To ask for the scandalous secrets of your industry?

[Iwasjustabouttosaythat]

Or just dirt?

Mine isn't very interesting, more just sad. My background is in immigration and I have never worked with so many racist (and stupid) people.

A boat of refugees when down and the guy who told us the news was laughing about it.

Endless racial stereotypes and visas refused because "as if a French person would go out with a Japanese person" etc.

Then there was the chap who said amnesty are evil because they provide money for abortions to rape victims in the Congo. He's the same guy who refuses to assess any applications from homosexuals because he thinks they should all be denied visas. He doesn't get fired for this.

There are probably more but they are the stand outs.

What's your industry gossip? I'd especially love to hear from nannies and cleaners but I'm interested in all dirt!

Apart from that it's an educational charity I can't say the industry, sorry, it's possibly outing.

Name changed for this.

I work in the complaints department of a very large bank...call centre based.

By and large, how your complaint is resolved depends on whether you're an arsehole to us or not. The same complaint about the same issue can have one person (the shouty dick) being given what we call 'a standard fuck off response' and another (the lovely guy that speaks to you like a human) a massive apology, bunch of flowers and £500 compensation.

As complaint handlers, our grade is fairly high and we have almost unlimited reach as to what we can do or agree. £10k compensation last week for one woman, on my authority, because loan advice from 2000 looked dodgy. Re-opening accounts. Closing accounts without the correct authority. Bumping up service levels (providing personal bankers/managers when they don't qualify). Reinstating overdrafts without the 'necessary' full lending app.

Yet these are done inconsistently...if you need an unfairly removed overdraft reinstated, this can take 3 hours of our time and sometimes the complaints are piling up and our workload too high...so you get a 'standard fuck off response' instead. At a quieter time, you'd have been agreed.

No one cares about staff complaints. When we receive one about a staff member (or sometimes have to raise a complaint about ourselves if your customer has copped the hump) you mute them whilst they rabbit on and/or shout and scream, frequently whilst half chatting with your neighbour and giving the occasional 'mm, I see'. Then assure them it will be escalated to management and dealt with thoroughly. Then you give your neighbour a poke in the ribs and ask if they want a quick win as someones just complained about Bob being rude. They send a letter out using a standard worded response about the call having been reviewed in full (it hasn't been) and we're sorry and the staff member will receive full feedback to make sure it never happens again. Takes 2 minutes to prep the letter, but you date it for 3 days time and send it late to make it look like a decent enough time period has passed for an investigation. The staff member the complaint is about never hears a thing, nor does a manager.

Thats not really anything to be proud of though is it SecretNetter ? You're part if the problem.

Super company ethos Secret. It reads as if you are fully behind such unprofessional handling of complaints.

Many years ago I worked in a pharmacy. The pharmacist was a lovely man but unfortunately he was an alcoholic. He used to hide alcohol in the toilet and drink it. On more than one occasion, he was in the back shop(hidden from shop view),passed out.

The dispensing staff used to give out prescriptions without him checking them. We used to basically run the pharmacy without a pharmacist.

I've never known teaching staff at school to gossip maliciously or routinely. Yes parents get talked about but that usually because one member of staff is looking for advice/support/background from another member of staff.

HA! Hahaha! I call bullshit, I've worked in tens of schools and every single day there was at least one teacher bitching about a parent/pupil with others joining in. They aren't looking for advice, they're blowing off steam. I don't blame them a lot of the time!

I won't say it never happens but it's not typical of my experience from over 20 years of teaching. Those problems that do arise are most often ancillary workers/TA's not understanding professional boundaries.

Lots of shagging in secondary schools? Not surprising when you remember that substantial numbers of teaching staff are still in their 20's/early 30's and single.

Far less worrying than the stuff that goes on in tertiary education: Head teachers don't have the power to alter the career trajectory of a fairly competent secondary teacher; getting on the right side of a university academic, though, can really boost your prospects...

I'm not proud...or anything really. It is what it is shrugs.

Interesting that this seems to upset more people than consultants or air traffic control turning up pissed and prescriptions being filed without a pharmacist though. People's priorities are fascinating

That what I was thinking Secret it's a very British response isn't it?

"Stiff upper lip about death and that, old chap, but by the gods the bank better take this complaint seriously or I'll be most put out"

Secret I'm far more concerned about drunk/drug addicted doctors.

We had a professor claiming pay-per-view hotel porn as part of his conference expenses.

@Crispyturtle. 100% true!
If you tell your midwife that you really want to breastfeed then we will do everything we can to help and support you. What gets annoying is when you know full well that the lady isn't enjoying breastfeeding at all and will no doubt be switching to bottles when she gets home!
We just want your baby to get fed and mum and baby to be happy and healthy. I can honestly say in 10 years I've never known a midwife to pressure and guilt trip anyone into breastfeeding.

SadlyNotNormal I'm a web dev too! Though I'm not nearly as experienced as you, only about 2ish years.

Scandals... I've seen a bit of insecure stuff floating around. I try my best but I always get stuff checked if I'm not sure I can say the same for others. That and clients wanting to have their site be secure as there are people's personal details in there but then exports of those details being sent all over the place by less secure methods and stored on various laptops (and we all know what some people are like with their passwords).

The caffeine thing is so true, a lot of developers run on coffee/coke/energy drinks. I know a guy who has a big can of monster as soon as he gets to work.

I could do with one of those pills right now as I'm supposed to be working on a web app that has a relatively sort deadline but here I am.

Oh and in online competitions, I CAN SEE YOU CHEATING :p

Also, there are few women, I'm the only one in our team of 7, so I've been offered a job purely because a "big oil" company wanted to show they hired female developers. And I've been the token (black) girl developer quite a few times.

I work as a child protection social worker. The real surprise would be how above and beyond most of my colleagues go. Working late, most of the weekend, buying presents, giving lifts ect ect.

@PeaFaceMcgee that makes me really sad to think they'd do that about women at their most vulnerable. I've just had my second baby and I'm wondering now what they were all saying behind my back

I used to work in a well known cake shop. Spotless hygiene but not so hot on staff welfare, insisted we wear tights in 90 degree kitchens with 2 ovens and 3 deep fat fryers going in the height of summer. We used to eat everything we could as soon as it was deemed waste (it was fine).

Also worked with a super confident bunch of media sales people and marvelled at their confidence and loudness. Turned out 70% were using cocaine daily.

I used to work in an ice cream hut when I was 13-15 and there was an ice cream machine there. Every night, if we remembered, we would use a metal spoon to scrape off the top layer of gone off, curdled milk/ice cream and chuck it in the bin, and then put the spoon back on the side. There was no running water in the hut other than the boiling water in the large kettle thing (forgotten the name of them) so we never even washed the spoon. We would sign a cleaning rota at the end of each shift to say that we 'maintained' the machine, and at the end of each week to say that it had been emptied and refilled. We signed it, but I didn't ever do it myself or see it be done in the two years I worked there. New ice cream would just be added to the top.
I also did 10 hour shifts every day of the summer holidays between the age of 13-15, which is illegal. I was also there on my own for almost all of my time working there, but occasionally my sister would come and help. This is only 6-8 years ago.

I've worked in a few call centres and 80% of the time if someone asks to speak to the manager, the manager can't be arsed dealing with it so the advisor next to you takes the call pretending to be manager.

Another is when people are so rude from the get go and starting shouting 'not to call again', they go straight back into the system to be called again in 4 hours. If people want to have their number removed from system the best way to go about it is to be decent and polite and state 'remove my number from the system' then you will receive the same decency and politeness back.
In fact that's generally the case with any issues, if customer starts the call being a rude or abusive arse then they're unlikely to get very far with the advisors.

The rudest people to speak to are middle class women between 35-50. I loved it when I worked for a popular mobile phone company and the middle class women rang to complain about billing, but would speak to you like you're an idiot or just start shouting immediately, then when I looked up the problem I would find that the bill is correct and the extra charges are because their teenage son/husband has been paying for porn through their mobile. That always shut them up

Ex children's services SW

A surprising amount of senior staff are only in the position they are in because they are known bullies and promoting can be easier than sacking.
And we have a not insignificant amount of staff with lives more chaotic than their service users

NeedsAsockamnesty I so agree with this comment.

If you are genuine OP then you need to whistleblow. That is not my experience of immigration - it would not have been tolerated.

There are always bad apples ( one guy at my office was involved in a 'sex for visas scandal' ) but behaviour like you describe needs to be rooted out.

I work in a prep school and many of the younger teachers are massive coke fiends. They are completely vile about the less bright children behind their backs and laugh at them.

I used to work in a call centre... frequent sackings for gross misconduct. Frequent "dirty protests" in the (mostly female) toilets

A while ago I was working with people from the oil industry. It's industry standard to pay fees to be able to extract oil (definitely happens in the UK, it's a form of tax). Much of the world's oil is in (and indeed the cause of) unstable countries. It was not unheard of to pay such fees in weaponry if an arms embargo was in place at the time - the example given was Angola. One of many reasons I didn't go into the industry.

Law.

Lots of gossipping about clients private and confidential matters. There is zero confidentiality when you're talking to your solicitor. Been in law for about 15 years and it never fails to amaze me what goes on in some people's lives and how some people live.