What Part Of Your Job Goes Against Your Grain Morally

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

OK let me start out by saying, I’m not judging or trying to be holier than thou.

The next thing you’re probably all asking is “What rerun did Mark watch which made him think of this question.” The answer was “Becker” and he had a patient posing as someone else, so that other person could qualify for insurance.

:slight_smile:

Anyway, we all have had jobs where we have to do things that go against out ethics. Some we can live with, some we cannot.

For instance, I worked in a computer store over the last Christmas holidays and 75% of everything we sold had an “extended warranty” come with it. Even cheapo $7.00 keyboards had an extended plan for 99¢

I worked in checkout and we were required to offer it. Obviously it bugged the customers, and it’s a cash cow cause you’ll probably won’t use it before the thing breaks and if it does, you don’t want to go through the hassle for a cheap item.

But since we were being watched and I needed the job, and the added benefit was we got 25% of the cost of every extended warranty we sold. (In other words if I sold an extended warranty for $10.00, I got $2.50 of it in my paycheck). And that helped. I usually wound up with $50.00 a paycheck which is good considering I was only making minimum wage.

Another thing I hated was I had a temp job in an office and the guy I was answering phones for got a lot of personal calls. He had me lie and make up excuses for him. I don’t mind lying for business reasons, but not because he can’t be bothered telling a woman he doesn’t want to date her, but wants to keep her on the hook, in case he has nothing else.

Another job I had, I would work on websites and the guy would steal copyrighted material and have me put it on the website. I explained this is illegal, and he said, "Yeah, so what. They’re not gonna sue us. They’ll just send a Cease and desist. and if that happens, THEN we’ll take it down.

So what parts of your job, just go against your grain? Things you don’t like to do ethically but do anyway.

Again we all do things we consider wrong, because sometimes you do what you have to. For instance, I would never think of taking any money, even a quarter, from my employer. Yet I have a habit of stealing pens. Some which cost more than a quarter

2

I am required to teach Respect for Authority and Conformism, because I am The Man. I also must weigh in on The Evils of Marijuana and the Moral Decay Caused By Teenaged Sexual Promiscuity.

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
**Hunter S. Thompson **

3

I am subject for random drug testing, though the policy may only call for post-on-the-job-injury testing. Never had a test in 8 years, other than the one before I was hired. I don’t actively use anything, but am pro-legalization, and would get a “medical” prescription in a hot minute if I could get off my ass and do it.

Joe

4

Working for the military industrial complex and figuring out better ways to kill people and destroy things is sometimes morally troubling.

5

Nothing, currently. Yay!

However, years ago when I worked in the copier industry, one of my duties was to “Sledge 'n Wedge” trade-ins of competitors’ equipment. This involved donning work gloves and goggles and using a sledge hammer to utterly destroy the machine.

Sometimes they were objectively near the end of their service life - but usually they were perfectly good copiers which had years more use in them, and sometimes they were virtually new. And of course, this was the whole point. The rationale was that if we did anything apart from totalling them, it would go against the bottom line. Second-hand machines devalue a lot, and if you let a machine that will serve for years find its way back to the market, then it may find its way into the hands of someone who would otherwise buy a shiny new machine from you with the service contract and supplies sales that go with that.

I understand the mercenary logic of it, but it’s still all kinds of wrong.

6

Doing computer support, I have been occasionally compelled to install Internet monitoring software on family and children’s computers. The parents always argue that they just want to make sure their kids are kept safe, but spying is spying. Also, do you really want to see what material your son or daughter is masturbating to? What if it is MILFs that look like you? As they say, there are things you can see that you can never un-see.

Oh, and like Larry Mudd, I have been forced by my employer to destroy newish, and even brand new equipment, in furtherance of fraud. The AV store I worked for was broken into by someone who drove a car through the front door. Suddenly, there was a close-out table in the front of the store, and I was in back taking new equipment out of it’s box and stomping on it to add to the insurance claim.

7

Nothing now, but at my old job at a hospital, I was “encouraged” to change diagnoses in order to get insurance companies to pay.

8

I work in a small zoo. We have a jaguar, among other endangered/threatened species, and while I understand the benefits of captive breeding programs, etc., the real reason we have a jaguar is, we want a jaguar. They’re cool, awesome animals that everyone wants to see. I also know, intellectually, that zoos give captive bred and rehab animals the best possible life. But I also strongly believe that wild animals belong in the wild.

9

Way back in 1988 . . . I was working in an ad and production agency, and was assigned the Pat Robertson presidential campaign. I refused to work on it, and tried to switch assignments with someone else. Long story short, I wound up quitting over it. I got a much better job the next day.

10

Sometimes people want to build a structure in a place it really shouldn’t be. One of the things I do as a consultant is to run hydraulic models of creeks & streams to check for adverse effects of building in the floodway.

I don’t like it when the modeling shows “no impact”, because I think you shouldn’t build so close to the creek/stream. Morally, I think I should be encouraging people to get OUT of the floodplain, not get IN it.

11

on certain patients, due to insurance regs, I have to claim I was with them for a 1 hour visit when it was really longer ( like 2.5 hours sometimes) because their iinsurance will only pay for a 1 hour visit. It bugs me to no end.

12

I work in the Security department at a very large corporation. Sometimes I am required to escort a person off the premises who has been fired or laid off. It’s hard to do, when you know how terrible the local economy is and how unlikely the person is to easily find new work.

13

On occasion, I’ve had to pass a kid that didn’t make the grade (through no fault of his own). I was also relived at a few suspensions.

14

No we haven’t.

15

I work in a flower shop. I die a little inside when take an order for someone who is obviously cheating. I HATE cheaters. HATE. When I get to the door of the other person I want to say things like, “You know he has a wife, right?” or “Her husband sends his regards.” just to see the look on their faces.

I am, of course, absolutely forbidden to do any such thing no matter how angry I get. Spilling the beans would open us up to all kinds of legal trouble.

I had one when I first started out that really shocked me. I didn’t know just how open some people could be about the fact that they were cheating. I took an order from a man who wanted something really special. The card message was just, “Will you marry me?” I put the bouquet together and went to deliver it feeling really good inside. I’ve always liked making people happy. He sent it to her workplace and she was on her lunch break. She was sitting in the little courtyard on the side of the building with her friends. When she opened the card she burst out laughing and showed it to them. Then they sat there trying to figure out which of her men it could be from by the location of the shop. The nasty thing asked me who sent it. I said I wasn’t allowed to tell her and walked away. I went from feeling 10 to rock bottom 0.

A couple of years ago, I had a guy send a half dozen roses to his wife for her birthday and a dozen to his mistress. From the card message he had plans to “work late” with the mistress that evening. When I got to his house his wife was there with their three little kids. She was so happy to receive a token of affection from this worthless asshole. I was seething all the way to the skank’s house. When she opened the door she said, “Oh. More flowers.” She took them and went back in without even saying thanks. I wish I had broken the vase over her head.

This job is a tiny part of why I haven’t bothered dating. I see a bit too much of how ugly relationships can be.

16

The corruption, nepotism, favoritism and general quid pro quo that goes on almost daily within the city government.

17

I’m a telemarketer, so in most people’s minds I’m ethically bankrupt already :smiley:

My first telemarketing gig had racial profiling as a policy, which rubbed me up the wrong way. We were told never to bother pitching to anybody that sounded Asian (as in, from India or Pakistan). Their rationale was that they never made a commitment to buy anything after a meeting with one of the sales guys, because of their ‘culture’. As a result, none of the leads we sent to the sales guys would get picked up if there was an Asian-sounding name on the form, no matter how enthusiastic they were about discounted solar heating systems.

18

I used to do research on executive compensation. Essentially, compensation committees of the board of directors of large firms would hire consulting firms to advise them on how to pay their executives more, and the consulting firms would hire us to dig up information on what other companies were doing. It’s not that we fabricated information, but just knowing that the work I did was used to justify higher pay for the top five executives at Fortune 1000 companies made me feel like I needed a shower at the end of the day.

19

Bloody hell, I was thinking - what could go wrong here. :eek:

20

I’ve been lucky enough to avoid it so far, but I’ll probably be asked to do it at some point in my career: black hat SEO. I just hate link farms and fake blogs and other artificial ways to inflate search rankings. I mean, I’m an internet user too, and I want relevant search results.