Nothing at my current job, thankfully, but at my last company I had to place TV & radio buys for a Check Cashing/Pay Day Loan client, and absolutely hated doing it. For radio, we were told to focus on stations that best reached african americans and/or people earing under $25k annual income. For TV buys, we were instructed to focus on “lower class” programming such as Jerry Springer, Maury, Cops, judge shows, etc. Made me feel pretty scuzzy.
Ah, yes. My first job was in telemarketing, at the ripe old age of 14 (my voice sounded older and my best friend’s dad ran the place.) We had a different technique for our racial profiling:
“Hi, Mr. Jones! This is Me from Asshole Magazine Marketers! I’m calling to let you know you’ve won a free subscription to a magazine! I just need to find out which one you’d like: Ebony or Better Homes and Gardens?”
Anyone who answered Ebony was thanked and hung up on and deleted from the lists. BH&G takers were subjected to the whole spiel wherein we talked them into a dozen monthly magazine subscriptions for the low low price of I forget what.
There’s a place in the special hell reserved for me, I’m sure. 
As a safety professional, my job is to help see to it that everyone on my job site gets home at the end of the day in one piece, no matter what stupid, obstinate things they do. There are (a lot of) days, when I see some moron deliberately disabling or ignoring safety features designed to keep them alive, that I wonder if I’m really doing the world a service by preventing Darwinism from doing its thing and taking these people out of the gene pool. It can be extemely frustrating to look out for people who choose not to look out for themselves.
The other thing that bugs me periodically is filling out my timesheet. I’m on salary so I get paid the same whether I work a 40-hour week or a 70-hour week. However, the sites generally ask that I only report 8 hours per day so the accountants don’t have to do a bunch of extra work after that fact. It also means I don’t have a record of my unpaid overtime hours, which means the company doesn’t ever have to compensate me for that time. Not cool. This has huge advantages for the company, obviously, since they get a lot of work for free out of its workers, but it annoys the bejeesus out of me.
Having to toss aside new textbooks that are donated to the library because we already have a copy in the collection. We aren’t allowed to let students have them.
I’m a consultant: I go to workplaces, people explain to me what do they do and how they do it, and I explain them how to do it either better (hopefully) or Using The Big Blue Database (which is usually but not always what the project is about).
In general, I have problems with:
- being ordered to give what I know to be bad advice (but it means higher billing for the vampires); I avoid it but I do propose all options equally and only give a recommendation if directly asked for one, whereas normally I’d rate them unprompted
- working for customers whose own practices I find disgusting,
- and ridiculous amounts of face time (since whomever is paying me gets paid for “hours each warm body is at work”, they don’t want to let people take time off - even if they can’t come up with anything to give you and you do, in turn, bill them for time you’re at work, staring at the wall and trying to come up with new ways to cook raw carrots :p)
There is nothing at my current job that I do that twinges my radar.
But I’m another who has a telemarketing gig as a youngster, only mine was explicitly political. Push-polling and begging for cash. Ugh. Fucking loathsome job that I lasted a few months at because I needed tuition money.
I’m happy to say that right now there’s nothing I have to do at work that goes against my moral grain. If anything, the projects I’m working on might play a very very small part in helping the environment. Even though I’m just a software engineer.
Working for a consulting firm sort of sucks this way. Typically a consultant (in my field, anyway) makes money by billing employees’ time to its various clients for their various projects. If you as an employee have too many unbilled hours, you’re costing the company money. So, basically, not billing enough hours on your timesheet is just inviting something bad to happen, ranging from getting a really crappy assignment at best to being laid off at worst.
It’s fine when there’s lots of work to be done, but during the slow times that inevitably come, you are faced with the choice of being honest on your timesheet and risking bad consequences, doing unncecessary make-work stuff so you can bill your clients (for things they didn’t need done) or padding your billable hours. The position you’re in is such that there is a strong incentive to be dishonest or, equivalently, a strong disincentive to be honest.
I am in the rare and enviable position of working for a small, one-office company owned and run by people who know, like, and value me, so they understand that it just sucks for all of us when I’m not billable enough. I can be honest and only bill a few hours a week if that’s realistically all I have. Woe to those who work for larger firms where the bottom line truly rules all, though.
I work for a bank.
End of post.
Encouraging doctors to write more prescriptions for patients that they probably don’t need in order to make my company more money.
Err… why?
I work for a large-scale, high-stakes assessment publishing company. You know those standardized tests they make all the kids take, with the fill-in-the-bubbles? Yeah. I make sure everything is spelled and punctuated properly. It’s like working for the Halliburton of education.
I did get a claim check for my soul, which is in a filing cabinet in HR somewhere, IIRC. I* think* I can still get my soul back after my resignation, but there may be a moral statute of limitations on that.
Working on Fridays. The day after Creation is a holiday in my religion.
I work for local government. In theory, we have robust procedures to ensure that every bit of spending is responsible and that maximum value for money is obtained. In practice, there is a great deal of waste, unnecessary expenditure and apathy and circumvention of the rules.
I try my level best to do the right thing, but sometimes, that makes me the squeaky wheel, so I have to bite my tongue and watch taxpayers’ money being pointlessly pissed away.
I’ve worked for the Department of Defense for 37 years. Some might call it a war business. It helps to think of it as protection against other war businesses. I hate that it’s necessary, but such is the nature of people.
At one call-center job, working in ‘retention’ for a certain consumer electronics company, I’d have to use new-and-unsatisfied customers contract obligations to keep them from cancelling. Often times, this didn’t bother me because they knew damn well they were on a contract when they called in to activate the service (the ONLY way to activate was to call in and be read the abbreviated ToS, which mentioned a 1-month money back guarantee multiple times, followed by a service contract of X months/years). When this began to rub me wrong was when the customer called in after Christmas to cancel a unit activated by a well-intentioned but idiotic family member and was already past the first month window in which to cancel. My hands were tied, those calls sucked.
Years later, I worked in another call center (I swore I’d never do it again after the first one, but I had my back against the wall financially). This time, it’s my job to ‘conduct important polls on issues effecting us all.’ These polls are all thinly veiled right-wing propaganda posing as opinion surveys and four times out of five any democratic-leaning independents I managed to talk into taking the damn thing decided by the end that they were now going to vote republican. There were actually threads made on the SDMB about this company last election cycle. I quit mid-way through my second shift and felt disgusting as a person for lasting even that long. Additionally, lies and falsehoods were built directly into the scripting I was reading, AND the company reserved the right to dictate when I can leave, when I can take a break, and when (or if) I could eat lunch depending on quotas that needed to be made on a day-by-day basis. This was easily the worst. job. evar.
I don’t perpetuate the nasty side of insurance claims at all, I’m just the nice lady on the phone who takes your claim, hangs up and takes the next one (ad infinitum). But I’ve seen more scuzz and filth done by claim adjusters in the name of short-term money-grubbing than I’d care to shake ten sticks at. A hundred sticks.
It’s a “sticky” job.
Anyway, my mom works at the same company I do, and she sees a lot of it (she’s a drug review nurse for workers’ comp). She approves expensive prescriptions for people who get hurt at work. And a lot of times a claim adjuster with a perennially bad attitude will just denydenydeny every single employee claim (my mom calls it practicing medicine without a license), *even knowing *that the drugs are justified and necessary, because they know that most injured workers don’t understand the system and/or can’t afford/won’t bother to get a lawyer. They’ll just suffer in pain while the adjuster gets a higher bonus for denying more claims than their coworkers (yes, this happens).
Sometimes they lawyer up and take my company’s adjuster to the cleaners. I feel good when that happens. It’s so ridiculous to think that a 50k lawsuit later on could have been averted by approving a $50 prescription today, but it’s a cost-effective way of doing business given that so few people lawyer up. I seriously hate this side of the insurance industry.
I don’t have to do any of that yet but I do hate when I have to facilitate for my clients a way to have big chunks of “keyword-rich text” just sitting around on a page not making much sense, or when they set page titles to be non-sensical.
I want page titles to be like “Store Name: Product” not “keyword KEYWORD key word LOCATION Something Irrelevant To The Product”
Ugh. I actually quite hate the Internet. It’s totally skeevy and all about ads and deception and how can we use these free services (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Etc) for our business’s economic advantage?
I always say I want to quit and work for a farm but I’d just be dealing with shit (literal) and keeping the bugs (literal) out on a farm too.
I worked with Kevin Trudeau for a couple of years. I was a studio engineer at Nightingale-Conant during the late 80’s until I got shit-canned 14 years ago. I recorded Mega Math and Mega Speed Reading. I condensed Mega Memory from 6 a hour program to a 2 hour program. In order to do that, I had to get Trudeau’s OK for the edits, as stipulated in his contract. I had to work through his attorney, because he was in the Federal pen for credit card fraud. I recorded the training tapes for the Nutrition for Life multi-level marketing scheme he was involved with.
I was the low man on the totem pole at Nightingale, and Kevin Trudeau was part of the shit detail I had to deal with.
He told me one day, just as an aside, “I spend most of my time in court with lawyers.”
The speed reading program with Howard Berg was really bad. This was in the day they were publishing 6 cassette programs. Side 12 was Kevin pitching his other products. The program needed a lot of editing, but I was told to push it through fast, and skip the editing. Some distribution company heard it and refused to sell it the way it was, so I was told to re-edit.
There was time to do it over, but not time to do it right in the first place.
When I joined Nightingale-Conant in 1987, there were about 250 employees. It was a well respected motivational and sales training tape company, the best. I was proud of the stuff I worked on, and I learned a lot.
When Trudeau got out of the pen, he and his cellmate Jules got involved in Nutrition for Life, an Amway-style pyramid scheme scam, and we produced the tapes they sold.
Not we, I. I recorded him in Studio A for 2 or 3 years, i don’t remember many details. Jules did a Yoda impression that he thought was hilarious. I had to record this crap, it was my day job. Trudeau did TV infomercials with Danny Bonnaduce about some health products around that time. Nightingale housed the Trudeau Marketing Group in the building for a while, and the morale slid downhill.
People were laid off from Nightingale in a few waves. Mike, Rose, Roger, Steve, and many others. When I was laid off in March of 1997, they fired 50 people that day. The personnel director had a sign on his desk that could be moved around to say, “Have a nice day,” or " Take a hike."
I took a hike. I’m still pissed off and bummed. It was a good company, and buying into Trudeau’s bullshit cost them their reputation and a lot of jobs, mine among them. I think there are about 75 people working there now. Trudeau is long gone from Nightingale, and they don’t even sell his stuff anymore. He does that on his own.
Before you buy from Kevin Trudeau, read on the internet about the complaints against him.
I’m not making this shit up. Thanks for letting me rant
David
I agree. I mean, it’s inevitable that people will try to exploit markets for self promotion, but the sum of all the utter lack of integrity on the net makes it a really horrible place at times.
I made the decision long ago never to let my site fall into that mould. I’ve had loads of quite lucrative offers from people wanting to place deceptive ads.