30 People Reveal “Dark Secrets” About Their Jobs That Common People Aren’t Supposed To Know

For-profit healthcare is crazy in the first place. I get it for cosmetic stuff, but not for just trying to stay alive and well.

The longer I spend on this site, the more America seems like a horrific dystopia

I had a CT scan of my lungs, and the bill was enormous. I managed to get a detailed breakdown, and I was charged $300 for "complicated medication coding." The only "medication" I received was saline with a dye marker. I got them to remove it from the bill, but it's beyond infuriating that it was included to begin with.

"Ah, private healthcare. A tradition so embedded into the heart of the American people, only a surgeon could excise it, and it would probably cost at least a thousand dollars." -BDG

Health insurance is the largest and most vile scam ever forced upon people

Worked call center for ~7 years and took "supervisor/manager" calls for six of them. Most of the "supervisors" you speak to are just regular agents that will just repeat what you were already told because they don't get customer surveys done on them. Most call centers will punish (or outright fire) agents for receiving too many "no" survey's.

This is why I demand to speak to a supervisor. I know the first 3 people I speak to can't change the policy, but that 4th usually can. I'm polite and I tell them I know it isn't their policy, but I need to get this done so I need someone who can help me. Also, in the US, if you are asking for them to be fair and they aren't, 9 times out of 10 a BBB report will do the trick. I have ended up getting a response from an executive vice president of some pretty big companies, and at that level they know that a customer is worth more than the $30 that you're trying to get back because they broke something (or whatever your complaint is).

Yeah... Tell that to the one that refused to let me talk to a supervisor. I turned everything over to the credit card company I had put an order on, and was called by the company the next week. It seems that the CC company emailing them and tell them they were going to backcharge over $10k for their policy gets you help from the head of customer service.

Always treat the phone people good, they are the gateway to what you want. Kind of like don't make the chef mad.

Same

I was in IT for 9 years at a major insurance/banking company that heavily promotes its customer service. Most of that time I provided assistance to callers (many of them elderly) who needed help not only navigating the website but very basic things like how to use a browser, upload a document, or troubleshoot basic user issues. We created a huge knowledge base for solutions to common issues. I loved my job because I really helped people who had no one else to turn to except expensive commercial geeks. Our reward? They saved $$ by eliminating our jobs and hired temps who could only do password & PIN resets. All our work and training wasted. It still burns. OK, rant over.

And this isn't a commentary on everyone who does this. There are $10/hour helpdesk people who really aren't that good, but the job doesn't need great. Then there are $300,000/year engineers who are amazing It guys and they still Google stuff. Because no one can no everything and because there are so many random issues that may come up! I ask people how their Google research skills are when I interview because your last job may tell me what kind of work you can do, but your Google skills definitely reflect on how well you can adapt!

I worked in consumer electronics, it was widely known that we never needed to be tech geniuses, we just needed to be one or two steps ahead of the general public.

Imho. IT guys (and I am specifically taking about fellas here. Worked with a young lady a few years back who was probably one of the best IT workers I've ever had the pleasure of working with) are super f*****g lazy and won't lift a finger to help. Of course there go to is Google lolololololol.

Knowing how to find information is a skill in and of itself. We call it Google-Fu.

Nine people in our office. Consultant said to CEO "fire your son and brother, they're bleeding the company dry." CEO fired the consultant instead.

A consultant I once met (working for one of the top 10 international players) told me, that in many cases they are just hired and paid to take the blame: like when management wants to close a branch, lay off lots of workers or something like that, consultants get hired to "analyse" what needs to be done, while really being told the wanted result they are expected to come up with, just for the management to be able to say "sorry, but that´s what the consultants said, we got to do...!"

This is way too broad to apply to any “consulting”. It’s not the case for a lot of it, and doesn’t ring true. Consultants don’t have this function in many industries. The OP should state the specific field they’re talking about.

In my previous job, there were many times where I said "we paid how much this? We got scammed".

No it didn't. Just because two products come out of your factory with different branding on them does not mean that all the products on the supermarket shelves are the same. It is fairly common for one company to manufacture products for multiple companies to sell. They may or may not tweak the recipe for each one.

I had a Saturday job when I was a student (aged 17ish) which was packing sliced ham. The ham came as a huge block, and was placed into a slicer, then the slices moved along a conveyor belt. At the start of the belt, the workers picked 4 slices off the conveyor belt to put into a plastic packet/envelope, and at the other end, the plastic was sealed and a label stuck on. Every so often the labels changed to a different brand but it was the exact same ham slices whether it was a cheaper or more expensive brand. There were other things that put me right off eating sliced ham for years.

Sounds like the US has some seriously dodgy food standards and laws.

Buy a block of cheese and grate it yourself and save bucketloads of money....

If you read the ingredients list, if the first or second ingredient is milk then that's a good cheese. If milk is like way down on the list that's an inferior cheese. The brand doesn't matter the ingredients do.