Office Depot sells printers at very low (or even negative) margin, and then inflates the margins on cables, paper, ink, and warranty. If you want the best deal, get the printer from OD, and everything else you need somewhere else. That $20 USB cable they sell costs them $1 and you can get the same or better online for $2.68.

I used to work for a popular wrestling company, billionaire owner, very profitable, would write off any OSHA penalties as the ‘cost of doing business’ just as they did in 1998, when The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table

i worked for a hybrid hosting and cloud provider that was partnered with Electronic Arts for the SimCity reboot.

well half way through they decided our cloud wasn’t worth it, and moved providers. but no one bothered to tell all the outsourced foreign developers that they were on a new provider architecture.

all the shit storm fail launch of SimCity was because of extremely shitty code that was meant to work on one cloud and didn’t really work on another. but they assumed hurr hurr all server same.

so you guys got that shit launch and i knew exactly why and couldn’t say a damn thing for YEARS

It’s pretty depressing, but the fact that soil and groundwater are almost certainly contaminated anywhere that humans have touched. I’ve seen all kinds of places from gas stations, to dry cleaners, to mines, to fire stations, to military bases, to schools, to hydroelectric plants, the list could go on, and every last one of them had poison in the ground.

Our business-critical internal software suite was written in Pascal as a temporary solution and has been unmaintained for almost 20 years. It transmits cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests. They also use a single decade-old Excel file to store vital statistics. A key part of the workflow involves an Excel file with a macro that processes an HTML document from the clipboard.

I offered them a better solution, which was rejected because the downtime and the minimal training would be more costly than working around the current issues.

The programming team that is working hard on your project is just one dude and he smells funny. The programming team you’ve met in your introductory meeting are just the two unpaid interns that will be fired or will quit within the next two months and don’t know what’s happening. We don’t do agile despite advertising it. Also your project being a priority means it’ll be slapped together from start to finish 24 hours prior to the deadline. Oh and there will be extra charges to fix anything that doesn’t work as it should.

The company would bid on government contracts, knowing full well they promised features that didn’t exists and never would, but calculating that the fine for not meeting the specs was lower than the benefit of the contract and getting the buyers locked into our system. I raised this to my boss, nothing changed and I quit shortly after.

Everything comes in frozen. Before mixing with the sauces it smells off. Half the staff mix without gloves. Dont get the tuna but have it your way…

I work in IT. Most systems have laughable security. Passwords are often saved in plain text in scripts or config files. I went to a site to help out a very large provincial governmental organization move some data out of one system and into another. They sat me down with a loaner laptop and the guy logged me into his user account on the server. When I asked for escalated privileges, he told me he’d go get someone who knew the service account passwords.

After a few minutes, I started poking around on my own… And had administrative access within an hour. I could read the database (raw data), access documents, start and stop the software, plus, figured out how to get into the upstream system that fed data to this server… I was working on figuring out the software’s admin password when the guy came back. I’m sure that given some more time, I could have rooted the box because the OS hadn’t been updated in years.

Anybody knows that one waterfall attraction in the Southeast US? The one that advertises bloody everywhere? Waterfall is pumped during the dry seasons, otherwise there’d be nothing to see. Lots of the formations are fake, and the Cactus and Candle formation was either moved from a different spot in the cave, or is from a different cave in New Mexico. Management doesn’t want people to know that, but fuck 'em.

We used to sell Windows built-in Recovery tool.

A certain fruit company knows about you WAY more than you can imagine, and most of the information is accessible to even the lowest ranks of support. And yeah, my NDA is finally over.

Depending upon your position you have an NDA that either has a date or never expires. I have worked for companies that I have NDAs with that never expire. Be careful what you share.

Just remembered another one:

Have you ever had an anonymous survey sent to you by your work or by a company your work has hired? They’re not anonymous. Management knows what your opinions are and will use them against you.

I worked for a consultant that would try and help fix businesses. The worst example I can think of was when I saw one person had answered a survey question saying that their employer had a “blame culture”. Rather than trying to work on the processes or address why something had gone wrong, staff would start pointing fingers to keep out of trouble. This didn’t fix anything and only made people spend all the time covering their posteriors.

The manager called a general meeting of everyone at that site and then singled out the employee who’d mentioned the blame culture, blaming him for saying there was a blame culture. The employee then pointed out that they’d been told, in writing, that the survey was anonymous. That employee called the manager a liar and then she lost control of the meeting, with lots of employees calling her a liar and several storming out. They weren’t in business the next year.