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job description
With the world being as fast-paced and multi-faceted as it is, it's literally impossible for us to know everything.
Even if we somehow could contain all of that knowledge, there's still information out there that people may only be privy to by working in the right field, making it difficult for consumers to make smart decisions with their money and time.
Curious, Redditor Boring-Plastic-4667 asked:
"What industry 'secret' do you know that most people don't?"
The Truth Behind the Story
"Most, probably 80 percent or more, of the books on the nonfiction bestseller list (autobiographies, memoirs, political/business books, etc.) are ghostwritten."
"Source: I am a ghostwriter."
- RSquared787
Lightbulb Moment
"People who sell courses on how to make money make their own money by selling you the course."
- BianaMcDaniels
Teacher Burnout
"Secondary teaching. If teachers did absolutely everything in their job description perfectly they would never sleep, eat or socialize."
"Planning great lessons requires hours that simply don’t exist in our day. Consequently, majority of teachers walk into lessons having done no dedicated planning. We just wing it with our years of experience and resources we purchased online two minutes before the lesson."
"The students never notice, I think partly because this happens so frequently, it seems normal. Most teachers I know aren’t satisfied with what they’re doing in the classroom, but don’t have the time or resources to do better."
"The 'good' teachers that do put in the additional planning are usually sacrificing significant portions of their personal time and money to delivering great education. This generally results in the best teachers getting burnt out and leaving the profession OR having significant issues in their personal life (eg divorce, no social or romantic life)."
- YeahNah54679
Safety... Not First
"I'm an unarmed security guard."
"Every now and then, I'll get a comment from someone about how they're glad I'm around in case there's an active shooter or something."
"Yeah, if that happens? We're not doing anything aside from getting ourselves to safety and calling the cops."
"We're literally told during training that if we try to intervene directly with an active shooter, we'll be fired."
- PineappleUnderTheSea
...Gasp
"Your lobster tail at Outback is microwaved."
- fishflower
"This one hurts me."
- ushouldlistentome
Reduce, Reuse, Throw It Away
" China has stopped buying a lot of recycled plastic from the USA due to quality issues and a lot of it just gets stored in warehouses as landfill. The industry is spending money out the a** on PR to avoid this being public knowledge."
- PapaChewbacca
"My city announced last year that they're not going to be 'doing recycling' anymore and were pretty transparent that most of the stuff collected on recycling day has been going to the landfill for years now."
- RallyX26
As If Their Grief Wasn't Already Enough
"I worked at a newspaper processing obituaries, and it was crazy how much funeral homes tried to rip people off."
"Obits are expensive. Like, 400 dollars for a single day expensive. And they are priced by the word."
"We had funeral homes who would send us obits with all the commas and periods separated to make full new words. The homes would get the estimate from our website and use that for billing the grieving family. We would edit the obit to meet English standards, which would reduce the word count substantially, dropping the price."
"In other words, they charged for the estimate but got billed for the edit."
"It got so bad management told us we were not allowed to talk about prices with family members, even if they came in and showed us the bill from the funeral home. The 'customer' was the funeral home, not the family, so they weren't privileged to see the pricing."
"If you have to put an obituary in the local newspaper, please contact them directly for pricing guidelines. There's usually cheaper options the funeral homes won't tell you about."
- SeguroMacks
Define "Editing"
"Audio engineer here. I can play guitar, bass, and drums very well."
"A lot of the time, I say I’ll clean a person's part up with editing, but secretly I just learn and redo their part myself when they leave. It’s WAY easier than digitally cleaning up a sloppy performance."
"I’ve been doing this for 10+ years and nobody has ever complained. Not even once."
- Flashy_Contract_969
Smart and Resourceful, Not Unfriendly
"I'm an academic researcher and I can speak for a huge number in my field when I say:"
"If you want access to our studies and they're behind a paywall, you can email us and we will send you the study."
"We are genuinely delighted to share and if you want further context for the results or what have you, I'll always try my best to oblige."
"The only limiters on that last bit are that: a.) the original data for the study might have reached the end of our right to keep it, in which case it will have been destroyed; or b.) I might have forgotten details or I might have written that paper during a particularly hectic time and my file system might be total s**t."
"Also, a lot of us are on ResearchGate and various social media things so you can contact us through there. If you can't contact us directly or we're being slow, one of the other authors on the paper might be contactable."
- and_so_forth
A Bestseller to One
"The New York Times bestseller list has a lot of people on it who buy massive numbers of their own books."
- ibringupeace
No Ruining the Surprise
"If your baby goes to a nursery/daycare, chances are those weren't their 'first' steps, words, etc., that you witnessed. The industry standard is to not tell parents when these things happen as it makes them feel bad."
"I've seen kids up and walking about the room for weeks, even months before their parent proudly announced at drop off that they 'took their first steps last night.'"
- by_the_way_mate
"When my daughter was in daycare, for a couple of weeks, they kept saying, 'She is soooooo close to walking,' and 'We can’t wait to hear she took her first steps!'"
"She had already been toddling all over at daycare but not at home, lol (laughing out loud)."
- KittyZH88
Shoutout to the Small Businesses
"At the local place nearby, an 'extra' handful of fries in the bottom of the bag, or an onion ring or cheese curd added to your fries is policy rather than mistake, looking generous with the sides gets them repeat business."
"For those curious, no, it's not a franchise, it's a little one location between the public pool and high school founded in 1968 called JD's Drive-In, in Appleton, WI. No, they aren't under-filling the bags and dumping some of that in the bottom, it's already bigger portions (and better fries) than Culver's or McDonald's."
- Treekin3000
Very Suspicious
"Some appetizers are the most labor-intensive items on the menu to make, for example: dumplings take one worker about an hour to make 12 to 15 orders."
"If you want to know what I'm getting at, if a restaurant offers a plethora of appetizer options, then there's a high chance a lot of them are store-bought and resold because there's no feasible way to prepare several orders for each item on the menu."
- LesserHealingWave
Celebrity Status
"I worked in politics. There are A LOT of people who write to a politician like they're a celebrity."
"They receive love letters and all kinds of weird stuff. There's also quite a sizeable part of their mail that is comprised of people asking for a photo with an autograph. Way more than you think! Some because they're admirers, others because they collect them... and then some other cases you don't really want to know about (I've worked for a female politician, trust me, you don't wanna know)."
"The dirty little secret within the secret is that the politicians I knew didn't sign anything. They had a machine that did all the signing for them. So technically the autographs were not even real."
- ladyteruki
Fascinating
" Car industry: NEVER buy a car that is completely new on the market! They always, always come with a ton of bugs that need fixing and it takes about two years of serial production to get rid of most of them. If you must buy a new car, be sure the model has been in the market for at least two years. The reason for why we don't fix the problems before start of selling? Cost."
"Also, don't buy models that were in development during years of crisis. Example: during the 2008 financial crisis we let got a huge number of people (to fix the numbers in the books, didn't actually save the company money because they all got a big payout on their way out) so we were understaffed and under immense pressure to reduce cost. The models that came on the market after that time were s**t. Like, serious s**t quality we have never seen before."
- cpt_goldstein
These insider tips and facts were so interesting to think about; it's wild what we as consumers often do not know.
Hopefully, if we keep collecting information like this, we'll be able to make better-informed purchases and decisions!