Customs broker here. Every day hundreds of thousands of containers and air shipments arrive into United States territory. The volume of customs entries entered every day is staggering. When we get licensed to be a customs broker we are trained and tested not just on knowledge, but ethics. We even take a pledge to partner with CBP to uphold the law, and cooperate with them should we come across anything suspicious. Why so much emphasis on this? Customs can’t actually screen everything coming in. I’m oversimplifying but CBP basically works on the honor system. You file an entry saying what the shipment is, and they just take your word for it and release it. This happens hundreds of thousands of times a day. Maybe at best customs can screen 3-7% of what’s coming in, the rest of just waived through….

You know the people who write instruction manuals or user guides in things you buy? Half the time, they’ve never even seen or touched the product. Some dude just sends us pictures, a rough description of how it’s supposed to work, and that’s it.

There is a problem in substance abuse treatment in the United States called body brokering. Substance abuse treatment can be very expensive and insurance companies pay A LOT of money for a patient to be there. Treatment centers will hire “body brokers” to find addicts with the best, highest paying insurance and entice them to check in to the specific center, the treatment center then gives the broker a commission from the insurance money. This can go as far as body brokers literally putting more drugs in to the hands of some addicts before they come in, bc the higher level of drugs in your system upon admit, the more and longer the insurance company will pay to the treatment center. Brokers will also hire other addicts in a pyramid scheme type way to check in to the treatment center, make friends with the other patients, and upon discharge encourage relapse so they come back to treatment.

Ghost writers in fiction. John Grisham, Danielle Steele, James Patterson, Janet Evanovich etc., all those big names with an NYT bestseller every year use ghostwriters who are are never credited or mentioned. It’s barely even a secret.

Many hotels often sell rooms multiple times. Used to work in airport hotel. Knowing that chances are some guests won’t arrive due to missed or delayed flights so we sell more rooms that we have. You have guests checking out from 2/3 am due to early flights so even though the room is technically still theirs you quickly and sometimes poorly clean the room and tell the arriving unexpected guest or new booking there’s a random computer issue and to wait 20 mins and then check them into the departed guests room praying. Multiple times I’ve had to run a kettle under a cold tap to hide the fact the previous guest used it 15 mins before the new guest arrives

Many bills are literally written by lobbyists or special interest organizations. I have seen my boss give bill language to a state legislator and then found the same language in print a few days later several times. The bill may change in committee but usually not drastically against the original intent.

Air traffic control – A diagnosis of virtually any mental illness…and a diagnosis of many physical conditions…is disqualifying and will end your career. For that reason, people avoid doctors like the plague.

Have you ever started filling out a form for a quote on something (insurance website, or literally anything) and then changed your mind and said “nah, I don’t want to give them my personal information”, and then abandoned the form before pressing “submit”? If you think that stopped them from getting your personal information, it didn’t. Most companies looking to capture leads will capture your info in real time as you enter it into a form. The submit button is just there to move you to the next step, not to actually send your information to the company.

99.9% of advertisements involving ‘real people’ is acted and scripted. Even when the people being interviewed are indeed non-actors, they are prompted on what to say. For example, recently we interviewed a guy who won a car from one of our brands. First round: Interviewer: Congrats on your win! How do you feel? Guy: Uhh… really great. It’s a real surprise, to be honest. Thank you. AFTER SEVERAL ROUNDS AND COACHING Interviewer: Interviewer: Congrats on your win! How do you feel? Guy: I feel so lucky to have won a (BRAND) car! The design and handling is first rate, and I’m most impressed by the fuel consumption. I will definitely keep on holding (BRAND) as my top car of choice.

At a very large pizza chain restaurant that remains widely popular, we had these perforated pans for thin crust and stuffed crust pizzas. They’d get washed in the dish washer by the hundreds per day and at least half would still have burnt cheese and shit on them. Well they were just stacked to dry. When making new pizzas in those pans, sometimes the pans that were left to “dry” overnight grew bits of mold around the burnt cheese. We were told just to put the dough on top because otherwise we’d never keep up with the orders if we rewashed everything. The manager said, “don’t worry, it gets cooked”.

Services costs are based on how much money you look like you have. I’m a woodworker/contractor. I come to you house, you tell me what you want done. My jumping off point is how much the market will bare. If I think you can afford a $4,000 solid oak book case that’s what I will quote you. I can make a cheaper version that I make less money on, but why would I do that? It’s not that I’m just ripping you off, I’m selling you a better product, but in doing so I make more money. So when getting a quote it can pay to be very direct about what you want to spend or you are going to be sold the most expensive version they think you can afford.

The chances of you surviving cardiac arrest are only between 5-10% with the proper application of life saving measures . people seem to be under the assumption that most people come back … They don’t…(a heart attack is blood being blocked from getting back to the heart while cardiac arrest is the heart altogether suddenly stops beating unexpectedly)

Funeral homes are businesses, and funeral directors will absolutely take advantage of grieving people. The most offensive to me are the cremation boxes. They’re literally just big cardboard boxes, and should cost less than a hundred dollars. But they also make really expensive boxes, and directors will say things like “grandma would be more comfortable in this”. No, she won’t, because she’s dead. Some of these boxes reach 1000 dollars, and of course are all just burned.

The comforters in hotel rooms almost never get washed. They are nasty.

Mobile Homes are cheaply made and mass produced by people making 9 bucks an hour and don’t give a shit if it’s up to code or safe. Hundreds of people in a factory with little supervision, and the main goal is to get as many made as possible, with little care to protocol, codes and fire stopping. I got hired as a HUD admin, ended up doing inspections so we could stop getting fined by the fire marshal and the amount of crap that is overlooked and not cared about is infuriating.