65 Ex-Employees Share The Untold Work Secrets They Can Now Reveal After Leaving

At the grocery store where I worked, I caught one of my managers stealing from a till, and he gave me $300 to shut up. Then, like three days later, an entirely different employee got caught stealing and took the fall for all the missing money

I worked at this one pizza place in a northern California town many years ago. They were quite successful from 2010 to 2015. Around 2012 they had opened a second location.

After a few months people, employees, and the owners began to notice a funky smell in the area. One of the bosses blames it on the faulty sewer system of a town founded during the gold rush. Some people just assumed it was from the refuse of partying tourists who flood the downtown during the weekends.

In 2015, the owners of this pizza place decided to move the original location to a bigger building, close the second location, and consolidate the workers into one spot. The official statement was to simplify operations.

This wasn't the truth.

There had been complaints by customers that they were find slugs in their drinks. Drinks were a soda fountain so it was obviously self service. No way an employee would be able to plant a slug in the cups before a customer would go use the soda fountain. One of the bosses even thought it was sabotage. Well, they shortly discovered what the problem was:

The drain for the soda fountain went directly under the building and dumped everything onto the foundations. The soda was laying under the building in a pool of fermenting and rotting sugar. Slugs would travel up into the drain following the source of the delicious nectar. The cost of repair would have been enormous so the owners decided to leave and let someone else fix the problem.

It was absolutely insane, lol. I haven't worked for that pizza spot since 2020. I still, to this day, get people saying they miss that second location and I tell them the story of why it actually shut down.

Chili at Wendy’s is made with leftover cooked burger meat.

Beer steins and mugs generally contain the same amount of beer but steins are made of thicker glass and looker bigger so they can charge more.

One of the supervisors has random women come to the workplace on night shift in the middle of the night to cheat on his wife. His wife found out and legitimately brought a freaking gun to the workplace to confront her spouse/the supervisor/the side piece. Our manager is BFFs with the police and managed to make the whole thing go away quietly. Lots of us wanted to quit afterwards.

I still work there at a different area, but when I worked in the warehouse we'd have to use forklifts that ran on gasoline and LPG, one of them had been having engine troubles where it was overheating frequently after being on for a few minutes. We'd let the lead know about it, stopped using it and were told it would be fixed ASAP. The issue more or less got pushed under the rug despite my shift's concerns about it, and eventually one day, someone forgot, turned it on and left it idle while they went to get breakfast, and it managed to catch fire. My coworker (not the one who turned it on) managed to sprint over to a fire extinguisher and put it out before it got too bad, but it was near 2 other forklifts, and we may have been seconds away from half the warehouse exploding because of it. I just end up thinking about that from time to time...

The big printing companies use their rejected,scrap and salvaged paper in the middle of big jobs. The beautiful nice perfect stuff is used at the beginning and end if the customer is there okaying the job or checking progress. The customers billed for the name brand stuff.

I work in one of the big4 accounting firms and when my manager is too busy, they would ask me to send out a draft directly to client without their review.

Former bartender - the owner would reuse plastic cups frequently. So did other college bars in the area (Wisconsin).

And no, it wasn’t a dishwasher method. It was a hot water and bleach rinse, followed by a soap and water rinse. No scrubbing. Sometimes I’d notice chewing gum stuck to the bottom of a reused plastic cup. I now only drink from beer bottles and cans.

Most stuff in spoons is microwaved. Even the poached eggs ( vacuum packed pre poached from Brakes ) when it was busy we would run out of McCain chips we would run over the road and buy the cheapest frozen ones instead. During busy period most food like burgers were bulk cooked on a grill and stored in a thing to keep stuff constant temp using water.

Toyota (had) a reputation for no redundancies when you were hired.

The easiest way to achieve this was to have 50% contractors and be very reluctant to make anyone permanent. Downturn and the contract line workers could be booted no problems.

The mechanics/line engineer subcontractor was raking it in and billing £120/hour because they knew Toyota needed them and didn't want to play along to get on staff.

A well known opticians (that you should've gone to) operates as mostly franchises. As an organisation they offer lots of very good opthalmic training for franchise staff free, but the franchise owners don't tell the staff about it as the owner doesn't want to promote them or pay them more.

Also a fair amount of the franchise owners drive shitboxes to work and, say, an Aston Martin at home, to keep staff in the dark.

All of the other preschool teachers were sleeping with parents of the kids.

We didn't let customers use our bathroom because that's where we kept the gaming consoles.

Not any company but worked in a spare parts shop and some parts are very rare to sale that we forget the rate to sell so we just blabber some high price according to the behavior of customer we even sell those parts at half price too so that we can get rid of those parts.

I work for a games publisher. You'll be able to guess which one easily.

- The Football Manager games on PSP were literally nothing more than roster updates after the first time.
- The Xbox One/Series X version of FM 2021 is literally the mobile version repurposed for a controller. The main game will run on a toaster - unless you don't have a PC I wouldn't bother.
- The Total War games have run on the same engine since Empire. Same issues and limitations pop up with every new release. There's a lot of technical debt with Warscape but they don't want to put the series on hold just for a major rework.
- Most of the team that worked on Sonic Colours and Sonic Generations are no longer working for the dev team. There wasn't much confidence in Sonic Forces from the off and it ended up being released as a budget title and priced as such. Though it sold quite well considering. From what I've heard about the new one they're working on, they've once again proved to have not learned their lesson.

Worked at checkatrade for a bit after they got bought out by homeserve. Apparently it used to be a good company that did work for its members, but when I started there it was like walking into a dumpster fire every day. Insane yearly monthly prices (highest was about £140 pm) would be decided by your trade and how well you seemed to be doing through the site, so the more reviews you got the more your page would be boosted, but likely your monthly membership would shoot up when it came to your renewal date (which, by the way, was automatic if you didn't say no), but we were not supposed to tell members that's how prices are decided, we just had to 'convince them it's worth it'. seemed like it was verging on a pyramid scheme to me.

Not to mention the absolute state of management and staff as a whole, processes would change almost every week so no one actually knew what the hell they were doing and ending up with really pissed off builders screaming down the phone at them. Having to try and keep a straight face whilst explaining to a window cleaner why their monthly membership has almost tripled was near enough impossible, made worse by the fact you had to pull a reason out of air because you had no idea either.
Was only there for about 6 months temping, but by the sounds of things it's not got any better.

Also that annoying radio ad was purposely made to get stuck in your head and drive you crazy.

I use to deliver at disneyland. They have an abundance of pallets in the back because of all the semi trucks that do drop ship. I would go home each day with at least 40-60 pallets. I sold them to a pallet yard, their buying price was $8.25 a pallet. 5 days a week 40-60 pallets x 8.25 do the math.

Everything the client gets delivered is ChatGpt. They charge lakhs of retainer for generating stuff. Waste of money and time (and water).

PR is a scam. I worked with a ceo once and he had a bit of a narcissistic streak. We paid less than 70,000 and had his interviews in 2 magazines from Hyderabad and 2 newspapers in 3 months. Even tried getting him into Forbes but that was costly and in lakhs.

I started my career in a BPO type job in Raheja mind space. During the night shift, they would use the pregnancy room to hook up (no cctv cams or pregnant women at night thanks to company policy). Some people hooking up were married.

One of my friend works in a FAANG in Hyderabad. He is stupid af. He only got in because his wife is HR in that company and his BIL is a very senior person in the same company. I spoke to him 3 days back and he never heard of ChatGPT apparently and fyi he works as part of the companies operational innovation department. FYI he makes 30 LPA. Works 2-3 hours a day. Just emails and basic reports.

Another friend joined Wipro and was on the bench for 1.5 years. He would go to office, sign his name (for benched people access card isn’t attendance for some reason). Every time they put him on a project he got out. In that time he finished his MBA at OU and was consistently being paid. He left the company lied on his resume and now works someplace else (but now works very hard and is on track to becoming a VP).

In my first job post MBA I would hire Pakistani/ Bangla Financial analysts on fivver and make them create financial models. Never got caught. Was offered a promotion within 6 months of joining but I left the company out of guilt.

In one of my other companies there was a team lead (FE lead) and his GF/now wife was a Jr Dev. She worked on a project with me and I always noticed she never delivered anything on the same day. Later found out she would go home and ask her husband to do the work so she would always deliver one day later. I didn’t care since the work was getting done and code quality was awesome.

My friend works as a very senior financial person for a SaaS company, and it is true. You are all numbers on an excel sheet and layoffs decision are nothing but marking you in red background. So yeah, don’t d*e for your company.

I have too many such stories...this is one the unfortunate outcomes of working for short stints in multiple places...

A. The PR lead of one of my companies while I worked at Pune around 16-17 years ago..he was gay...he used to hire good looking gents at junior temporary positions under him all the time. He came out later, some 10 years afterwards....but I knew from then on as I was privy to his internet activities...he is a friend and we are in touch now....but I could not tell him that I knew since then onwards..

B. The HR head and the Receptionist of a very famous company of Ahmedabad were having a roaring affair...they had the usual flirting over IM (desktop to desktop in the same building). They used to visit the company guest house on Saturdays some times. The guest house caretaker was given special instructions to disappear during that time. He was bengali and I had good relations with him..(once in a while when he cooked good food he used to keep aside some for me). He told this to me..and I could not share this with anyone while I was there. Later on I came to know that few other people had suspected this.

C. This incident is different. 1999. City of Rourkela. Not connected directly with me. But with a fried, but I was a direct witness. My friend was the branch manager at a private bank. Once every 2-3 months he would get intimation from the owner of a mine from a place called Joda, to be ready for a large cash deposit. The vehicle would come late at night, around 11 pm or so. Since large amount of cash was involved, he had to make provisions for extra security but at the same time very few people would need to be present. The customer himself used to provide additional security from his side and food for all the people for counting the cash. The incident where I was present the amount was some 2.5Cr..and the notes were stuffed into the bags like clothes..all denominations..sorting and ordering them took the larger part of the night.

Bud Light (the official beer of the England men's football team) is made using rice and fish bladders.