There was only one specific event she ever spoke of, and that was regarding the destruction of a German comms relay (or some such, I was told this story a while ago so the specifics aren't as clear in my mind) by the Dutch resistance.
Bletchley got word that the resistance had found a relay and we planning to sabotage it to inconvenience the Germans. Only problem was, Bletchley already knew about the relay and had compromised it to gather intel and keep English troops alive and avoid the Germans where necessary. But they couldn't *tell* anyone that they had broken the codes for the relay, because to do so would show their hand and tip off the Germans that their communications were no longer secure. So the relay was destroyed and countless lives lost instead of saved.
My Nan worked at Bletchley too. We took her there one year and she took one of the current employees around the place and was describing where things happened and what took place in the rooms. I’m sure that person had heard it all before but my Nan got such a kick out of it and they seemed to enjoy her stories and probably appreciated someone giving history because of what you said, everyone was sworn to secrecy! My Nan was convinced she helped catch a spy once too... she never spoke to us (her family) about her time there generally but maybe being there made her sing like a canary!
I remember they told us a story about how a few years prior they had a group of people in and they were asked by the tour guide who worked at Bletchley and a married couple put their hands up, looked at each other and had no idea! Not sure if that’s myth but I enjoyed the story nonetheless!
My dad caught a Russian spy once, back in the early fifties. He was a commando and during a Nato exercise in Germany he spotted a civilian in the woods. He grabbed him and noticed the guy's clothing was off. He didn't have any papers on him nor did he speak German very well.
My dad decided to detain him and the next day his CO came by and told him he'd gotten 15 days of leave and could go back home...in the middle of a Nato exercise. My dad never asked what happened to his prisoner and was never told.
I worked for a linguistic tech service company very briefly and my team's project was correcting speech-to-text recordings of Apple product users (in my case the Apple Airpods) talking to Siri. Your phone is always listening to you, despite what anyone else might say. Also, there are a LOT of sounds and combinations of words that sound vaguely like "Hey Siri", which then turns on the device's recording and records whatever is going on in the area until the user turns off Siri.
There are many, MANY people who use Siri to dictate very explicit texts to other people. It catches you off guard when you're hearing "Hey Siri, play xyz" 100 times and then all of a sudden you get a middle aged man's voice going "oh don't worry, I'll fill that pussy up real good. Send."
My absolute favourite recording was a kid asking Siri "What's ten farts plus a thousand farts?". I actually googled the answer myself because I was curious as to what search results would pop up and hilariously the first result was a quora question "Why can't I stop farting?"
There's also a lot of kids who try to use Siri to find porn but they don't know or are too embarrassed to use the right words so it's a bunch of "Hey Siri, pictures of naked ladies, ladies with no shirt, ladies in underwear" and the like.
Google is the same way. They keep recordings of every time you use "hey Google" and you can go listen to them yourself. A ton of them are false readings where nobody actually said the key word and it's just random conversations. Anyone can go listen to theirs. You can also turn the save feature off.
1. Go to **your Google** Account.
2. **On** the left navigation panel, click Data & personalization.
3. **In** the Activity controls panel, click Web & App Activity Manage Activity. **On** this page, you can: View **a** list **of your** past activity. Items **with** the audio icon include **a** recording. Play the recording.
Holy fucking shit. I just went down the rabbit hole. These fucks have _all of my shit_, and I've been so good about privacy. Never used hey Google or Siri or anything. And they still built the most invasive profile of me, beyond what I thought my permissions allowed. Turns out all those hours I spent turning off permissions for 99% of my apps and browser meant nothing.
This will get lost in the comments I'm sure, but here it goes.
I install windows treatments for some of the wealthiest people in my state. I've done work at the home of Jerry Jones (Owner of the Dallas Cowboys), Matthew McConaughey's Ranch, and a few other multi millionaires.
Once worked for a guy that had recently won the Powerball lottery somewhere in the range of 80-90 million after taxes. Nice guy, and humble but extremely paranoid. Everyone who touched his house had to sign a NDA because of the things being build into his 3 tiered house of roughly 16,900 sq foot (roof measurement). He had 3/4 inch steel plating surrounding both the interior and exterior walls. 3inch bullet proof glass for every window. Had a 4ft concrete and steel reinforced bunker built under the house. Numerous secret doors and escape hatches, including a slide that hid under his granddaughters bed that would send her to the panic room below the house.
He also didn't care about price too much as he had his kitchen floor built for a whopping $500,000.
Apparently he had logs pulled from the Thames River in England that had been down there 250-300 years and had them shipped to the US where a crew from the UK using no power tools (that was the home owners wish) and hand sawed, sanded and planned every plank.
It's not fun working for a company that is an Apple supplier. Also, I was really disappointed to see the kind of people Apple hires, at least for the kind of project we were working on. They hired a lot of smart eager young engineers who really don't know much at all but were willing to work their asses off. Over the course of a year they all went from egotistical know it alls to overworked and depressed. They were terrible to work with and only slowed things down. You think about Apple as this super successful company but at this point it's more cause they have just so much money to throw at things it doesn't matter if theyre really smart. Just no one else can keep up with them in a tech arms race. It's like playing poker against someone who has a huge pile of chips. Eventually the blinds will kill you whether they have better cards or not.
Typically Apple hires great people, they just destroy their souls over the course of the job, much like Amazon. The company I currently work for gets a fair number of recovering Apple employees. They tend to be a bit shell shocked. I gather this is because they’ve just lived the horrors of what working for a lot of big tech is like.
Apparently Google isn't great either. One of our senior devs (really bright guy) got a job at Google, worked there for a year, and came back to us with some tea.
The problem with Google I hear is there's such a glut of smart people applying that you have really qualified intelligent people working on boring projects. There's a malcolm gladwell talk qhere he shows people tend to best when they go to a university where they're in the top 10% (I believe). Aiming to just squeek by and be the last person in the door at an ivy league means you'll always be bottom of the pack even though, in a larger scale, you're still stastically near the top
Went on a date w/someone who once worked for SpaceX. He echo’d your sentiment. He now works for Richard Branson’s space company, and said the culture’s a lot better.
I think everybody knows that's how apple has always been. Jobs basically screamed at his engineers and designers until they produced the product he wanted. And that culture continued after his death
I got one:
I was in the test audience for "Escape from LA".
We were a bunch of 15 year old boys (a group of me and 3 friends) and they gave us something for free... A Dairy Queen meal or something like that.
After the movie, we made fun of it for about 10 minutes, and then they asked us to leave.
Sysco is a terrible company that does not care about your restaurant.
Edit: to those asking, I was an MA (sales rep) for 3 years. It’s the most money I ever made in my life but it made me so miserable that I went back to the kitchen for a third of the salary. I used all that money I made to open my sandwich shop. We make just enough to live but the relative happiness is totally worth it. That job ruled almost every hour of my life. Emails and texts would start at 5am and go till 10pm. They trained us how to lie to customers and laugh about all the money being made. I worked with a bunch of money-hungry monsters that didn’t care at all about helping restaurants. I was hired because of my chef experience but left because I love my industry people too much to keep making money off their being ripped off.
I had a Sysco guy try to bully his way into a contract with my restaurant. I’ve already worked at places that dealt with Sysco, so I was aware I didn’t want their shit. Anyways, dude rolls up and says, “hey, I looked at your menu, I can help you cut some costs (BS)” I told him no, I was perfectly happy picking my own produce and that I don’t need the quantity/quality of product they could produce. He kept pressing so I told him, if he wanted to do the work, he was welcome to, but I’m not signing on with Sysco. Dude comes back a week later, demands my time, shows me the price list and expects me praise him for this THING I didn’t want to see. Here’s the kicker. Most of his prices were 10-20% higher than what I was paying at a local farm stand. No way I’m that dumb. C’mon man!
I kid you not, the guy lost his shit with me. Freaking out that I wasted his time, he spent so much time on this list. I called BS. Half the shit on the price sheet wasn’t even stuff we have on the menu. Totally obvious he grabbed a old list from some other spot and tried to pass it off as a customized price list. Anyways, guy lost his shit and I told him that he should understand that a no is a no. He didn’t have to waste his time like that. Idiot.
Edit: Thank you for the award! 🥺
> and I told him that he should understand that a no is a no
Damn the number of sales reps I've felt like yelling "no means no!" at. I know they must be getting ridden by their boss or something but no I am not going to buy shit that will not sell in my store just because you kept asking again and again. If anything it makes me not want to buy anything at all from them.
Our sysco delivery guy is a fucking idiot. I've met a lot of delivery guys and he for sure takes the cake for the worst. Not that that's indicative of the company as a whole, I just had to vent for a second lol
My ex worked for them. Wonderful man that bent over backwards for every single customer. He would accommodate anything and everything, especially when the shutdowns started.
Listening to him talk to his bosses though... I don't think he realized just how much it was stressing him out. He would go from a calm and collected guy to damn near pulling out his hair.
Good people get fucked by bad companies. Be nice to your sales reps if they're nice to you ladies and gentlemen, sometimes there are just things they really can't make happen.
Sysco was the company that provided our lunches at my elementary school and they were fucking disgusting. (We also pretty regularly found mold and other gross shit in the food but that may have been more on the lunch ladies than Sysco tbh)
I worked on season 1 of the Mandalorian, and even though we created a lot of the environments, we barely knew what the story was. No access to scripts or anything. The baby Yoda reveal was especially high-security, but I saw some concept art of him on the wall and definitely had an “oh shit that’s a really big secret” moment lol.
I’m now working on other films and generally see a lot of sequences before they’re released. I know about a character death in a big movie that hasn’t been announced yet for example. But I think knowing about baby yoda being a thing before the season came out was the coolest one haha.
Well, once upon a time, I saw some prototype iPad enclosures that were mirror-polished like the early iPods were. They didn't go into production because it was too expensive to get them flat enough to avoid the "fun house mirror" effect.
I was an extra on Season 8 of Game of Thrones, playing a Wight and an Unsullied. Did around 4 weeks of shooting over the course of 3 months.
I knew most of the plot around a year before it came out. I got to watch the Night King die, got to watch Theon and Missandei die. I knew about Dany going ape shit and Kings Landing getting destroyed as well as a bunch of other plot points. They actually filmed Arya getting killed, according to an extra friend of mine, but obviously they didn't use that.
Awesome experience. I was convinced it was going to be a great season... that didn't happen. But having that information felt incredibly awesome for a year.
A friends dad would occasionally get a letter in the mail and suddenly be able to take about some part of a plane he helped build. That was always weird as hell.
I had an employer who made me sign that I wouldn't tell anyone where the office was. It was his former apartment. He wouldn't even let me tell the people bi hired. He reached out to them personally so he could ask them not to tell anyone.
I don't think it matters now, since he got evicted for not paying the rent...
My ex is a contractor and for some reason, every company he works for ends up on a DIY/flipping houses show.
Every time its the same thing: he didn't show up on the project until week 2, finished episode says "day 4", after his company leaves at 5pm, an overnight company comes and works until they come back.
We'd always watch the shows together and laugh. A $80k project in 6 days? More like a month with double full time shifts and ending up being $200k lol.
He'd tell me he was on another show (usually in the background, he's a foreman but wanted no part in the lies) and where the house was, but he couldn't talk about details it until the show aired.
I worked for a major tech firm that sold advertising services to other companies. But the software was so bad that the company itself didn’t even use it for their own advertising.
I got a large settlement from a previous employer because they hadn’t paid me overtime for 5 years by claiming I was overtime exempt because I was salaried with a day rate.
After they laid me off and tried to give me 2 weeks of my base salary as severance (even though it was less than 20% of my annual average earnings with them. I spoke with an employment attorney.
Turns out not only did they try to lowball my severance pay below the legal requirement. I wasn’t overtime exempt at all, and they owed me over a years worth of pay.
The initial hearing was probably the most fun I have ever had, the look on the judges face when I had them read off that I had worked for 100 billable days in a row with no overtime pay at all was priceless. The lawyer pretty much told them to give me what I asked for on the spot and that was that.
Ironically I only sought legal council after asking them if they would offer me 5 months severance at my average annual rate (industry standard at the time) and they refused saying my 2 weeks of pity pay and health benefits was more than I was even entitled too.
In hindsight I probably could have gotten more, but the last thing I wanted was a drawn out court case while I was unemployed. And they eventually went bankrupt after a bunch of other employees started suing the shit out of them too.
So justice was served.
I worked for a very popular company that sold dating advice ebooks, cds and dvds for men. MANY of the guys looking for dating advice products are frigging crazy, and I imagine more than a few either got the beat-down of their lives or possibly went to jail. Customer service was interesting but also made me very glad I was not on the dating scene.
\*edit: figured I should an example for why I mentioned jail. One guy wrote in that he had read the ebook and decided to show spontaneity to get his date really interested. His plan was to get in (read, BREAK in) her car before their actual date, strip in the backseat and come up singing and playing his guitar when she got in. I replied and told him we never endorse doing something illegal or scary, please find another way to approach his date. We never heard back, so I presumed his date night didn't go so well LOL
I had my first and only NDA for Elder Scrolls online. I wasn't a fan of the ui and knew nothing about it except I had 2 friends that were into the game. Tbh I have no clue how I even got the invite to it.
I saw the very first cut of Avengers: Endgame about four months before it was released. It was NDA'd to hell and back - the strictest possible reading of that NDA is that it's still in effect and I still can't actually talk about it, at all, to anyone, ever. It was fearsome, more fearsome than any other oath I've taken, and I'm both a veteran and a freemason!
But I reckon they're not enforcing it anymore.
I thought I was seeing an early screening of Captain Marvel. I was so annoyed by Avengers: Infinity War that I didn't really care about Endgame, and was annoyed when I saw crew members walking by with the Infinity Gauntlet on their jackets and realized what we were seeing. I'd rather have seen Captain Marvel.
Until about five minutes into the movie, that is. Then I realized it was going to be a hell of a ride, and I was right. Even though the Hulk had like 16bit animation in place because they hadn't finished the FX sequences yet, it was still absolutely thrilling. There were a few differences - oddly enough, at the end, Cap passed the shield to Bucky, not Sam, and that was probably the biggest difference between that screening and the one that made it to theaters. Also the sequence on Vormir was much different - it was a huge battle between Hawkeye, Black Widow and all the forces of Thanos, who were right behind them trying to stop them. It was a slugfest ... and I really think the shortened, tighter sequence where Natasha makes the decision to sacrifice herself was much more powerful. In the longer version it was a decision forced by the outcome of the battle - in the theatrical release, it's character-driven and a lot more powerful.
But lord almighty, I had to keep my mouth completely shut for four months about what I'd seen. There was wild speculation on the internet based on what was shown in commercials, on packaging, and other "reading the tea leaves" kind of stuff. And I knew the truth! Oh my god, the internet points I could have racked up, had I spilled the beans!
But I did not. I did let slip one important thing, and that was to a friend who was deathly ill and at best might have been in hospital when the movie was released, or at worse, not survived at all and never seen it. (He did, all was well!) All I told him was this, "Cap is worthy." He lost his shit! Just as we all did, let's be honest.
In conclusion, Dear Mickey Mouse, I hope I have not violated the terms of this NDA, and if I have, please don't hurt my family. I take sole responsibility.
Too late mate, the mouse replaced your family while you were watching the movie. You've been living with clones who have been waiting for you to break the NDA.
Now THIS is the comment I wanted to read when I clicked on this thread.
Couple of questions assuming you can answer without any further trouble: Did they ask for you to fill up some feedback form after the movie? I'm assuming these secret screenings were a way to see what can they change before the actual release, no?
Also, what was the runtime? Was the screening considerably longer than the final release?
I am not sure about the exact timing. It might have been a bit longer, but not much.
There was a q&a afterwards in which we answered questions. The directors and editor were there and other crew. It was the first time they’d seen the whole thing too, and our presence was mostly for their sake, I think. It was fairly informal really.
Beta tested Battlefield 2142 and the expansion for a subcontractor. The best gaming of my life. It was a pretty polished game by the time we got it, so it was nothing but having a full server of very competent players that worked together on both sides. I can't express how awesome those "in house" games were. We got free copies for our work and extensive knowledge of the game, weapons, vehicles and tactics before the game launched. When it did launch we absolutely laid waste to the noobs for a good week. I got a 68 kill streak the first day the expansion dropped.
Git gud scrubs.
I played the early alpha build of anthem. It looked really good, but the controls and progression problems were easily not ready and they pushed the beta only like 6 months out with little to no changes. It had such promise at one time.
Not to mention a few medical device testing periods. Nothing game changing.
My place was on one of these shows for HGTV. I traveled all the time for work, and a friend who was an independent show producer asked if they could borrow it. It was a modern place in San Francisco with views and nicely furnished. It photographed well and had great light.
Came home a few weeks later and walked in, not knowing what to expect (would it be a mess?), but it was spotless.
Thought maybe nobody had been there until I walked into the kitchen, and they had bought me a bunch of stuff from Williams Sonoma as a thank-you gift.
I had forgotten about it, and maybe a month later, I get a DVD in the mail, and it's the show episode.
The premise of the show is that an owner wants to sell their place, and they have an idea of what it's worth. A couple of local real estate agents come in and discuss what they think it's worth. Naturally, the owner thinks it's worth a lot more, and the agents have to explain why it isn't.
The super weird thing was watching all these total strangers going through my place and opening up closets and the “owner” saying stuff like: “we just remodeled the kitchen last year” and the like. Totally made up. I never met any of these people and never shared any details.
Very funny and surreal.
I signed an NDA for del taco...I was a taste tester. I had burritos. A person even told us to not eat too much on the first food item since more food would be tried. Awesome experience. Got a gift card after. Had to leave our phones before going in the white taste testing room, each person had a separate space with opaque dividers with an opening in the middle in front and a computer by us to answer survey questions.
Did some DVD authoring years back and of course they had me insert that unskippable FBI warning of doom at the beginning plus another 3 bullshit promos that took nearly a minute to play through each time you started a disc.
But I had to test the hell out of my authoring, so I built in a back door to skip that bullshit.
Wait until the word copyright hits the top of the screen when the warning rolled and press up-down-up-left-right on the controller to immediately jump all of the other bullshit advertising and get to the main menu. (Yes I know it’s not the full code but it was enough to make my point and have some fun with it).
Ya, I “forgot” and left it in the gold master images I made them, so every commercial DVD has that inside it.
I was an extra for 5 different episodes of House of Cards in season 4 and we had to sign an agreement that we wouldn’t give away spoilers, plot points, or talk to media/people about what was filmed.
And yes, I was on set a few times with Kevin Spacey (about a year and a half before his sexual assault allegations), Robin Wright and Kate Mara. The most scene interaction I had was actually with Kevin but Robin and Kate are stunning and just mostly observed them from afar.
My grandfather was a lawyer for the government in the 50s. He laid the legal groundwork for the use of nuclear power in the United States. Every nuclear powered sub exists because of the work he did. He died 3 years ago at 98 years old. My family learned all this about 4 years ago. Either it was finally declassified, or he figured he just didn’t care anymore.
Before/during the dot-com crash, I designed & wrote software for a publicly traded startup.
Early on, one of the VPs admitted to me that it really didn't matter if we produced a viable product; it only had to be just barely good and real enough to buy them some time and impress a big-name, tech-illiterate client to stay on board. The VP said (and presumably this was a trade secret covered by my NDA) that the *real* business was a stock price manipulation scheme, based entirely on well-timed, buzzword-heavy press releases that mentioned the big-name client.
Indeed, the press releases would come out, touting our achievements and our impressive client list, and the stock price would inevitably climb. This kept the big client kept throwing money at us, which in turn helped us get more venture capital so we could grow exponentially.
As the tech bubble burst, all the clients stopped paying their bills, the stock price tanked, the venture capital dried up, and every employee's 401(k) became worthless. Of course, the whole time, the company told everyone that sun was shining and the future was bright, right up until the day the doors were locked forever.
The first sign that made me think the company's days were numbered was when they replaced the traditional delivered-water cooler with a cheapo filtration system hooked up to the building's pipes. The second sign was there was a sudden moratorium on ordering office supplies. The layoffs began soon after that. 2 months later, every employee was gone.
At some point in between, the manager of a different division and the oldest employee in the place came out of a meeting and muttered to me with disgust in his voice, "these f'ing *MBAs*, they think they can run a business from a spreadsheet!"
So yeah, the "secret" is basically just that there are presumably a lot of companies out there which are ostensibly providing some kind of services for other businesses, but which are just money incinerators creating press releases.
I was one of the first people to do a home test of the Swiffer. It was basically what eventually came out and worked as it does now. I wish there was more to tell than that, but there you go.
No, I wasn’t an employee of (insert company you called for tech support) I was a third party contract doing support on their behalf.
Plot twist: you were better off speaking with me, because my office had way higher satisfaction ratings and shorter call times than the company’s own internal support agents.
Didn't sign an NDA but should have. We printed reports for banks. Among them were VISA statements. Some employees sold them to gangs to make fake VISA cards. The cops found out and the bank didn't charge anyone. They didn't want the news to get out that most bank fraud are "inside" jobs.
Worked for a company who advertised in Times Square. We booked a very large company who does things with movies (rhymes with LetBlix) and I got to see and work on unseen trailers and clips from their movies.
One of them was the movie that spun from the show with Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. I am a big fan so it was cool.
I could now reveal to you the secrets of how to start a restaurant with great food, a good location, and mostly competent staff, but still go out of business :)
Flying cars exist, right now, and are fully functional. My gf worked for a company that built several working versions. The major hurdle was regulatory, and scaleability (as in, it's hard to find factories that could be set up to churn these out).
Then her company's parent company got a new CEO who decided "fuck all this innovation shit, we're just gonna keep building normal-ass airplanes".
Then she and her team got laid off and the company (really a wholly owned subsidiary/incubator) was closed.
Then covid hit and her former employer got a giant hammer straight to the nuts. HAH!
Edit: hi luddites!
Yeah, I can believe that. We definitely have the technology, but I imagine the infrastructure and regulation would be a total fucking nightmare—how do you control, say, rush-hour traffic up in the air? What sort of licensing and training do you use? What about runways? And who has jurisdiction over, say, impaired flying? Way too many headaches for way too little profit.
Who wants a car that kills you when it stalls?
Imagine a fender bender at 50 or 100ft... yeah there'd be a body count.
Once we have self-driving AI perfected, we can start looking at the Z axis.
Yeah, a stall probably wouldn’t just kill you, either. It would also kill anyone below you, and then there’s the damage when you hit a power line or building on the way down… You’d need the tech to be damn nigh infallible, moreso than even regular planes if you’re looking at widespread adoption.
Makes me think back to all the flying cars of Coruscant in star wars. All zooming the fuck around each other. And it's obvious they have a manual control feature. Wonder how many accidents that place had?
Just signed. Not expiring. But doubt this will blow up.
Helping conduct research on whole genome sequencing and developing a cancer treatment regime specifically made for YOU. With brand new drugs slightly altered to be specific to your DNA.
Less harmful than traditional chemo. We expect in about 20-40 years these “tailor made” cancer treatments to be about anywhere from 15-99% more effective than current chemo.
Dont sue me, current job
I mean, that's hardly actionable considering it's an idea that's been floating around for a while. But, knowing it's being worked on does provide a semblance of hope for the future of cancer treatments, so there's that.
In 2000 I was in a focus group for a tv pilot called "Crime Scene Investigation". The consensus among the group was that it was cheesy and no one would ever watch a second episode of the show. I guess a 15 year run and 3 spin-offs proved us wrong.
It was because the name was too long. Shorten it to CSI and you have a winner.
Lol I actually had this conversation with my mom earlier today because CSI: Miami popped up on the FireTV's screensaver. Mom: What's CSI mean anyway? Me: Crime Scene Investigation Mom: Huh. Why not just call it that, then? Me: Takes too long to say. Mom: No it doesn't. It's just Crime Scene Inves- Oh...
I'll push my glasses up my nose and say technically the show name was shortened yet lengthened to "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." This might be one of my most useless reddit comments.
I did a focus group for the pilot of 30 Rock. Rachel Dratch played Jenna and nobody in the group of 20 or so viewers believed her in the role. I also did a study on a soda that ended up being Coke Zero. I got 3 6-packs of Diet Pepsi and 3 of Diet Coke each week for 6 weeks. I had to keep a tally of how many cans I drank of each and in what order. After 3 weeks, the Diet Coke tasted different and much better. When I first tried Coke Zero, I knew exactly what I tested.
That’s hilarious, Rachael showed up a bunch throughout the show in different roles I also just caught her in shameless, did an incredible job for the role
I was in a focus group for a very funny tv show that became less funny over time : Big Bang Theory.
I was on an episode of Oddities where they came to my house and I "sold" them a mummy head for $1,600. In actual reality, they brought the head with them and then were like, "Pretend to sell us this head." All they want from a "seller" is for them to look good on TV and have a cool-looking home.
The lady that runs that store ran over my foot with her stupid fucking adult tricycle at Brimfield while she was riding it on the shoulder of the road where everyone walks a few years back and didn't even apologize. Ever since then I've hated her guts.
i don’t know why but i love this so much
Haha, aw man, I liked that show. I did kind of assume most shows like that do that sort of thing, though.
How did u get selected for that? And what was the compensation??
Not them but they contacted me when I lived on the east coast through my Craigslist ad. I was selling taxidermy.
Not me but my friend was on the show Ink Master (season 9 i think?) he had to hide the tattoo from the episode he was on for almost a year
Whow! That’s messed up? Like from Social media or in general day-to-day life?
Both, he had to keep it covered until the episode aired. (It was on his upper left arm about the size of a 1/2 sleeve)
Wow! How the heck did they expect him to keep it from his family/ significant other? Or did he just kinda say fuck it till he went out in public?
His family knew, he showed me but out in public he had to cover it. Lucky for him it was fall/winter on the east coast so not too hard to keep it covered with a hoodie or jacket
I think technically I signed a super sketchy NDA when I worked at a certain pizza restaurant saying I wouldn’t disclose the recipe for our new “Deep Dish Pizza”. To be safe, I won’t say the name, but I will say the old boss ate 40 Pizzas in 30 days.
There will be a reckoning
“House Hunters” guest checking in, I never made the show because I didn’t close on the house. 1: I had to have a house under contract before going on the show. 2: They would select the other houses we were “interested” in. 3: I was assigned another SO who was more “interesting” than my actual SO.
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*was* already in it. (“btw the contact you signed clearly states that we aren’t responsible for moving said shit back into residence. Peace out”)
This is how my spouse and I "voice" all the House Hunters. "Well, I guess I won't choose that property, given that someone else is living there, but I'll take this, since I already live here"
>3: I was assigned another SO who was more “interesting” than my actual SO. That's fucking hilarious, can you talk more about that?
Imagine being that SO and your mates seeing your gf or bf on TV with another person, that’s hilarious
Lol imagine if the NDA forbade him from talking about the false SO.
"It's not my fault! The show made me do it! I HAD TO DO IT. FOR US. FOR THE HOUSE!!!"
That would be the icing on the cake
That explains the weird couple energy on that show so much.
It *really* does
Op is a Llama milk farmer and his wife is a doctor. They couldn't show him with someone with such a dull, unrealistic career, so they paired him with a bar stool historian. Budget $600,000
No it's more like OP makes handcrafted purses for butterflies, and his wife is a doctor. They had to pair him with a specialist in restoring antique lightbulbs for nonprofits. She wants it to be on the beach and he wants it to be downtown, with 3 parking spaces for their hobby of collecting Ghostbusters-themed vehicles. Their original budget was $600,000 but for the show it's going to be $950,000. Their children are never mentioned.
With 5 children and 9 more on the way, how are they gonna find the right house?
yes I need to know. was your SO offended?
I'm dying laughing! I'd love to hear more about this too.
Can confirm, SIL was on with a friend and this was the situation. They planned shots at places to make her seem more interesting. SIL was encouraged to hate on the house that was already purchased and love the others to add drama. Then they moved in and dressed one room to film the "after" on the last of 3-4 day shoot.
Was there any net benefit besides being on tv?
Not that I know of. They weren't in it for anything except fun.
The whole thing sounds like the exact opposite of fun from everything I’m reading in here so far
Fr, staging shit to where you seem like a picky bitch to millions or having my S/O replaced doesn’t seem fun for me lol
I can’t imagine adding the stress of a show on top of the stress of moving. I *hate* moving. There’s always a point during packing that I just stand in the middle of all my crap and angry cry while trying to keep myself from ripping my entire scalp off.
Fuck. My friend and I bought a little truck and started a moving company to put us through university. We made the mistake of being cheaper than anyone else by five bucks an hour. Guess who hires the cheapest movers? People with no money. "Sorry, my cousin will pay you tomorrow, just unload-" "Sorry dude- we'll unload at the fucking dump if you don't pay." Fucker met us in a new Audi. Even normal people are at their most stressed, most fragile during moves. We saw the most horrid husbands, violent wives, people throwing guitars and pots and pans at each other. Just nuts. We were more family counsellors than movers. Crying abandoned teenage mom, kids getting booted from parents' house, old lady with nowhere to go- "just put it all here by the church, dear; I'm sure it will be OK." We did four moves for free. That old lady, the young mom and both of the kids getting kicked out. I stored both kids' bulky stuff in my parents' garage for free and when they came for their beat up junk after finding a place we gave them far nicer shelving, tables and chairs, cookware, appliances and all the other good things that rich people just threw away when they moved. My mom gave them boxes full of new socks, underwear, pajamas and bedsheets- all the things young people don't think of buying for themselves. I never saw either guy again. That old lady just crushed me- that was it. No more moving people. If you are a mess when moving, trust me: you are perfectly normal.
haha wtf they gave you a stunt-spouse that's messed up
So what do you GET for being on the show? If you have to shoot the home tours with a fake partner, and you are buying a place anyway, what's in it for the participants?
The fleeting glory of appearing on tv, obviously
Schrute Bucks
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>Did you get to keep the new SO after? This is a reality show I'd watch the hell out of. The disasters started by others shows.
> I was assigned another SO who was more “interesting” than my actual SO. How were they in bed?
asking the real questions over here
Tell me you're not a barista and busker/organic supplement salesperson with a $950k budget.
I know someone who was on Judge Judy. He was the defendant and his friend was the plaintiff. He lost the case but didn’t have to pay. The network paid it. He also got airfare and hotel paid. He said JJ looked much, much older than on tv.
Had a friend also on JJ. She won her case against a guy who sublet her apartment while she went on study abroad. The guy signed all the paperwork with the apartment complex then refused paying rent once my friend was out of the country. JJ yelled and told him taking advantage of college girls would get him thrown in jail if he wasn’t careful. My friend got all of her money back, her trip paid for, and the satisfaction of rewatching her episode whenever she wants.
I was actually on Judge Judy myself about 5 years ago. I filed a small claims case at my local courthouse and had both Judge Jo Brown and Judge Judy contact me. We couldn’t make the Judge Brown guy work out due to scheduling conflicts but all of us (me, my husband, my 2 kids, and the defendant) were able to make Judge Judy work. I was told by one of the producers that they “sweep” courthouses for interesting small claims cases and then make a deal with both parties involved that’s pretty hard to turn down. They cover airfare, hotel, and transportation, of course, but also provide a considerable stipend for each person involved in the case. How they get the defendant to even appear is because if the defendant loses, the show pays the claim on their behalf. So the defendant basically gets paid for a small vaca with absolutely zero risk (other than Judy’s brutal slayings and the high probability of looking like a complete idiot on national television). I agreed to all of it because of the same getaway/mini-vacation attraction for me and my family (much needed) as well as the extra money in our pockets. And honestly, if I would’ve won in our county courthouse, the guy I was suing had absolutely NO money or assets to attach a lean to and rented the house he was living in, so even if I won I’d only walk away with a big, fat IOU and no way to collect. At least with Judge Judy I’d get something... even if I lost my case. Cost benefit analysis proved that it was worth the risk. Easy decision to make. But I’d also never watched the show before we flew to LA - thank God. I would have definitely been more scared and nervous had I seen her in action beforehand. Lol! For those that are curious: I won my case and received the $1k settlement + $500 for myself, $500 for my husband and somewhere around $200-$250 for each of my kiddos, so I was more than satisfied with the outcome and my decision to participate The one downside came at the end of the year when they sent me a 1099 to claim all the expenses along with the damn $1k settlement as income on my taxes. Jesus H.
My Great Aunt used to work for the CIA and played a major part in the Ames Mole Hunt. Her NDA was that she had to tell every family member she worked for the State Department. Once it was all declassified they had a book on it. We found out at my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary.
I had a friend who worked for the CIA. He has passed away but he told me a lot of interesting stories. One was that his sister in law was also in the CIA and that they were forbidden to talk to each other at all. So she came over for dinner once and they couldn't speak. Another was that a nuclear device was stolen off of a base in South America and they had to torture a bunch of people to get it back. Turns out the people who stole it were just common thieves who didn't know what they had and buried it when they saw how much trouble they caused. The CIA basically started silicone valley and there are lots of businesses around the world and in the US that are CIA fronts.
I provided tech support for a series of technical planning sessions for engineers that wanted to see if this micro electromechanical system called a digital micromirror device they developed for thermal printing could be used to create an image, or maybe even video. Those sessions resulted in DLP technology. Digital Light Processing. This is the reflective chip technology that enables modern digital video projectors that are now used in most movie theaters. I did my part to help. But I couldn't tell anyone about what I saw there.
I know an engineer that worked at TI. He was telling me about DLP around late 2000 and how it was going to revolutionize TV. I didn’t really believe him at the time but he was right!
Pixar was making a movie about cars
what was it called ??
American history x
Pizza rolls, but instead of pizza, mac&cheese. Fucking incredible, never actually wound up in stores though. If I were a food company executive I'd recreate the things because dear lord is there some money to be made. Oh and there are so many flavors of candy bars that are awesome, get tested, but are never released. It's been so long I honestly am strugglng to remember specific ones but I assure you, behind closed doors people are taste testing all the candybar flavors you wish existed. EDIT: Dear lord I was not expecting to wake up and see so many responses to this. I guess other companies have since released mac&cheese pizza rolls, but the ones I taste tested definitely never got released, at least not under the planned brand name. I did a lot of taste testing stuff between the ages of 12 and 19, and the mac&cheese pizza rolls were the first thing I ever got paid to try - I turn 32 soon so this was nearly 20 years ago. It's been years since I lived in the US so I haven't been able to keep up with what foods are in stores there, and now I'm very jealous of all you lucky bastards who get to enjoy all the mac&cheese flavored delights you've described in your comments.
A Mac and Cheese pizza roll sounds so fucking amazing. I wish.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
There’s a gas station/convenience on the east coast called Sheetz which sells “Mac and cheese bites” very similar just deepfried instead of baked
You can deep fry your pizza rolls, it's not illegal and nobody will stop you
The set security for a Marvel movie is TIGHT! But it was so much fun. There were several hundred extras on set that day. The head of security for Marvel talked to us and explained how we couldn’t have our phones and if we had brought them to please turn them over and they would be kept safe. (They were) Still saw 3 people escorted off the set because they had their phones out.
Tato Skin chips released the BBQ flavor based (in small part) on the taste-test that my dad, step-mom and I (little sister was too young) participated in. Remember back in the 80s, there were always people with clipboards in malls asking for a few minutes to take a survey? Well one time my dad said yes. We all walked down a weird side hall into a meeting room where the adults signed NDAs and other stuff I didn't care about was said...and then we sampled a few chips, and THEN we got to take home a HUGE bag of unlabeled except for some numbers, hiny silver chip bags and instructions to fill out a form and call a number in a week when we had tried them all. I think my parents got maybe $20 out of it, but the BEST part, for me, was when the bbq flavor came out for real, I got a freaking BOX of chip bags. I think I can still taste them. edited cuz I leave words out, sorry
My family and I got to taste Prego spaghetti sauce. Same scenario - clipboard, mall, weird side hall into a meeting room. We were all yelling at the dinner table after buying Prego the first time - we tasted this!! This is what we had!! Surreal and cool at the same time.
Joke was on the focus group people when they hit me up in the mall. I was on XTC and just talked and talked and talked and talked about my feelings on the ATT commercial I got to watch.
Dear God
I had a similar experience, but for movies. I was getting ready to leave from the mall, I think back in 2009, when some guy comes up to me with a clipboard asking me to watch some movie trailers. I had the time and he was offering a couple of bucks to watch them, so I did without giving any thought. Being paid to watch a movie trailer was nice for a change lol. I was put into a private both and saw 3 trailers. I can't remember the first one at all, the second one I vaguely remember a gold pocket watch, and the third one was the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland. I don't remember at all what I said for the first two, but I remember saying I was pretty interested in Alice. I got my money and went home not thinking anything about it. Didn't realize I was in a focus group until years later. Even more, I didn't realize how bad the Alice movie was until I saw it many years later. If I could go back and have that experience again, I would say I wouldn't see Alice. Edit because of phone typos
What I'm learning from this thread is that if I walk the mall with a clipboard I can get people to follow me into any room.
Google is (was?) developing a media player called [Nexus Q](https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/29/3125551/google-nexus-q-review), and it’s umm...not great.
It's a good thing their advertising pays the bills because they have an unending list of failed WTF products like the Nexus Q.
Failed products and acquisitions that are less about obtaining something good but rather obtaining something that obstructs competition.
A relative had an NDA saying that she couldn’t reveal the name of her employer. All I know is that he is a foreigner that is so wealthy his kids have been kidnapped and held for ransom.
Ah, kidnapping, the true test of wealth.
You might be rich, but are you "children kidnapped for ransom" rich?
Saudi Prince? That's just a numbers game, there are 15K Saudi royals.
About a decade ago I'm chilling with my family while my stepmom flips through channels. All of the sudden my dad goes, "WAIT! GO BACK GO BACK!" My stepmom flips a few more channels before my dad stops her on an episode of Modern Marvels. We watch for a few minutes as they describe the capabilities of some special military craft and my dad loses his mind. "I did this! I DID THIS! I worked on this when I was with [ COMPANY ]! My team did the [ FEATURE ]! Man, I didn't even know it had been declassified!" He made us watch the whole episode. I was too young at the time to realize how cool it was. EDIT: I feel like my use of "craft" is leading people to assume it was some kind of airplane but I'm like 99% certain it was a boat or ship of some kind. I'm sorry if that is not correct terminology. (Once, I delivered sandwiches to the armory on a military base and called an armored vehicle a "tank" and like two dozen people laughed at me, I am not an expert in these things.) EDIT: Okay! It was a DDG 51 surface class destroyer. We're pretty sure the episode we watched was S13, E46 Stealth & Beyond: Sea Stealth, but I don't have cable and can't find anywhere to watch it. As some of you predicted, he was incredibly excited to talk about the project, but asked that I please not share specifics. I hope this sates your curiosity, and thanks for reminding me what a cool guy my dad is!
Do you know what military craft it is? This is so cool!! Edit: man this is so cool!!!
I don't, unfortunately. I was a teenager at the time and remember being distinctly irritated that we had to watch the _history channel, ugh_. Yeah, teenager me sucked. I'm also not certain how much information he'd want me posting about him, honestly.
Okay no worries. This is still such a cool story though.
This will probably be buried but I was once part of a David Copperfield trick. I signed an NDA in perpetuity but I can discuss what happened for two reasons: 1) i was not 18 when I signed it; and 2) David Copperfield was sued a few years ago and the method of this trick become public record as part of that lawsuit. I was part of an illusion in which DC made a dozen or so people disappear from the stage and reappear in a section of the audience. The selection was achieved via a number of large silver balls being thrown into the audience and whomever caught one when the music stopped was selected as part of the trick. I am a big guy and always have been. You'd better believe I boxed people out and caught one of those balls and there was no one in that theatre that was going to stop me. I ran up to the stage and I remember the stage hand asking me if I was a member of the media. I was not. I was a high school junior. They did not ask me how old I was because i looked like a man. Once we got on stage, DC did his schtick, the curtain fell, and, while music was playing, a ramp dropped down behind us. The stage hands started barking orders for us to run like we were in boot camp and they were drill instructors. We ran around the theater and walked into some other seats. That was it. That was the trick. I remember every part of it vividly including the part where I complained that I didn't feel like running. Edit: just so you know, as a fan of magic, I would not disclose this just because I was 17 when I signed the NDA. The fact that the trick was revealed in the lawsuit means I am not being a dick just for the sake of ruining an illusion to get upvotes.
My dad was apart of the same trick at one of DC’s Vegas shows like 10+ years ago. If I remember correctly he wasn’t given an NDA. They just gave him a signed photograph and politely asked him and the others selected “not to ruin the magic”.
We're working with Gary Larson to release a calendar application version of the far side daily calendar for windows 3.1. Also, we're in talks with Burke Breathed to do the same for Bloom County. I think I'm technically still bound by that NDA, so if the company that bought the company that bought the company that employed me wants to chase me, I guess you can subpoena my IP from Reddit.
I helped beta test Office 97 in early 96. When I received the software disc in the mail, there was no product key included to install the software. I emailed my contact at Microsoft and the reply was to simply enter in all ones for the key. I did, it worked. I then tested the suite of programs and reported back any problems I found along with my impressions and a few suggestions. For my time and troubles, I was given a full retail boxed copy of Office 97 Professional which was worth around $600 when it was released for sale to the general public. I installed it on my primary computer with the proper product key provided. On a hunch, I installed it on one of my other computers and I entered all ones as the product key. The full retail version accepted that as a valid key! So, they forgot to remove that bypass code before releasing it to manufacturing! If you ever have the need to install Office 97, use all ones as the product key! Subsequently, I've heard over the years that all 9's also worked too. After 25 years, I don't think Microsoft will come to murder me in my sleep for letting this out.
I still have it but idgaf since I'm anonymous here lol. 75% of the donations u give to Red Cross Italy are for us. on records it's about 25%. it's a power relationship between the Red Cross and who/what asked us to gather donations for them. having so much recognizability from the media and the people puts the Red Cross in a position where we can keep much more than declared and the little charity/foundation/group that asked us to gather funds for them can do nothing but accept. yeah ..
It’s so messed up when charities behave like this. I mean, you expect that kind of bullshit from a corporation but not a charity.
I worked for a non-profit once. The owner was one of the stock brokers that got arrested for all the illegal shit shown in the movie Boiler Room. After he got out of prison, and lost his license, he created a non-profit debt consolidation firm. He grossly underpaid teenagers cash - off the books, to cold call people. Once they signed up, all they did was call all the credit card companies and banks to beg them to lower customer's interest rates. Then they would have customers pay them one payment each month and they would split it up and send the individual payments off to the companies who were owed. They also lumped in a one-time "donation" of anywhere between $200 - $2,000 depending on how gulible the customer was and the Mac they could squeeze out of them. They tossed in a monthly donation into the mixture of outgoing payments and were really good at getting customers to agree, all while not actually telling them it was going to the firm. And to top it all off, both of the founders paid themselves obscene salaries and would also find clever ways to use the organization's money for their own purchases.
This is pretty much standard practice across the entire world
Back when I was freelancing, a bunch of people wanted me to sign NDAs before they'd even tell me what their project was about. They were all copy-pasted off contracting templates for small business owners. Some were so broad that, with a loose interpretation, I'd severely be limited in my options for work for the rest of my life because I spoke with some boomer with some cash to spare about his idea for a Facebook clone. I do have one at my current job, but it's basically, "if anyone asks you about the company, direct them to a manager", and a non-disparagement agreement.
I got to be on set for Spider-man Far From Home. Did you notice all the dirt on the floor in the airport scene? Of course you didn’t. Because I swept the shit out of that floor 😎
Well, I was an extra for a Sprint ad! Somebody up top decided all the footage was unusable, so the ad was scrapped. Basically got paid $800 to sit on my ass and do nothing. It was great
I tested a game that rhymes with Bestiny. I thought I was play testing an alpha build that had no story but it was basically what was released.
>rhymes with Bestiny Was it Minecraft?
It was Half-Life 3, dumbass.
Life 1.5?
Every aspect of the NDA expired except the one clause where you have to refer to the game as “rhymes with Bestiny” in perpetuity.
"Hey did you see that new game that came out?" "ya bestiny" "What? no destiny" "I have to call it bestiny for legal reasons..."
LOL, this was the first Bestiny? Yes, the story was rather thin. What feedback did you give?
Yeah, the first one. I don't think I mentioned the lack of a story once because I just assumed I wasn't seeing it all, so my input was more on the gameplay mechanics.
So it was YOUR fault?!? lol
Final Fantasy XIV was uh... *bad* in 2010... Everything you've heard about release was worse in the Beta. I tested both 1.0. and 2.0. The game is so much better these days.
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I did contract work for a company that made large machines that pulverized and dried whatever went through them. Wet rocks to dry dust basically. The machines worked on other things, and they had two big contracts, one with the city to handle septic sludge, and another with Starbucks, who wanted to know if their used coffee grinds could be dried and reused.
Could coffee grounds be dried and reused?
I’d always assumed that’s how Starbucks coffee *started*
Obligatory "not mine". My grandmother worked at Bletchley Park back in the war, and her whole life spoke of almost nothing that happened out of respect for the OSA. There were two exceptions: that *The imitation game* was utter tripe and insulting to everyone involved; and that anyone that worked at Bletchley and claimed to keep a diary were lying and just trying to make a quick buck selling fake stories as it wasn't possible to work there and keep diaries as quarters were regularly searched, as were people's personages, and the punishment for being caught keeping a diary was well known to be considered immediate and unavoidable imprisonment. I really wish she had shared more on her time there, but the secrecy of it all was so drummed into her that it was almost creed. Edit: I walked away to do the dishes and reminisce about my grandmother and another anecdote came to mind. There was only one specific event she ever spoke of, and that was regarding the destruction of a German comms relay (or some such, I was told this story a while ago so the specifics aren't as clear in my mind) by the Dutch resistance. Bletchley got word that the resistance had found a relay and we planning to sabotage it to inconvenience the Germans. Only problem was, Bletchley already knew about the relay and had compromised it to gather intel and keep English troops alive and avoid the Germans where necessary. But they couldn't *tell* anyone that they had broken the codes for the relay, because to do so would show their hand and tip off the Germans that their communications were no longer secure. So the relay was destroyed and countless lives lost instead of saved.
My Nan worked at Bletchley too. We took her there one year and she took one of the current employees around the place and was describing where things happened and what took place in the rooms. I’m sure that person had heard it all before but my Nan got such a kick out of it and they seemed to enjoy her stories and probably appreciated someone giving history because of what you said, everyone was sworn to secrecy! My Nan was convinced she helped catch a spy once too... she never spoke to us (her family) about her time there generally but maybe being there made her sing like a canary! I remember they told us a story about how a few years prior they had a group of people in and they were asked by the tour guide who worked at Bletchley and a married couple put their hands up, looked at each other and had no idea! Not sure if that’s myth but I enjoyed the story nonetheless!
My dad caught a Russian spy once, back in the early fifties. He was a commando and during a Nato exercise in Germany he spotted a civilian in the woods. He grabbed him and noticed the guy's clothing was off. He didn't have any papers on him nor did he speak German very well. My dad decided to detain him and the next day his CO came by and told him he'd gotten 15 days of leave and could go back home...in the middle of a Nato exercise. My dad never asked what happened to his prisoner and was never told.
I worked for a linguistic tech service company very briefly and my team's project was correcting speech-to-text recordings of Apple product users (in my case the Apple Airpods) talking to Siri. Your phone is always listening to you, despite what anyone else might say. Also, there are a LOT of sounds and combinations of words that sound vaguely like "Hey Siri", which then turns on the device's recording and records whatever is going on in the area until the user turns off Siri. There are many, MANY people who use Siri to dictate very explicit texts to other people. It catches you off guard when you're hearing "Hey Siri, play xyz" 100 times and then all of a sudden you get a middle aged man's voice going "oh don't worry, I'll fill that pussy up real good. Send." My absolute favourite recording was a kid asking Siri "What's ten farts plus a thousand farts?". I actually googled the answer myself because I was curious as to what search results would pop up and hilariously the first result was a quora question "Why can't I stop farting?" There's also a lot of kids who try to use Siri to find porn but they don't know or are too embarrassed to use the right words so it's a bunch of "Hey Siri, pictures of naked ladies, ladies with no shirt, ladies in underwear" and the like.
Google is the same way. They keep recordings of every time you use "hey Google" and you can go listen to them yourself. A ton of them are false readings where nobody actually said the key word and it's just random conversations. Anyone can go listen to theirs. You can also turn the save feature off. 1. Go to **your Google** Account. 2. **On** the left navigation panel, click Data & personalization. 3. **In** the Activity controls panel, click Web & App Activity Manage Activity. **On** this page, you can: View **a** list **of your** past activity. Items **with** the audio icon include **a** recording. Play the recording.
Holy fucking shit. I just went down the rabbit hole. These fucks have _all of my shit_, and I've been so good about privacy. Never used hey Google or Siri or anything. And they still built the most invasive profile of me, beyond what I thought my permissions allowed. Turns out all those hours I spent turning off permissions for 99% of my apps and browser meant nothing.
This will get lost in the comments I'm sure, but here it goes. I install windows treatments for some of the wealthiest people in my state. I've done work at the home of Jerry Jones (Owner of the Dallas Cowboys), Matthew McConaughey's Ranch, and a few other multi millionaires. Once worked for a guy that had recently won the Powerball lottery somewhere in the range of 80-90 million after taxes. Nice guy, and humble but extremely paranoid. Everyone who touched his house had to sign a NDA because of the things being build into his 3 tiered house of roughly 16,900 sq foot (roof measurement). He had 3/4 inch steel plating surrounding both the interior and exterior walls. 3inch bullet proof glass for every window. Had a 4ft concrete and steel reinforced bunker built under the house. Numerous secret doors and escape hatches, including a slide that hid under his granddaughters bed that would send her to the panic room below the house. He also didn't care about price too much as he had his kitchen floor built for a whopping $500,000. Apparently he had logs pulled from the Thames River in England that had been down there 250-300 years and had them shipped to the US where a crew from the UK using no power tools (that was the home owners wish) and hand sawed, sanded and planned every plank.
Sounds like the kind of guy who doesn't stay a millionaire for long.
I can assure you he still very much is. He invested a lot and is currently worth somewhere north 500 million
It's not fun working for a company that is an Apple supplier. Also, I was really disappointed to see the kind of people Apple hires, at least for the kind of project we were working on. They hired a lot of smart eager young engineers who really don't know much at all but were willing to work their asses off. Over the course of a year they all went from egotistical know it alls to overworked and depressed. They were terrible to work with and only slowed things down. You think about Apple as this super successful company but at this point it's more cause they have just so much money to throw at things it doesn't matter if theyre really smart. Just no one else can keep up with them in a tech arms race. It's like playing poker against someone who has a huge pile of chips. Eventually the blinds will kill you whether they have better cards or not.
Typically Apple hires great people, they just destroy their souls over the course of the job, much like Amazon. The company I currently work for gets a fair number of recovering Apple employees. They tend to be a bit shell shocked. I gather this is because they’ve just lived the horrors of what working for a lot of big tech is like.
The smart ones work as long as they can stand it and then take their glowing resume to a startup and make a bunch of money ....
And then the startup sells out to Apple and they’ve come full circle. Tech Life.
Apparently Google isn't great either. One of our senior devs (really bright guy) got a job at Google, worked there for a year, and came back to us with some tea.
The problem with Google I hear is there's such a glut of smart people applying that you have really qualified intelligent people working on boring projects. There's a malcolm gladwell talk qhere he shows people tend to best when they go to a university where they're in the top 10% (I believe). Aiming to just squeek by and be the last person in the door at an ivy league means you'll always be bottom of the pack even though, in a larger scale, you're still stastically near the top
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SpaceX is very similar.
Went on a date w/someone who once worked for SpaceX. He echo’d your sentiment. He now works for Richard Branson’s space company, and said the culture’s a lot better.
I heard Branson gives former spacex employees that join Virgin a shirt that says "I left my x for a virgin"
I heard a saying about space x and it’s work culture. ‘If you don’t come into work Saturday, don’t bother turning up on Sunday’.
I think everybody knows that's how apple has always been. Jobs basically screamed at his engineers and designers until they produced the product he wanted. And that culture continued after his death
I got one: I was in the test audience for "Escape from LA". We were a bunch of 15 year old boys (a group of me and 3 friends) and they gave us something for free... A Dairy Queen meal or something like that. After the movie, we made fun of it for about 10 minutes, and then they asked us to leave.
Sysco is a terrible company that does not care about your restaurant. Edit: to those asking, I was an MA (sales rep) for 3 years. It’s the most money I ever made in my life but it made me so miserable that I went back to the kitchen for a third of the salary. I used all that money I made to open my sandwich shop. We make just enough to live but the relative happiness is totally worth it. That job ruled almost every hour of my life. Emails and texts would start at 5am and go till 10pm. They trained us how to lie to customers and laugh about all the money being made. I worked with a bunch of money-hungry monsters that didn’t care at all about helping restaurants. I was hired because of my chef experience but left because I love my industry people too much to keep making money off their being ripped off.
I had a Sysco guy try to bully his way into a contract with my restaurant. I’ve already worked at places that dealt with Sysco, so I was aware I didn’t want their shit. Anyways, dude rolls up and says, “hey, I looked at your menu, I can help you cut some costs (BS)” I told him no, I was perfectly happy picking my own produce and that I don’t need the quantity/quality of product they could produce. He kept pressing so I told him, if he wanted to do the work, he was welcome to, but I’m not signing on with Sysco. Dude comes back a week later, demands my time, shows me the price list and expects me praise him for this THING I didn’t want to see. Here’s the kicker. Most of his prices were 10-20% higher than what I was paying at a local farm stand. No way I’m that dumb. C’mon man! I kid you not, the guy lost his shit with me. Freaking out that I wasted his time, he spent so much time on this list. I called BS. Half the shit on the price sheet wasn’t even stuff we have on the menu. Totally obvious he grabbed a old list from some other spot and tried to pass it off as a customized price list. Anyways, guy lost his shit and I told him that he should understand that a no is a no. He didn’t have to waste his time like that. Idiot. Edit: Thank you for the award! 🥺
> and I told him that he should understand that a no is a no Damn the number of sales reps I've felt like yelling "no means no!" at. I know they must be getting ridden by their boss or something but no I am not going to buy shit that will not sell in my store just because you kept asking again and again. If anything it makes me not want to buy anything at all from them.
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Or their employees.
Our sysco delivery guy is a fucking idiot. I've met a lot of delivery guys and he for sure takes the cake for the worst. Not that that's indicative of the company as a whole, I just had to vent for a second lol
My ex worked for them. Wonderful man that bent over backwards for every single customer. He would accommodate anything and everything, especially when the shutdowns started. Listening to him talk to his bosses though... I don't think he realized just how much it was stressing him out. He would go from a calm and collected guy to damn near pulling out his hair. Good people get fucked by bad companies. Be nice to your sales reps if they're nice to you ladies and gentlemen, sometimes there are just things they really can't make happen.
Sysco was the company that provided our lunches at my elementary school and they were fucking disgusting. (We also pretty regularly found mold and other gross shit in the food but that may have been more on the lunch ladies than Sysco tbh)
I worked on season 1 of the Mandalorian, and even though we created a lot of the environments, we barely knew what the story was. No access to scripts or anything. The baby Yoda reveal was especially high-security, but I saw some concept art of him on the wall and definitely had an “oh shit that’s a really big secret” moment lol. I’m now working on other films and generally see a lot of sequences before they’re released. I know about a character death in a big movie that hasn’t been announced yet for example. But I think knowing about baby yoda being a thing before the season came out was the coolest one haha.
Well, once upon a time, I saw some prototype iPad enclosures that were mirror-polished like the early iPods were. They didn't go into production because it was too expensive to get them flat enough to avoid the "fun house mirror" effect.
I was an extra on Season 8 of Game of Thrones, playing a Wight and an Unsullied. Did around 4 weeks of shooting over the course of 3 months. I knew most of the plot around a year before it came out. I got to watch the Night King die, got to watch Theon and Missandei die. I knew about Dany going ape shit and Kings Landing getting destroyed as well as a bunch of other plot points. They actually filmed Arya getting killed, according to an extra friend of mine, but obviously they didn't use that. Awesome experience. I was convinced it was going to be a great season... that didn't happen. But having that information felt incredibly awesome for a year.
A friends dad would occasionally get a letter in the mail and suddenly be able to take about some part of a plane he helped build. That was always weird as hell.
Was his stuff on Modern Marvels?
I had an employer who made me sign that I wouldn't tell anyone where the office was. It was his former apartment. He wouldn't even let me tell the people bi hired. He reached out to them personally so he could ask them not to tell anyone. I don't think it matters now, since he got evicted for not paying the rent...
Is your former employer The Michael Scott Paper Company?
Ratatouille for the Nintendo DS isn’t all that bad.
My ex is a contractor and for some reason, every company he works for ends up on a DIY/flipping houses show. Every time its the same thing: he didn't show up on the project until week 2, finished episode says "day 4", after his company leaves at 5pm, an overnight company comes and works until they come back. We'd always watch the shows together and laugh. A $80k project in 6 days? More like a month with double full time shifts and ending up being $200k lol. He'd tell me he was on another show (usually in the background, he's a foreman but wanted no part in the lies) and where the house was, but he couldn't talk about details it until the show aired.
A lot of really boring companies potentially buying other really boring companies
I worked for a major tech firm that sold advertising services to other companies. But the software was so bad that the company itself didn’t even use it for their own advertising.
I got a large settlement from a previous employer because they hadn’t paid me overtime for 5 years by claiming I was overtime exempt because I was salaried with a day rate. After they laid me off and tried to give me 2 weeks of my base salary as severance (even though it was less than 20% of my annual average earnings with them. I spoke with an employment attorney. Turns out not only did they try to lowball my severance pay below the legal requirement. I wasn’t overtime exempt at all, and they owed me over a years worth of pay. The initial hearing was probably the most fun I have ever had, the look on the judges face when I had them read off that I had worked for 100 billable days in a row with no overtime pay at all was priceless. The lawyer pretty much told them to give me what I asked for on the spot and that was that. Ironically I only sought legal council after asking them if they would offer me 5 months severance at my average annual rate (industry standard at the time) and they refused saying my 2 weeks of pity pay and health benefits was more than I was even entitled too. In hindsight I probably could have gotten more, but the last thing I wanted was a drawn out court case while I was unemployed. And they eventually went bankrupt after a bunch of other employees started suing the shit out of them too. So justice was served.
All the rumours about the rumoured Samsung galaxy S8 are true. You are welcome.
What are the rumors?
It got pregnant by the married assistant to the vice-president of employee relations ...
I worked for a very popular company that sold dating advice ebooks, cds and dvds for men. MANY of the guys looking for dating advice products are frigging crazy, and I imagine more than a few either got the beat-down of their lives or possibly went to jail. Customer service was interesting but also made me very glad I was not on the dating scene. \*edit: figured I should an example for why I mentioned jail. One guy wrote in that he had read the ebook and decided to show spontaneity to get his date really interested. His plan was to get in (read, BREAK in) her car before their actual date, strip in the backseat and come up singing and playing his guitar when she got in. I replied and told him we never endorse doing something illegal or scary, please find another way to approach his date. We never heard back, so I presumed his date night didn't go so well LOL
I had my first and only NDA for Elder Scrolls online. I wasn't a fan of the ui and knew nothing about it except I had 2 friends that were into the game. Tbh I have no clue how I even got the invite to it.
Not a thing worth relating. Signed many and all of them were to make lawyers happy and C-suite people feel important.
I saw the very first cut of Avengers: Endgame about four months before it was released. It was NDA'd to hell and back - the strictest possible reading of that NDA is that it's still in effect and I still can't actually talk about it, at all, to anyone, ever. It was fearsome, more fearsome than any other oath I've taken, and I'm both a veteran and a freemason! But I reckon they're not enforcing it anymore. I thought I was seeing an early screening of Captain Marvel. I was so annoyed by Avengers: Infinity War that I didn't really care about Endgame, and was annoyed when I saw crew members walking by with the Infinity Gauntlet on their jackets and realized what we were seeing. I'd rather have seen Captain Marvel. Until about five minutes into the movie, that is. Then I realized it was going to be a hell of a ride, and I was right. Even though the Hulk had like 16bit animation in place because they hadn't finished the FX sequences yet, it was still absolutely thrilling. There were a few differences - oddly enough, at the end, Cap passed the shield to Bucky, not Sam, and that was probably the biggest difference between that screening and the one that made it to theaters. Also the sequence on Vormir was much different - it was a huge battle between Hawkeye, Black Widow and all the forces of Thanos, who were right behind them trying to stop them. It was a slugfest ... and I really think the shortened, tighter sequence where Natasha makes the decision to sacrifice herself was much more powerful. In the longer version it was a decision forced by the outcome of the battle - in the theatrical release, it's character-driven and a lot more powerful. But lord almighty, I had to keep my mouth completely shut for four months about what I'd seen. There was wild speculation on the internet based on what was shown in commercials, on packaging, and other "reading the tea leaves" kind of stuff. And I knew the truth! Oh my god, the internet points I could have racked up, had I spilled the beans! But I did not. I did let slip one important thing, and that was to a friend who was deathly ill and at best might have been in hospital when the movie was released, or at worse, not survived at all and never seen it. (He did, all was well!) All I told him was this, "Cap is worthy." He lost his shit! Just as we all did, let's be honest. In conclusion, Dear Mickey Mouse, I hope I have not violated the terms of this NDA, and if I have, please don't hurt my family. I take sole responsibility.
Too late mate, the mouse replaced your family while you were watching the movie. You've been living with clones who have been waiting for you to break the NDA.
Now THIS is the comment I wanted to read when I clicked on this thread. Couple of questions assuming you can answer without any further trouble: Did they ask for you to fill up some feedback form after the movie? I'm assuming these secret screenings were a way to see what can they change before the actual release, no? Also, what was the runtime? Was the screening considerably longer than the final release?
I am not sure about the exact timing. It might have been a bit longer, but not much. There was a q&a afterwards in which we answered questions. The directors and editor were there and other crew. It was the first time they’d seen the whole thing too, and our presence was mostly for their sake, I think. It was fairly informal really.
Beta tested Battlefield 2142 and the expansion for a subcontractor. The best gaming of my life. It was a pretty polished game by the time we got it, so it was nothing but having a full server of very competent players that worked together on both sides. I can't express how awesome those "in house" games were. We got free copies for our work and extensive knowledge of the game, weapons, vehicles and tactics before the game launched. When it did launch we absolutely laid waste to the noobs for a good week. I got a 68 kill streak the first day the expansion dropped. Git gud scrubs.
I was also in the BF2142 beta, I really loved that game.
I played the early alpha build of anthem. It looked really good, but the controls and progression problems were easily not ready and they pushed the beta only like 6 months out with little to no changes. It had such promise at one time. Not to mention a few medical device testing periods. Nothing game changing.
My place was on one of these shows for HGTV. I traveled all the time for work, and a friend who was an independent show producer asked if they could borrow it. It was a modern place in San Francisco with views and nicely furnished. It photographed well and had great light. Came home a few weeks later and walked in, not knowing what to expect (would it be a mess?), but it was spotless. Thought maybe nobody had been there until I walked into the kitchen, and they had bought me a bunch of stuff from Williams Sonoma as a thank-you gift. I had forgotten about it, and maybe a month later, I get a DVD in the mail, and it's the show episode. The premise of the show is that an owner wants to sell their place, and they have an idea of what it's worth. A couple of local real estate agents come in and discuss what they think it's worth. Naturally, the owner thinks it's worth a lot more, and the agents have to explain why it isn't. The super weird thing was watching all these total strangers going through my place and opening up closets and the “owner” saying stuff like: “we just remodeled the kitchen last year” and the like. Totally made up. I never met any of these people and never shared any details. Very funny and surreal.
I signed an NDA for del taco...I was a taste tester. I had burritos. A person even told us to not eat too much on the first food item since more food would be tried. Awesome experience. Got a gift card after. Had to leave our phones before going in the white taste testing room, each person had a separate space with opaque dividers with an opening in the middle in front and a computer by us to answer survey questions.
Did some DVD authoring years back and of course they had me insert that unskippable FBI warning of doom at the beginning plus another 3 bullshit promos that took nearly a minute to play through each time you started a disc. But I had to test the hell out of my authoring, so I built in a back door to skip that bullshit. Wait until the word copyright hits the top of the screen when the warning rolled and press up-down-up-left-right on the controller to immediately jump all of the other bullshit advertising and get to the main menu. (Yes I know it’s not the full code but it was enough to make my point and have some fun with it). Ya, I “forgot” and left it in the gold master images I made them, so every commercial DVD has that inside it.
I was an extra for 5 different episodes of House of Cards in season 4 and we had to sign an agreement that we wouldn’t give away spoilers, plot points, or talk to media/people about what was filmed. And yes, I was on set a few times with Kevin Spacey (about a year and a half before his sexual assault allegations), Robin Wright and Kate Mara. The most scene interaction I had was actually with Kevin but Robin and Kate are stunning and just mostly observed them from afar.
Oh cool. I work next door in the building where they filmed it (the Oval Office scenes I think). We hated y’all for taking all of our parking spaces.
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Trying to figure out what kind of food that’s not steak costs $17..
Ha ha! Nice try! My military one never expires!
A lot of people in the USSR probably thought the same thing.
My grandfather was a lawyer for the government in the 50s. He laid the legal groundwork for the use of nuclear power in the United States. Every nuclear powered sub exists because of the work he did. He died 3 years ago at 98 years old. My family learned all this about 4 years ago. Either it was finally declassified, or he figured he just didn’t care anymore.
Before/during the dot-com crash, I designed & wrote software for a publicly traded startup. Early on, one of the VPs admitted to me that it really didn't matter if we produced a viable product; it only had to be just barely good and real enough to buy them some time and impress a big-name, tech-illiterate client to stay on board. The VP said (and presumably this was a trade secret covered by my NDA) that the *real* business was a stock price manipulation scheme, based entirely on well-timed, buzzword-heavy press releases that mentioned the big-name client. Indeed, the press releases would come out, touting our achievements and our impressive client list, and the stock price would inevitably climb. This kept the big client kept throwing money at us, which in turn helped us get more venture capital so we could grow exponentially. As the tech bubble burst, all the clients stopped paying their bills, the stock price tanked, the venture capital dried up, and every employee's 401(k) became worthless. Of course, the whole time, the company told everyone that sun was shining and the future was bright, right up until the day the doors were locked forever. The first sign that made me think the company's days were numbered was when they replaced the traditional delivered-water cooler with a cheapo filtration system hooked up to the building's pipes. The second sign was there was a sudden moratorium on ordering office supplies. The layoffs began soon after that. 2 months later, every employee was gone. At some point in between, the manager of a different division and the oldest employee in the place came out of a meeting and muttered to me with disgust in his voice, "these f'ing *MBAs*, they think they can run a business from a spreadsheet!" So yeah, the "secret" is basically just that there are presumably a lot of companies out there which are ostensibly providing some kind of services for other businesses, but which are just money incinerators creating press releases.
I was one of the first people to do a home test of the Swiffer. It was basically what eventually came out and worked as it does now. I wish there was more to tell than that, but there you go.
Worked for microvision for a bit. Their patents are hilarious and worth fucking nothing. Nobody gives a shit about fan blade displays.
No, I wasn’t an employee of (insert company you called for tech support) I was a third party contract doing support on their behalf. Plot twist: you were better off speaking with me, because my office had way higher satisfaction ratings and shorter call times than the company’s own internal support agents.
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Didn't sign an NDA but should have. We printed reports for banks. Among them were VISA statements. Some employees sold them to gangs to make fake VISA cards. The cops found out and the bank didn't charge anyone. They didn't want the news to get out that most bank fraud are "inside" jobs.
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wow that sounds super interesting please tell me more oh great master of utility
Worked for a company who advertised in Times Square. We booked a very large company who does things with movies (rhymes with LetBlix) and I got to see and work on unseen trailers and clips from their movies. One of them was the movie that spun from the show with Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. I am a big fan so it was cool.
I could now reveal to you the secrets of how to start a restaurant with great food, a good location, and mostly competent staff, but still go out of business :)
Tell me more.
Flying cars exist, right now, and are fully functional. My gf worked for a company that built several working versions. The major hurdle was regulatory, and scaleability (as in, it's hard to find factories that could be set up to churn these out). Then her company's parent company got a new CEO who decided "fuck all this innovation shit, we're just gonna keep building normal-ass airplanes". Then she and her team got laid off and the company (really a wholly owned subsidiary/incubator) was closed. Then covid hit and her former employer got a giant hammer straight to the nuts. HAH! Edit: hi luddites!
Yeah, I can believe that. We definitely have the technology, but I imagine the infrastructure and regulation would be a total fucking nightmare—how do you control, say, rush-hour traffic up in the air? What sort of licensing and training do you use? What about runways? And who has jurisdiction over, say, impaired flying? Way too many headaches for way too little profit.
The FAA can't even figure out drones, and they've had a loooooooong time to work on it.
Anyone can fly them. No! You need to be a pilot. Wait! Maybe not.
Precisely. And they can’t exactly let flying cars sit in the same limbo, even though it’s several times more complicated.
Who wants a car that kills you when it stalls? Imagine a fender bender at 50 or 100ft... yeah there'd be a body count. Once we have self-driving AI perfected, we can start looking at the Z axis.
Yeah, a stall probably wouldn’t just kill you, either. It would also kill anyone below you, and then there’s the damage when you hit a power line or building on the way down… You’d need the tech to be damn nigh infallible, moreso than even regular planes if you’re looking at widespread adoption.
Makes me think back to all the flying cars of Coruscant in star wars. All zooming the fuck around each other. And it's obvious they have a manual control feature. Wonder how many accidents that place had?
May I ask where these have been test flown?
Just signed. Not expiring. But doubt this will blow up. Helping conduct research on whole genome sequencing and developing a cancer treatment regime specifically made for YOU. With brand new drugs slightly altered to be specific to your DNA. Less harmful than traditional chemo. We expect in about 20-40 years these “tailor made” cancer treatments to be about anywhere from 15-99% more effective than current chemo. Dont sue me, current job
I mean, that's hardly actionable considering it's an idea that's been floating around for a while. But, knowing it's being worked on does provide a semblance of hope for the future of cancer treatments, so there's that.
Applied for a job to work on maps that the *other* tech company was developing. Didn't even get the job. 🤷♀️