Oh boy - I did a stint at that too.
We had a sales manager who would hasve us take customers out for a test drive and tell them we were going to have our mechanics check out their trade in. They’d drain the oil and put a brick on the accelerator untill the engine threw a rod. Then they’d tell the customer “How you gettin’ home?”
:rolleyes:
One of my previous employers was a military contractor, upgrading communications equipment for various branches of the military. Initially, the work was 90%+ stateside, but it gradually shifted to more-and-more overseas work.
We received DOD per-diem rates for food and lodging, but that was paid to the company, not us; the company then reimbursed its employees. It was an overall sweet deal until one of our Project Managers in Europe came up with a nifty scam:
- He hired a somewhat shady “Travel Agent” to book us into crappy, cut-rate hotels.
- Said Travel Agent paid for the lodging up-front, and then wrote a bill out to our Project Manager for the full per-diem amount.
- Project Manager then submitted that bill to the DOD branch we were working for, and collected great big mega-bucks worth of lodging per-diem.
- Project Manager pays Travel Agent, who immediately pays most of it back to the Project Manager, less his cut.
- Anyone complaining about crappy lodging or refusing to stay in crappy hotels (we had company-issued AMEX cards and technically could stay wherever we wanted) got terminated “for cause,” (they can always find some reason to fire you) and dropped off at Franfurt Airport without a plane ticket home.
Several someones told one of the company VPs, the one in charge of our division, about the scam, but he never did anything about it. Fucker probably cut himself in on the scam.
To give you an idea of the dollar amounts we’re talking about, average lodging per-diem at the time was around $100. The hotels we were staying in couldn’t have been charging more than $20-$30 a day per person. Multiply that by 3-4 dozen people, over the course of a year and change.
A scumbag is a scumbag, with or without steroids. Using steroids doesn’t turn anyone into a pedophile. Don’t falsely malign the drugs (and if you weren’t implying a connection, why bring up “roid rage” at all?).
Kirby vacuums. What do I win?
The public school system.
No explanation necessary.
The NYC public schools.
I call him that as an appropriate descriptor as in he abused steroids as well as being a pedphile
I’m a social worker, and my boss requires me to interview and talk to people that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt we cannot help. We aren’t allowed to tell them we can’t help them, because we don’t have an attorney that would protect us from discrimination lawsuits. Instead we make them jump through increasingly more ridiculous hoops until they give up and stop calling. Recent example - woman whose boyfriend stabbed a dude and has spent the last three years in a psychiatric hospital - completely not appropriate for the kind of service we provide. For the past three weeks she has been trying to get a court document of an arrest that is over 12 years old. It was a minor offense and no charges were pressed, but my boss insists we see the court record even though we are not going to help her. Meanwhile the client, who is completely desperate to get out of the hellhole she currently lives in, calls me every day asking if she keeps doing those things, can we help her? And I’m not allowed to tell her no.
Fuck I hate my job.
I used to work for a building supplies retailer. Customers liked to haggle and we had some leeway. However, if we encountered somebody who was in a hurry or seemed ignorant, we were supposed to jack up the price. There were other dodgy practices, like giving a discount on a price-sensitive item, say, studs, and making up for it by padding the price of nails. There was an option for it built into the POS software.
I’d like to say I quit because of moral objections, but no. I got fired because the district manager thought I had a bad attitude.
I once worked for a courier service. The owner had several schemes to hide cash, and in order to get $20 for gas he had to call a bank and have them transfer funds to another bank because the company’s account never had any money in it. He’d send everybody out on the road on Friday afternoon just before we were supposed to get paid. Checks were locked up when we got back and we couldn’t get them until Monday. When we tried to cash them, he had already moved the money back to his secret account.
I don’t know if he was cheap or just a bad businessman, but all the trucks were run down and had pieces hanging off. He just piled the garbage up in the garage (unbagged and without A/C) for six months or so, then would shovel it into one of the vans and drive it to the next state where they had dumpsters at the rest stops.
One of our jobs was to transport human organs for shipment around the country for transplants. They were in styrofoam and packed in dry ice, so they were probably safe from the filth, but after picking them up from the hospital, he have us drive them around in the back of the truck for a few hours until he had a sufficient number of jobs going to the airport. I have no idea how he was able to get away with this.
I almost wonder if there is a word or concept for this, I’ve seen it elsewhere in government bureaucracies. There will be a requirement that is simple sounding but actually impossible, like prove you were physically present in X. Ah but how do you REALLY prove that ? You can’t so they will just insist on more and more proof until you give up if they don’t want to deal with you.
I worked as a mental health therapist for this residential facility who were interested in keeping their beds full ($) rather than genuinely helping people in the community. My co-worker was stuck in a similar situation where we couldn’t accept a pregnant woman into the facility but we also couldn’t say “no” to her. And so my coworker had to keep giving her the run around. The poor lady was in the mental health system, she was homeless and needed a place to stay. Sad.
They also kept pushing us (read harassing) to keep billing MediCal…even when billing really wasn’t appropriate. We also got shit at the end of the month when we didn’t bill enough. It was horrible. I hated working there. They ended up firing me while I was on maternity leave and lied to the unemployment judge saying that I had quit my job. Luckily, I had solid proof because I saved every single email they sent to me. I won my appeal and they had to pay me. Assholes!
I once spent a day working in the county tax offices. The way they waste tax dollars makes that a pretty unethical place, I’d say! 
All I did was stuff envelopes, though.
And by “them” does he mean “dudes who look like chicks”?
I don’t think Capt Kirk mean’t any offense against roidheads. I think he was just painting a comical picture of this jacked-up quicktempered overcompensating jerk flying off to Thailand for a sexcation.
Can I interest you in some Amway products?
I always thought “roid rage” referred to crankiness on account of hemerroids.
I worked for the Mayor of a local municipality. He would literally ask me if they were Republicans or Democrats, as if I knew or kept track, when they called in to ask for things such as a special garbage pick-up or immediate snow removal.
He also chastised me for mailing bid solicitation ads to businessmen throughout the city in order to generate a more competitive bid for the taxpayers. By law, we had to advertise for bids on certain things (this particular item was to insure our police and fire fleet), but they advertised in the local paper, instead of the city-wide paper, which meant that unless insurers subscribed to Podunk Times, they’d never see the ad.
Sooo, realizing that this was contrary to the spirit of the bid process, I left my fingers do the walking and mailed a letter inviting bids to random insurance agents in the city. On bid day, much to the complete surprise of the local dude who’d won the bid without competition for decades, there were half a dozen agents ready to submit bids. Sadly for him, another agent submitted a bid from the same AAA underwriter, for an amount which saved the taxpayers a lot of dough. IIRC, it was $10k. The board had no choice but to award it to him.
Woohoo, right? Nope.
Instead of congratulating me for my good work, I was called into the office and called naive and stupid. See, the agent had been inflating his bid by $10k for years. And it was understood (wink, wink) that he’d turn around and write a check for half of that to the Republican Club. The Mayor patted me on the shoulder and told me that I’d soon learn the ways of the world. I quit soon thereafter.
In high school I worked at an ice cream shop and our specialty was zero-fat, zero-sugar soft-serve. “Carbolite,” it said on nutrition cards we were instructed to hand give to customers if asked. We had ice cream, too, but the yogurt was the big seller, and our clientele was mostly of the fairer persuasion. They’d drive hours, sometimes from out of state, and take home dozens of quarts in enormous coolers. Aside from the standard flavors and twist the owner, Mark, would make a specialty flavor every week - Oreo, peanut butter, etc. We were the most popular joint in town.
Of course, if you’re a Seinfeld fan you know that it wasn’t no-fat no-sugar Carbolite but rather regular ol’ Hood, mixed with Oreos and Jiff. Once a woman told me her husband was diabetic, so she had to know if it was really 100% no sugar. I instructed her to consult a doctor before having it, and she left empty-handed.
It was a very strange place to work in other ways too, for a first job.
I should really try and figure out if that stuff is still going on.
That sounds absolutely horrifying.
What’s unethical about this? Is it a tax or health code thing? Perhaps it’s a bit wasteful to pay retail and then have to add your own profit on top of that, but unethical?