I don’t have any good stories because I’ve never personally been the one handling overdue fines, but people pull this kind of thing with libraries all the time.
When I lived in Japan about 5 years ago I was surprised to learn that my local video rental shop also rented CDs…and sold CD-Rs.
Ah, I see. I was thinking of the sort of thing where you stay at a motel during a long road trip, and couldn’t figure out why you would make a thing out of always returning to a specific one.
I have worked in hotels in a tourist destination, and now in a university town, and can absolutely confirm two things: most locals are trouble with a capital T, and most of the bread-and-butter, regular clients are not local. At my current location, we don’t go so far as to refuse local business, but we sort of confine those customers to a particular floor in the hotel (the unrenovated one,) and those clients don’t get to rent our executive suites. Local clients usually are the most unruly, and yes, they are much more likely to have loud parties, use drugs, etc. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they sleep in their own homes? Sure, there are exceptions - broken heat or air, busted water heater flooded the house, getting away during fumigation - but by and large, we’d rather have out-of-towner.
And the non-local regulars can be very regular, and lucrative. I’ve had clients who slept in a specific room 4-5 nights a week, 48 weeks per year, for over three years. At the last hotel where I worked, Mr. M had been in house constantly for over two years. Territorial salespeople who come in for 2-3 nights per month, every month, for years. And once you work out their preferences, these regulars are very low-maintenance, not requiring heaps of staff effort. No “seven calls to the desk to get two towels, a cot, an extra blanket and where’s a good place to eat.”
Back to topic: gotta love the booty call scam. Couple checks in, spends 30 minutes in the room, and then “unhappy with the room, wants to check out with a full refund.” Maybe after I have housekeeping check the room?
In my industry, certain documents are required by law to be produced within two weeks of a written request.
Lots of people try to jump the queue by “forwarding” a forged earlier request two weeks or more in the past, along with a lot of bluster about being violation of the Act and whatnot. It takes about a minute to examine the logs of the e-mail server and spam filter, metadata of attachments, etc to confirm the fakery.
These geniuses receive a reply indicating that their duplicity is transparent, congratulating them for making an effort to familiarize themselves with relevant legislation, and directing their attention further to the Canadian Criminal Code:
I close by matter-of-factly letting them know that could have expected their documents within a day or two at most, if they’d been forthright about it - but that that they would now be made available to them fifteen minutes from closing time, at the very end of the allowable two weeks. Suck it - ya stupid sneaky bastids.
I SO want to post in this thread, but I need to be employed elsewhere first.
Yeah, back pain is a big one for drug seekers. In the emergency dept, dental pain is another common excuse that the drug seekers use so don’t be surprised if they are suspicious if you show up in the middle of the night saying you have a horrible toothache (even though we all know that does really happen legitimately).
You might think that it would not be worth it for a drug addict to get just a few days of Vicodin, but many of the drug seekers will travel from one doctor or hospital to the next trying to collect prescriptions for pain pills.
Also keep in mind that many of them are also scamming the system by getting on disability for their “back pain” or whatever, so they don’t have anything else to do with their time.
Fortunately many states now have computerized databases to show how many times someone has had a prescription for controlled substances filled. When I was rotating in an emergency department it was not unusual for the docs to have to confront someone with a printout showing they had just had a prescription for 60 Vicodin tablets filled yesterday and gee, here they are asking for more.
Is this standard in the computer industry to do this? Do computer techs actually go through the computer and remove stuff that is pirated?
The only way to remove the virus load on that machine was to reformat the drive and then re-install the OS and other programs. Without the install CD/DVD, no can do. Since it was all pirated, no media.
The operating system of that computer needed to be reinstalled. I assume that it is in fact standard practice in the computer industry to only install valid copies of operating systems when a reinstall is required.
It’s not, more’s the pity.
That’s why I don’t keep my pills anywhere close to the sink. I keep them on my dining room table. I have knocked them over all over the floor, but the worse thing is that I might have to swallow some dust or cat hair.
One time, though, I had my bottle of pills in my shoulder bag–the one I keep everything AND the kitchen sink in–and the cap slipped off. Pills everywhere in the bottom of the bag…along with the usual yucky detritus that accumulates over the years. I threw those pills away but didn’t bother with an early refill. I had lucked out somehow because I still had some pills from another prescription, from a previous doctor, filled by a different pharmacist. Lesson learned: keep pill bottles in a plastic baggie when packing and make sure the caps are on tight!
Mine isn’t in my industry but last year I was going to replace all three sinks at our old house. So I went to Lowes and purchased three sinks and took them home, but when I opened one and found out it was just a tad smaller than the old one and thus wouldn’t work.
So I packaged it back up and took it and the two unopened sinks back to Lowes for a refund.
I get there, explain the situation and the guys then opens ALL of the sinks up and looks at them. So I ask him why–and it turns out that they have a problem with people putting the OLD sinks in the boxes and returning them, so they now open any and all returned items. I was floored as that is just something that would never have crossed my mind.
I can’t imagine if you did put the old sink in there–and they opened the box up in front of you. What do you say? 'hey, how did that old sink get in there? Those kids, always playing jokes on their dad!" I mean what possible reason could you come up with–I guess you just turn and run out of the store. Good thing I am honest!
What about if there was no reinstallation required? Like, you cleaned out the virus but noticed the guy had pirated software? Are computer techs like teachers where they HAVE to report it? Is there a tendency towards reporting or silence within the tech community?
Computer techs aren’t cops. The tech’s job is to fix the computer. If I fix someone’s computer, I don’t look through their files and check what programs they run and whether they’re legally installed or not. Most times there’s no obvious way of knowing whether a program is paid for or pirated anyway.
And, frankly, who cares? I use Linux, all my software is free. People acting like the economy would collapse if no-one paid for software are not very convincing when I’m reading it on a free browser running on a free OS.
… in an economy that’s going down the crapper.
Yes, certainly the entire software industry going under would have no noticeable effect on the economy. Everyone, including my nearly-computer-illiterate relatives, would easily and simply switch over to free software, and all of those former software engineers would go to work for the post office instead, or maybe the Peace Corps, or hell, I’m sure they’ll find something, and who gives a shit about them anyway? Freedom is what’s important, man. FREEDOM.
I work for a state agency that performs water quality testing on lakes and streams and regulates industrial dischargers based on those results.
Way way before my time, there was someone who got fired for some dumbass shit. He’d leave for the field, be gone for a few hours, and always return to the office at around the same time. It didn’t matter what stream he was sampling; it was always the same. Majorly suspicious. So his boss followed him one day. Turns out the guy would turn into some wooded area and nap in the state vehicle. Then fill up his containers at whatever ditch he was parked next to. Dumb, dumb, DUMB.
Then there was another guy who’d fill containers with tap water. He must have been really stupid not to be concerned about the strange results the laboratory would return, and even dumber for not thinking someone would be paying attention to those results.
There were couple of other doozies. A couple of them were caught when management attached homing devices to their vehicles and watched where they were going in real time.
Thing is, these people did not just waste the agency’s time and vehicles, but they cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lab costs. Because none of their data could be trusted…and some of the people had been with the agency for years. So all their data, even if they had been “good”, were tossed out.
As someone who works with the data other people collect, I’d be pretty peeved if someone told me all those numbers I had been working with were LIES LIES LIES!!
Working for a cell phone company, I always liked when people would call in about overages and just claim they didn’t use their phone when they used their phone. Sometimes there were legit problems (usually something like a single call being duplicated multiple times or a single call reflecting an impossible amount of time).
But plenty of times it was somebody who routinely came near their limit, and their history shows their normal calling pattern (same #s, same call times, same general distribution per day) but over their limit. Invariably, they “noticed they were near the limit, so they put the phone in a drawer and didn’t touch it the whole last week of the month.”
Now, of course, overage charges are a pain but lying about usage isn’t going to help.
Yeah, I guess I didn’t think it completely through, either. To me, hotel is for business trip (and I might be a regular) or vacations (regular), and motel is for passing through.
Ah yes, drug seekers…
We had a guy in the ER who claimed a back injury of just ridiculous circumstance. No marks, no real signs of pain in triage, but he claimed it was 8/10. He drove himself so the doctor told him flat out if he wanted something for pain, he’d be staying for several hours. Refused meds, went through CT scans, blood draws, urine samples all the while refusing meds until, surprise, “Yes, I think I need something for the pain.” I guess he thought if he refused a couple times first it would make him look more credible? I don’t know.
The doctor recognized him but couldn’t place him so he googled the guy’s name. Turns out he and a buddy decided to hit up the same ER for some drugs less than a year prior and, to make it SUPER credible, the buddy thought he should jump out of a moving car. The patient panicked, kept driving, then returned and called the cops saying he just found the guy like that. EMS worked on him but he died on scene. All for the chance at scoring a shot and 10 vicodin.
The doctor gave the guy 10 vicodin anyway but made it clear that he knew what the patient had done before and told him there must be some easier way to score drugs. I happened to be on clinic rotation the day of his scheduled follow up a week later. When the scheduler took a call for a same day appointment and refused that patient because we were booked, I told her to go ahead and schedule over this guy’s appointment because he wouldn’t show up anyway. He didn’t.