Jason Mustian
Chances are you’ve been asked to sign (or asked someone to sign) some kind of Non-disclosure agreement in your lifetime. Be it with an employer (most common), or with your ex-girlfriend who knows you still sleep with a Star Wars plush doll, even though you’re 37 (much less common).
Those NDAs have time limits though, and once they expire, I guess you’re free to spill the beans. And on Reddit, people are doing exactly that in response to a question:
From financial dishonesty to seriously awful abuse on the part of Medicare, folks are not just spilling the tea, they’re dumping it into Boston Harbor.
Here are some of the juiciest secrets:
(Just a reminder to take these with a grain of salt as we have no way to verify them.)
1. Equifax
“I worked for Equifax about 20 years ago. We were doing things with your data we weren’t supposed to do. I know this is going to come as a great shock to a lot of people.” —
2. “Made In China”
“I worked for a company that did screen printing and engraving, and one of their biggest clients was the US military. They bought EVERYTHING from China. They had a person who would cut out the ‘Made in China’ tags, and replace them with ‘Made in USA’ tags.” —
3. Medicare Calls
“If you are ever with an elderly loved one and they get a Medicare call, hang up, hang up right away. I worked at a company in downtown Chicago this last year that were absolute slime balls. All these young agents scamming old people, promising something about this ‘new upgrade’ to their insurance when really they were just taking them off their plan. A lot of these people have Alzheimer’s disease and we’d get POAs calling in saying that we took their mother/father/aunt off a plan and now they can’t get back on their plan for an entire year. I finally quit because it was so horrific what we had to do to our elders to get a pay check. I personally tried to do everything I could to not be slimy but at the end of the day the whole job was f*cked. I took a man off his plan and was going to have him start a new one the following month. He didn’t have his medication list on him so told me he would email it to me. He finally emails me a list of it least 20 medications, one of his medications that was covered for like 20 bucks on his plan would literally go up thousands of dollars on the plan I put him on. I called him back and spent two hours canceling what we had signed him up on. I still feel horrible to this day. Imagine if he forgot to send me that list of medication. Listen to me, as a past Medicare advisor, do NOT let your parents/grandparents take these calls. Medicare advantage plans are f*cked and Medicare advisors are 20 sum year Old kids who will do anything to get them taken off their plan.” —
4. DocuSign
“Never open a document with DocuSign on your phone, we took ever piece of data we could get our hands on.” —
5. State IT
“When I worked for State IT, we weren’t supposed to provide details of what hardware was being used or operating systems. In the nineties, I took on an old server, souped it up, and put Linux on it to run our networks. This was pretty radical at the time because everyone else was using something proprietary (Like Netware) and I was able to deliver services for free (email and samba) they were paying out the nose for. The NDA wasn’t about security. It was about keeping how much money they were wasting under wraps.” —
6. Waste Disposal
“During my geology PhD I visited the site of a proposed waste disposal site. A preliminary geophysical survey identified a strange anomaly, a deep linear feature trending to the south south west. Looked like a buried river valley. The site needed investigating for a environmental impact statement / report, part of the planning application. My access to the site and investigation included a NDA, I couldn’t publish anything about it until after the rubbish dump was built and a 5 year Stay was put on my thesis (access was restricted to only a few people). My PhD supervisor also thought the a anomaly was an ancient buried river valley, perhaps a few million years old. This is exactly what the people who wanted to build the rubbish dump wanted to hear, as they absolutely could not put a rubbish dump over or near a Karst feature (dissolved limestone). Contamination could leak into the ground water. We drilled into the center of the anomaly in 2003, we encountered peat and gravels, then 40 meters of clayey lake sediments, then some more gravels, but then we found 65 meters of hard clay (in fact two layers of clay, 40 meters of orange clays and 25 meters of white clay). We hit limestone bedrock at 128.32 metres depth (33.3 metres below sea level). The hard clays were left behind after the limestone dissolved. It was Karst. A type of Karst called a Pocket Deposit. They were also found in they UK, the clays were used to make pipes (pipe clay) and cheap pottery. They were around 15 million years old, judging by the fossil pollen and leaves they found. By the time the Stay ended, the rubbish dump was built, close to the anomaly. Where it should not be.” —
7. No Refunds
“I worked for a company that audited medical bills and looked for stuff that wasn’t charged. If you were not billed for something they would try to collect on it and get a share of that. If you were billed for something and should not have been, well sucks to be you, moving on, no refunds.” —
8. Medication Expiration
“When a pharmacy’s stock of medication expires, they can’t just throw it away. So they hire pharmaceutical waste disposal companies to take it away and dispose of it properly. The ‘pharmacy’ I worked for bought expired medication and supplies under the table from one of these disposal companies and resold them at full price. EDIT: Naming and shaming would be complicated because the business operated under a constantly changing chain of mail-order pharmacies. When insurance companies would get enough complaints about one they would deny coverage, at which point patients would be shuffled to another pharmacy in the chain while the impacted pharmacy quietly closed and reopened under a new name. The good news: they were busted and folded pretty quickly under the weight of having to operate like an honest pharmacy. Company in question is no more.” —
9. Terrible Video Games
“That video game that was terrible on release? It was terrible in beta, and alpha, and we weren’t allowed to warn you.” — 0110bot
10. Financial Crash
“The big financial houses in NYC knew about the impending crash at least 6 months before it started in 2007. I was at an investment conference when I heard the heavy-hitters discussing it before going on stage. I will never forget the sentence: ‘What do we do? Go out there and tell them we are all f*cked?’ They proceeded to go out there and peddle their “everything is great!” bullsh*t. I had never heard the word ‘tranche’ before that day.” —
11. Titles
“Marketing companies will hire Jr people, give them amazing titles, and then charge the client outstanding fees per position and pay those people Jr pay, pocketing everything as profit. The time they charge on estimates is double what it actually takes.” —
12. No Tumor
“I was working at a hospital as an Intern. There was a woman who had a brain Tumor a while ago. She got in for a check up, six months pregnant and having depression. The doctor thought he found a new Tumor so she had another brain operation. But there was no Tumor and they cut her head open for nothing. And after she woke up they didn’t tell her this, instead acted like they removed it successfully. Edit: I made an internship at the hospital for a few months. I completely forgot that intern in the medical context means someone who wants to become a doctor and studied medicine.” —
13. Mixing Strains
“Most marijuana growers, like some of the biggest companies in the world, mix their strains together regardless of policy/SOP because people are stupid and upper management doesn’t give a sh*t. Stems, seeds, they don’t give a flying f*ck about what makes it to the end of the line. They only care about money, not product. That’s a you problem as the consumer.” —
14. Operating Costs
“Basically all donations go to ‘operating costs.’” —
15. Lying For Amazon
“Part of Amazon’s associate training is literally how to lie when asked certain questions, and there was a ‘social’ part of the contract that discouraged speaking poorly about Amazon with friends and on social media.” —
16. Compliments
“I work in finance. The computer does not tell me your rates. Your rates are determined by my mood that day and whether or not you complimented my shirt.” —
17. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
Even if you walk away with nothing on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, you still get money for doing the show.
