By REBECCA SPARROW
Do flight attendants ever do the, er, rumpy pumpy on long-haul flights? Do teachers and schools ever rig those ‘school leader elections’? Do the housekeeping staff go through your stuff when they’re cleaning your hotel room?
These are the kinds of questions which keep me up at night.
But the real question is: do I really want to know the answers?
HELL YES! At least, I think I do.
Last month I found myself both appalled and mesmerized when my friends and acquaintances responded to my Facebook status update: “Profession Confession: what would people be shocked to know about what really goes on in your job?”
And the responses kept coming. And coming. And coming.
There were the obvious (and yet still appalling) food industry ones. The friend who’d worked in a restaurant where the chef hand-peeled carrots on the toilet (excuse me while I GAG). Or washed lettuce in the bathroom sink. And the bakery (which I frequented as a teenager) which I found out would scrape the mold off old cakes and STILL SELL THEM (What. The. Hell?).
But a few other confessions took me by surprise.
One former ‘matchmaking agency’ employee admitted that the photos of the ridiculously good-looking available members were completely fictitious. And those claims about “1000 successful matches” were blatant lies. I knew it!
A former ‘instant photo’ staff member said that staff really do look through your photos and have a good laugh which is, you know, comforting. NOT.
Then there was the journo friend of mine who – when relegated to the “Horoscope” section of the newspaper – simply made the entire thing up. (Naturally she made sure her own star sign always had a banging forecast.)
As for me, well I did work in a certain cheap homewares store (cough *CopperArt* cough) where we routinely chipped the wooden furniture and then simply coloured the scratches in with a black nikko pen. And sold it at full price.
And when I worked as a TV publicist I was told in great detail how to handle complaints from viewers about programs aired before 6pm. I was to take their name, their address, their phone number and write down the nature of the complaint. And then I was to file the piece of paper in the bin.
So, over to you.
What workplace confession do you have to make? (To protect us all from getting sued, let’s keep the business/employer anonymous.) What dirty little secret do you want to get off your chest? GO.
Top Comments
I work (current tense) in a retail store and always have a laugh to myself when people ring up and refuse to allow me to help them because they have to have one of the male staff members help. I happen to be a young (about thirty years younger) than the males at the store and can run rings around them when it comes to customer service because my computer skills are better than the older chaps. I laugh when they want to speak to the boys because I know they're not getting as good service as they would with me. Especially if they wanted help ordering a product in. And might I add this is ALWAYS elderly people asking this.
Also, nine times out of ten elderly customers will be rude a-holes.
I work in the education sector and we have (not often, but once or twice) re-jigged a person's academic scores/standing because we didn't want that individual to win a particular award... so we re-jigged the scores in order to give it to the next best student who we 'felt' deserved it more. Even when the scores clearly showed that they did not receive the best mark in the exam. (We were able to do this because exams were never handed back to students).
That is awful.
I remember in Yr 12 I well & truly beat this one girl in every single assessment, I absolutely whooped her in the trial HSC and I'm pretty sure I whooped her in the HSC itself. And yet somehow she got her name in the paper and I didn't... I remember thinking that my teacher must've really fiddled with the class mark to make that happen. It still pisses me off all of these years later...
I guess I just don't understand why you would do that? If someone has the best results, they have the best results. They deserve to win and you've cheated them of that.
I agree, that is awful.