rSlash - r/Askreddit What's a Shocking Secret You Can Expose

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

0:00 Intro 0:03 Todays question 0:11 Call times 2:24 Raffle 3:35 Internet 4:25 Concussion 5:56 Money 6:26 MP3 7:31 Cheating 8:53 Black mold 9:54 IT 11:32 Herbalife 12:31 Chemo 13:28 Cyber security Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to r slash ask reddit where people answer the question, people who are no longer bound by non-disclosure agreements, what are some surprising secrets that you can expose? Our first reply is from Gagwa. I'm a tech support role, and one manager used to boast his team's average call times were the lowest in the company. While average call times were in the 12 to 17 minute range, his team was constantly under 10 minutes. His team was awarded multiple times, and his strategy was adopted company-wide to all customer

service and technical support teams, including our internal IT teams. That strategy was under a strict NDA, as we didn't want to allow competitors to emulate it. When our call center would go bid on contracts, it became an awesome metric. Our customer satisfaction scores are on par, but we have call times 20 to 30% lower than our competitors. So what's the dirty secret of the NDA that I wasn't allowed to disclose? Their big method? Just hang up on people. Straight up. Find a way to say, okay, go ahead and do that and call back if it doesn't fix it. Then hang up. Don't wait for confirmation. Like, okay, so reboot your PC and

your problem should be solved. Thanks for calling. Click. Eventually, they came out with more useful metrics that tracked things like first call resolution, which absolutely shredded this company and they went out of business a year or two later. Beneath that, we have this story from Wow That Guy's a Dick. I remember reading an IT hell blog back in the late 90s or so where a guy was documenting the awful IT call center that he was working at. And the manager's favorite guy there had amazing numbers because he would just tell

every caller their warranty was voided and he couldn't help them. His throughput was amazing. Huge call time, very low call times. He was the department golden boy. Thing was, he considered any action taken on the device as voiding the warranty. Turning the PC on would void it according to him. So naturally, they put him on the fast track to management. I feel like this is how most r slash malicious compliance and r slash pro-revenge stories start.

Is the idiots like this getting promoted and then somewhere else on Reddit someone types up a story, so we got a new stupid manager today! Our next reply is from Midnight Warrior. I worked for a website creation company back in 1999, managing the website for a big brand and a large bank that was sponsoring a round-trip paid ticket to the Super Bowl. I worked on the website that collected all the entries, and I posted the rules that the company's legal department wrote to describe the rules of the contest. A random winner was to be selected for the prize, and I wrote a software tool to randomly pick the winner to be used when the contest was over. When the contest ended, I was told to forget my tool,

forget the rules, just look in the database and find someone in South Florida, where the Super Bowl was in 1999, so the company wouldn't have to pay for airfare. Beneath that, we have a similar response from Carson. On a similar note, whenever a contest involves writing a 25-word or less answer and the best answer wins, yeah, they just draw an entry at random. Then they quickly check that the answer isn't complete nonsense or obscene and that's the winner. Nobody's got time to read all that stuff?

True, that is literally the basis of my career. Nobody's got time to read Reddit, even though there's a lot of decent content on here. Our next reply is from Blackmobius. I was never under an NDA, but my hotel is under new ownership, so I guess I can say it now. Our hotel had no internet connection

starting around 1 a.m. toam to 6am, like clockwork every night. I don't know if it was just a system fault or if it was cost cutting. But without internet, the security cameras didn't work or record anything. The fire alarm systems didn't work either. The alarms would go off, but it wouldn't call for help. So if we had a fire that started at 3 a.m. for example, then unless someone else that's driving by calls it in, I have no idea that the fire's happening. One night, we had an assault happen in the parking lot. The police needed camera evidence and our cameras didn't record anything because the internet was out. So that was fun explaining to the detectives.

Our next reply from Fornico. I once got hurt at work, a concussion specifically, while on camera. I have a history with concussion-like symptoms. I was 99% sure that I hit my head, but I lost all memory of the accident. I ended up missing a few weeks of work due to the severity. I wasn't sure if I had some sort of mental breakdown, so I asked to see the video so I could confirm my injury. They flat out refused to let me see the video and told me there was no evidence that I hit my head.

I offered to sign away my rights to sue them and I wasn't even asking for hospital bills or paid time off. Long story short, I sued them and won, but I had to sign an NDA. I got my wages and hospital bills paid that I wasn't even asking for in the first place, but I was finally able to get the video. It was a 100% no doubt head injury complete with a loud bonking sound effect and me falling down and leaving a dent in the bulkhead that I hit. After the fact, the office staff told me that they were under orders from upper management

to lie and say that they didn't see anything on the tape. They said this was standard for anyone who gets hurt, to just lie about it and let it play out in court. I obviously quit soon after. Beneath that, Clicky Finger says, for future reference, an NDA can't prevent you from reporting a crime. Even if the original incident was an accident, the cover-up could potentially be criminal. Our next reply is from Snuffy. The private school I worked for was for students identified with giftedness.

The owner of the school administered the giftedness test. Can you pay the tuition? You're gifted! Can your sibling pay? Them too! Your cousin, neighbor, kid you know across town? You're all gifted! Yeah, beneath that Ted Stryker says,

My son went to a private school for the gifted. Really, it was a school for the financially gifted. Our next Reddit post is from this guy. About 20 years ago, I signed an NDA with a very large record company regarding their attempts to get into selling their catalogs online. Streaming, sales, etc. It was a minefield because they were still wary of pissing off high street retailers, and that's where the charts come from. These attempts were frustrated by their top level corporate guys. One week, they all went to a, what is an MP3 conference in Buenos Aires to get them up to speed.

The thing is, they spent so much time partying that the only talk they went to that seemed to stick was the scare tactics about how teens could scrape MP3s from the web. And then they could be copied and redistributed easily. When they came back, every item in the catalog was ordered to be scrubbed from the web. No 30 second previews, nothing should be audible. Not a hint of audio. Lock it all down. Put all the tapes in a chest and seal it with concrete at the bottom of the sea.

That's gonna make everyone go back to using CDs. Good old profitable CDs. Our next reply is from Hellhound. I briefly worked at a university in South Florida in the late 90s early aughts. I was chosen to be on an academic integrity team, basically reviewing claims of plagiarism and cheating and deciding between the five of us whether it was valid or not. We were made to sign NDAs when we accepted the invite to be part of the team. There were three instances where an employee that was taking classes there clearly cheated, and the issue was brought to our attention. Those three times, the cheating was blatant. All three times, we were told to let it go, as it would look bad for the university to

have it get out. I'm not sure if this was common for other universities, but at the time I was under the impression that it was common practice everywhere. It was ultimately one of the main reasons that I ended up quitting. I was and still am disgusted by it. Our next reply is from Kloparella. Hasbro has tried to make the following two films. Stretch Armstrong, a gritty reimagining starring Taylor Lautner, the wolf from Twilight with

a Nolan's Batman feel. And Candyland, a Lord of the Rings style epic for children starring Adam Sandler. Both got pitch packets made before ultimately being shelved. Last I heard, the Candyland idea is still kind of alive. Our next reply is from Frisbee. I worked for a Fortune 500 real estate company a long time ago. Yes, we know about the black mold problem. We always knew.

We just don't disclose it. We intentionally do not look into it. We don't know exactly what kind it is because if it's dangerous then we legally have to spend money to fix it. The only department that's allowed to talk about the black mold problem is press and PR because only they know how to bury it correctly. That was not a great work culture. Beneath that, Flaming Rust Bucket says, I just dealt with a black mold problem in an apartment complex. I found it on the walkthrough after stupidly signing a lease first. They ignored me when I brought it up, repeatedly.

I got the city involved and talked to the higher-ups in the company. The 180 they did after that was hilarious. They refunded everything and cancelled my lease. You could almost smell the panic in the emails. Our next reply is from Aquila MFL. I've been an IT consultant for many, many years. The most critical applications in banking, insurance and finance run on badly outdated machines held together by duct tape, prayers, and compressed dust, standing in dark, wet corners in mostly forgotten basements. Also, those systems are written in the most obscure and long-dead programming languages, or even directly in Assembler for a certain chipset, written by code wizards in their

own idiosyncratic dialects, who are now long retired or even dead. Backup systems are mostly non-existent, or the data tapes are worn down to be basically transparent. If a cleaner or a janitor pulls the wrong plug to find an outlet for their vacuum, there's a decent chance that whole branches or even institutions begin to crumble. Most of these systems will also never be updated due to their legacy status. As in, we don't know what this is, what it's doing, or even how it's doing it, but it's a critical part of our whole infrastructure and nobody dares touch it. But we'll never invest the necessary money to analyze those systems, write documentation,

or even replace them. Beneath that, meme man Dan says, I had a professor that worked for a company with the government of Ohio to update all their databases. When my professor's team took a look at how they set it all up, I kid you not, the state was running all of Ohio's social programs off one Excel spreadsheet millions of rows long. Our next reply is from Babylon4all.

I was never bound to an NDA, but I sat in to oversee the technical aspects of Herbalife meetings. For those who don't know, Herbalife is basically a pyramid scheme. We're talking about meetings with the highest level sellers and their board. They spoke about how to manipulate low income and unintelligent people to make them millions of dollars. They talked about how to teach others to scam people to make them more money. Beneath that, others are adding, Herbalife reps were told to specifically target single

mothers as the concept of working from home, before it was mainstream, along with the possibility to bolster their tight finances were the best prey of such pyramid schemes. Another says, My mom's boss at Mary Kay told her to find out what day the welfare checks get deposited, then target low-income neighborhoods on that day. My mom literally dropped out of the program after hearing that. Our next reply is from Matros.

I worked at a hospital that specialized in cancer care. They were doing something new by actually targeting the type of cancer that patients had with the right type of chemo. Most cancer centers don't do that. So suppose you get cancer C, but the insurance companies and the government mandate that you get chemo for cancers A and B before treatment for cancer C. Because when you do it that way, the hospital makes like 10 times more money off of you. The downside for the patient with cancer C is that they have to endure way more bouts

of chemo than if they had just targeted Cancer C. So if you ever find yourself in that really bad boat, make sure that your doctor's treatment plan is actually for your cancer and not just to make someone richer. Man, I could tell from the title of this Ask Reddit post that this was going to be a lot of crummy stories about crummy people doing crummy things, but this one is the worst. Our next reply is from Sovamind. I worked for a company overseas that enforces self-regulation for one of the power grids in the United States. My job was to help secure it against cyber attacks and to write the regulations that enforce those protections. I had panic attacks on Sunday nights because I knew at work the next morning we would go

over the list of everything not compliance. And the company lawyers would argue that they were compliant and nothing would get done. Many times the lawyers would tell me that I wasn't interpreting what was written correctly. Then I'd remind them that I was the one who wrote it. And if they didn't believe me, they could just go look at the minutes taken during those meetings. Instead, they would just document their justifications for being compliant and not actually fix anything. The US power system is now so vulnerable to cyber attacks that it's only a matter of

time before millions of people have their lives thrown into complete disaster and potentially hundreds of thousands of people that'll die. I just can't even think about how bad things are right now. That was r slash ask reddit and if you like this content be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new reddit podcast episodes every single day.