People Share the Dark Secrets of Their Profession Most People Don't Know

Every profession has its little-known secrets, things that the general public would never find out unless they worked in the trenches doing that particular job. One person was curious about what those secrets are, so they asked the people of Reddit to share the things about their job that those who don't work in that industry would know nothing about. Some of them are pretty shocking.

VaguelyLatina explains that there is a problem in the substance abuse treatment industry called "body brokering." Body brokers are people hired by treatment centers to find addicts with the highest-paying insurance and "entice them to check into the specific center." Sometimes, body brokers put more drugs into the hands of some addicts because "the higher level of drugs in your system upon admit, the more and longer the insurance company will pay to the treatment center." That's messed up.

If you've ever started filling out an online form for a quote or something, and then changed your mind and abandoned the form before submitting it, the company could still have all the information you filled out. Phpdevster explains, "Most companies looking to capture leads will capture your info in real-time as you enter it into a form. The submit button is just there to move you to the next step, not to actually send your information to the company."

"You know the people who write instruction manuals or user guides in things you buy? Half the time, they've never even seen or touched the product," katakago informs us. Most of the time, people who do technical writing are just given some pictures and a description of how it's supposed to work. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. 

This one might be more common knowledge, but provatrixless tells us that big-name commercial authors like John Grisham, Danielle Steele, and James Patterson have huge teams of ghostwriters who actually write the novels. They're not given credit; the author's name still goes on the front, but they don't write most of their own books anymore.

Archaeologist tor93 shares that they lick (LICK!) the artifacts to determine if they are made out of bone or pottery. Apparently, bone sticks and pottery doesn't. They also tap them on their teeth to determine if they're pottery or a rock. I guess nothing works better than your own sense of touch...and taste.

At this point, if you don't realize that all restaurants are gross, I don't know how to help you. But one Reddit user who works at "a very large pizza chain restaurant that remains widely popular," they use perforated pans for their thin and stuffed crust pizzas. The pans were washed in the dishwasher but would often still have burnt cheese and other crud on them that would get moldy when they sat out overnight. Employees were just told to put the dough over the mold because there was no time to rewash everything. Yikes.

I love this one. Ashesthemphoenix writes that librarians sometimes read the new books they get before registering them in the catalogue and making them available to the public. As they should! 

While we know that lawmakers are influenced by lobbyists and special interest groups, Jenova66 thinks we ought to know that sometimes bill are literally written by them. "I have seen my boss give bill language to a state legislator and then found the same language in print a few days later several times." 

NinjWen was a massage therapist but ended up quitting the career entirely "because people (all genders and ages) kept trying to solicit me for prostitution." That's horrible! Let masseuses massage in peace!

When someone says they're a "consultant," I never know what that means. Apparently, they don't really either. Theriskguy explains that "99 percent of consulting is basically copying one company's good idea and selling it to another. It's just PowerPoint presentations of peer company practices bouncing back and forth into eternity." Wow. Sounds exciting.