Journalists for the most part barely make minimum wage. They aren’t playing 3D chess with political messaging. They’re trying to file stories and photos from their phones after a 10-hour weeknight shift covering high school sports and city council meetings.

someoldbroad , Mido Makasardi ©️/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

POST

View more comments

If you have a cardiac arrest, chances are more than likely that you will stay dead. Unless you have that cardiac arrest in a medical facility and they can correct which of the 8 (ISH) things that are reversible causes.

If you die you'll most likely stay dead, at worst you'll be rescued and become a vegetable for your family to make a tough decision over.

amboandy , Pavel Danilyuk/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

POST

View more comments

Not a dark secret but I've been trained on how to escort kindergarteners through hallways in the event of an active shooter. The one thing that haunted me was when they told us to instruct our students to run in a zig zag pattern if there was nothing to hide behind. That was a dark and depressing in-service.

seaslugsally Report

POST

View more comments

When we go to check the back, we’re only doing it to get you off our back, we aren’t really looking for the product you need.

BoSocks91 Report

POST

View more comments

Accounting has a very high addiction/alcoholism rate. There is a very high chance your accountant was drunk or high while prepping your return.

That_Weird_Girl_107 , rolina Kaboompics/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

POST

View more comments

Physician here.

If you go to a large academic medical center, most of your orders will be put in by overworked doctors that sometimes haven't slept for 24 hours and sometimes get paid less than minimum wage. But you can be guaranteed that there will be a doctor on 24/7 able to come to bedside if needed. Why is the system like this? Hospitals love cheap labor. Hiring more physicians would be expensive.

The alternative, of course, is to go to a smaller medical center, where there won't even be a doctor on site at night sometimes.

So to alleviate this shortage, many states are passing bills which would allow foreign physicians who haven't even done a residency in the US to come and work. That includes the physician who may have no idea about how the US healthcare system works, and yes, it's as bad as it sounds.

Why not train more physicians in the US you ask? Simple, the bottleneck is residency, for which meeting ACGME requirements to run a residency is...actually really hard (since there are many requirements to ensure that the graduating resident won't go out and k*ll people). Your local small hospital likely won't be able to set one up, so residency training spots are pretty much already saturated. Fixes to this problem will be much more difficult.

naideck , Antoni Shkraba/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

POST

View more comments

I was a perfume sniper for a very high end store that may no longer be in business. Well, that was part of the job.


We had a quota of bottles to use up each shift.  Our manager would check behind the counter to make sure we weren't spraying into the trash can.


If we wanted to push a particular brand (more profit/commission) we'd dilute the competition's testers.


Our mantra:  we spray so you'll pay today.

Free-Bird-199- , Karolina Kaboompics/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

POST

View more comments

Retired person here. I swore I would never clog up stores or offices by coming in after-hours or on weekends, because people who are still working deserve priority. But sometimes I forget. Sorry.

Initial-Progress-215 Report

POST

View more comments

In pharma, your medicines are very safe. There are lots of checks and balances. The actual ingredients, including the active, are often pretty cheap, although the newer biologics are not. The finished pharma, the thing you actually take, has an enormous mark up but not to feed greedy rich men. The mark up pays for the next blockbuster, for advertising and for liability.

aphilsphan , Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

POST

View more comments

Psychiatry: Newer antidepressant presented no more advancements in terms of efficacy than cheap-a*s 1980s Fluoxetine (Prozac). As a result, most of the current guidelines just tells you to prescribe whatever you like.

soloward , cottonbro studio/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

POST

View more comments

I'm a lawyer: 1/3 of us are active alcoholics, 1/3 of us are in recovery, and the last third have a drinking problem. There is something about being on call 24/7, being expected to close a deal in days, efficiently, without making a single mistake in documentation. I'm getting sh*t from a client for a messed up schedule. Yes, we made a mistake, but bro, you gave us a term sheet 8 days before you needed to close. The whole team was billing 16-20 hours daily on that deal. There are going to be mistakes

Minnow_Minnow_Pea , August de Richelieu/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

POST

View more comments

Pharmacy (US-specific)

From the mid 90s or so, pharmacists were in high demand and salaries began to increase as a result of normal market forces in such a situation. The demand was compounded (hah!) in the mid-oughts when Medicare D went live, which also roughly coincided with the requirement that all future pharmacists must have a PharmD to get licensed.

Brief sidebar: PharmD is a 4-year doctorate similar to an MD in terms of structure (NOT particularly similar in challenge or rigor, especially these days, which I'll get to shortly) and cost. The degree had existed before, but was more of an advanced designation for pharmacists looking to get into clinical practice or teaching. The BPharm, a 5 year bachelor's degree had been the standard to practice in a community/retail setting prior to 2005 or so.

So anyway, huge demand continued to push salaries, and now the requirement for a fancier degree meant that a lot of new schools were opening up to help meet the demand, and also make money hand over fist by charging grad school rates for what used to be an advanced undergraduate profession.

Because pharmacy has no organization to monitor or control the number of schools opening, they rather overshot the target in terms of actual output of new RPhs needed, and we started to have a situation where there were too many pharmacists for not enough jobs. This resulted in retail chains pushing worse and worse working conditions, scheduling fewer hours to save money, and pharmacists would just take it because they were needing to borrow increasingly insane sums of money just to get the degree to get into the profession. Meanwhile the retail chains were also in a race to the bottom with each other for insurance reimbursements, doing anything to compete and meanwhile pushing reimbursement standards so low as to bankrupt many/most independent pharmacies.

While all this was going on, schools continued to open and attempt to fill all the seats in their classes, but the increasing costs, falling or stagnant pay, and progressively worse working conditions were driving prospective students away from the profession entirely. To remain profitable, schools started taking lower and lower quality students, and even do away with the requirement for the PCAT (an entrance exam sort of like a pharmacy version of the MCAT, but again much much easier; I have taken both and can say this with great confidence). The NAPLEX, the clinical licensing exam, is supposed to be a minimum competency text, meaning that if you finished a PharmD program you should be able to just walk in and pass it. Nevertheless, a growing number of schools are seeing first-time pass rates for their graduates below 90%, 70%, and even 60%.

So where this is all headed is there are way too many pharmacists, they are coming from an increasingly less selective pool of applicants, and working conditions are so poor that most of us know people who have just walked out of their job and the entire profession on a whim because the possibility of homelessness was preferable to another day working for CVS or Walgreens.

I struggle to believe that this situation hasn't resulted in direct patient harm thousands of times in the past year alone, and will continue to do so until something improves.

MuzzledScreaming Report

POST

View more comments

I'm a lawyer and I think people would be surprised at the generally poor level of lawyer work and how most actual work is done by stressed out, overworked and underpaid 20-somethings. I don't know, maybe I'm a crotchety old guy or maybe I'm experienced enough to stop worrying about myself as much and pay more attention to everyone else's fuckups. I know Belichick said most football games were lost rather than won.

AdaptiveVariance Report

POST

View more comments

There is so much extra b******t that it can be hard to do your actual job like you want to. You’re too busy clicking all the useless boxes so management stays off your a*s. This leads to burnout, stress, missing important things, and constant worry that you aren’t good enough. 

I probably googled or youtubed something right before doing it if it’s been a while. It’s fine. 

I have seen some questionable, dangerous, and borderline negligent stuff happen, and there are usually no consequences. Everything doesn’t need to be punitive, but there are definitely times when big things are swept away, especially depending on who did it.  

I’m about 99.9% dead inside, but I can fake it for eight hours a day. It is rare that anyone is seeing the real me at work. My performance could win an award. It is draining.  

 This list probably applies to so many jobs. .

ProfessorAnusNipples Report

POST

View more comments

Surgeon here. More of a positive secret. Sometimes I add in an extra organ for my favorite patients during surgeries. Tell me you like to drink and seem like a nice person? I just might graft in an extra kidney and maybe a spare liver lobe for you if I have one handy. You’re welcome! Our secret.

Neither_Cod_992 , Anna Shvets/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

POST

View more comments

There really is no sex in the champagne room. I should know.... Part of my job is to watch an entire bank of cameras aimed at both the lap dance room and the champagne rooms. It's also my job to call a 'code p***s' which is when I see a guy in the champagne room trying to unzip his pants. Security goes to the room and there are no second chances, you're out!


Yet we still get people asking. LOL.

Significant_Planter Report

POST

View more comments

Software development. I barely know what I'm doing, and my projects are built on a house of cards of legacy code. The guy i learned from sometimes knows less than me. Someone asked if my API is REST, and i was like "no. Wait..." looked it up. "Oh. Yes, yes it is. "

An app i made on a whim to help manage some things internally is about to be sold to the UN to monitor equipment for a considerable sum. I'm just winging it here!

CttCJim Report

POST

View more comments

I work for a roofing supply company. Both in the warehouse and on the truck making deliveries. The amount of damaged materials we send out to peoples houses, simply just to get it out of our inventory, is astronomical.

This causes a few issues for everyone that isn’t us. To list a few, it could cause leaks in your roof, shingles to simply fly off in the wind, vents to clog. Or the most common issue, which is the customer has to buy “Better material”. Which isn’t taken off the original ticket order and comes out of pocket. Meaning sometimes people pay 150% to 175% more for a roof than what it would normally cost. So a 20k roof turns into a 33k roof. If not way more.

All of that simply so our material looks better to the eye when you come in to order stuff. And most of that goes into the salesman’s pocket via commission, so they won’t do much about throwing away anything or sending out better material. Unless a bigger company lines his pockets prior.

My advice, don’t get a roof redone unless insurance covers every bit of it.

tatty1357 , Pixabay/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

POST

View more comments

Everyone is more than likely living with harmful mold in their walls and ceilings .

jak_parsons_project Report

POST

HVAC.
Most companies are being bought up by private Equity firms. They have no idea how to run an HVAC company, what it entails, or anything about equipment quality, life expectancy or maintenance requirements. They continually push to replace good equipment that may only be seven or eight years old. Regularly use high pressure sales tactics, but never call it that.

njroma Report

POST

View more comments

Carpenter here. I don't know how secret it is, but the waste we generate is unbelievable. 10-15% of what we buy gets thrown away as an industry standard, but I've had times where I have to get rid of 30-40% of my materials from a job (if, for example, I need a bunch of plywood pieces cut at 5' x 4', that means I have an equal number of 3' x 4' cutoffs from the 8' x 4' sheet) because I just don't have anywhere to store it all.

carpenterboi25 Report

POST

View more comments

Just how much time and effort it takes for a store to be clean and well organized. Time we don't always have if the store is busy. .

Sad-Frosting-8793 Report

POST

View more comments

Railway. We get k*lled all the time. 3x a year in Canada alone, and that doesn't include life changing injuries.

Strong_Wasabi8113 Report

POST

View more comments

That I spend most of my days at work during summer, either reading or surfing the webb, without getting any scoldings only a "Nothing to to I guess, sorry but I don't have anything to tell you to do right now" from my coworkers.

I work in a warehouse. Nothing happens during summer when everyone in every country in Europe goes on a two to three months vacation season.

Denimao Report

POST

I'm a hand hygiene reviewer for the healthcare facility I work in, not my only responsibility but it's one of them. In the province I'm in there are 4 moments to perform hand hygiene in a healthcare setting: before contacting the patient or the patient's environment, before an aseptic procedure or accessing clean supplies (includes gloves, clean linens, medical instruments, food, food utensils), after a risk of contacting or contacting bodily fluids, and after contacting the patient or the patient's environment. I'm one of many reviewers that records how often hand hygiene is being performed for these 4 moments. If they don't perform hand hygiene for one of these moments it's recorded as a miss and is deducted from the overall score of the facility. Not sure if this is standard everywhere in Canada or other countries.

I have access to all hand hygiene reviews from every healthcare facility in the city that has had one done, including EMS, for the last decade.

The scores are percentages, to pass you need at least 90%. The scores for some of these places are great, above 95%, but in other places the scores are abysmal.

One hospital in my city had a score in the low 60s.

I went to a doctor recently to look at a rash on my face, the score I would've given was 25%. He missed everything except using hand sanitizer when he came in. Put on gloves, touched the rash which had pus coming out, didn't even take the gloves off when typing on the computer, opened the door for me with gloves still on, took the gloves off incorrectly by touching the outside of the gloves, then I noticed him follow me out of the room without santizing his hands, and go to do paperwork or something, and he misdiagnosed me anyway to top it all off.

Ended up being shingles, he could've given chickenpox to the patient after me.

Not all places get reviews done on a regular basis either. The one hospital that had a score in the 60s last had a review done in 2015. Many places aren't even on the list, meaning they haven't had a hand hygiene review in at least 10 years, or there is such little data that they don't even have a score.

The kicker is that I need to announce that I'm doing a review, as with all other reviewers. So of course the people I'm reviewing are going to do their best to be perfect when they know someone is watching. But once I'm gone they'll likely go back to their old habits.

What that means is that the scores I see are likely 15%-20% worse than they actually are.

EMS had a perfect score, another hospital had 98% which is the best score for all the hospitals in the city, and my facility has one of the best scores in the city, last month we got 96%. Most places have at least 80%. So it's not all bad.

Edit: some words added.

PeachFreedom Report

POST