1. I worked at a newspaper processing obituaries, and it was crazy how much funeral homes tried to rip people off.
Obits are expensive. Like, $400 for a single day expensive. And they are priced by the word. We had funeral homes who would send us obits with all the commas and periods separated to make full new words. The homes would get the estimate from our website and use that for billing the grieving family. We would edit the obit to meet English standards, which would reduce the word count substantially, dropping the price. In other words, they charged for the estimate but got billed for the edit.
It got so bad management told us we were not allowed to talk about prices with family members, even if they came in and showed us the bill from the funeral home. The “customer” was the home, not the family, so they weren’t privileged to see the pricing.
If you have to put an obituary in the local newspaper, please contact them directly for pricing guidelines. There’s usually cheaper options the funeral homes won’t tell you about.
2. Most—probably 80 percent or more—of the books on the nonfiction bestseller list (autobiographies, memoirs, political/business books, etc.) are ghostwritten.
3. Secondary teaching.
If teachers did absolutely everything in their job description perfectly they would never sleep, eat or socialise.
Planning great lessons requires hours that simply don’t exist in our day. Consequently, majority of teachers walk into lessons having done no dedicated planning. We just wing it with our years of experience and resources we purchased online 2-minutes before the lesson. The students never notice, I think partly because this happens so frequently it seems normal. Most teachers I know aren’t satisfied with what they’re doing in the classroom, but don’t have the time or resources to do better.
The “good” teachers that do put in the additional planning are usually sacrificing significant portions of their personal time and money to delivering great education. This generally results in the best teachers getting burnt out and leaving the profession OR having significant issues in their personal life (eg divorce, no social or romantic life).
4. I’m an unarmed security guard.
Every now & then I’ll get a comment from someone about how they’re glad I’m around in case there’s an active shooter or something.
Yea; if that happens? We’re not doing anything aside from getting ourselves to safety and calling the cops.
We’re literally told in training that if we try to intervene directly with an active shooter we’ll be fired.
5. Pack your freight like it’s going to get a pallet stacked on top of it because it most likely will
6. If you have already googled your problem, you have already exceeded the first two tiers of tech support.
7. Audio engineer here.
I can play guitar, bass and drums very well. A lot of the time, I say I’ll clean a persons part up with editing, but secretly I just learn and redo their part myself when they leave. It’s WAY easier than digitally cleaning up a sloppy performance.
I’ve been doing this for 10+ years and nobody has ever complained. Not even once.
8. Your lobster tail at Outback is microwaved.
9. I make wildlife films for big streamers and broadcasters. The sound is all either library or foley.
10. I’m an academic researcher and I can speak for a huge number in my field when I say:
If you want access to our studies and they’re behind a paywall, you can email us and we will send you the study.
We are genuinely delighted to share and if you want further context for the results or what have you, I’ll always try my best to oblige.
The only limiters on that last bit is that:
- the original data for the study might have reached the end of our right to keep it, in which case it will have been destroyed.
- I might have forgotten details or I might have written that paper during a particularly hectic time and my file system might be total shit.
Also a lot of us are on ResearchGate and various social media things so you can contact us through there. If you can’t contact us directly or we’re being slow, one of the other authors on the paper might be contactable.
11. The New York Times best seller list has a lot of people on it who buy massive numbers of their own books.
12. The market for translation isn’t being killed by AI, because it’s already dead and AI is putting it out of its misery.
Essentially, translation agencies have been acting as a cartel, controlling the relationship between clients and translators and abusing their position as middlemen to drive translator pay down, mainly by using translators in developing countries whom they can pay less.
ETA: This is mainly applicable to “general” translation, but is creeping into technical subjects as well. Literary translation still appears to be somewhat safe from this trend.
13. If your baby goes to a nursery/daycare, chances are those weren’t their “first” steps/words etc that you witnessed. Industry standard is to not tell parents when these things happen as it makes them feel bad. I’ve seen kids up and walking about the room for weeks, even months before their parent proudly announced at drop off that they “Took their first steps last night”.
14. Worked in online community management and social media for years – Admins CAN read all of your PMs. Private only means private from the masses, not from administration, we had to be able to read them to check reports of abuse, grooming, illegal activity etc. I can’t tell you how much cringeworthy shit I had to read through, especially from guys trying to hook up.
15. English teacher. Though it’s been made less secret by the Sold a Story podcast, American schools have been peddled and been disseminating a flawed program for teaching reading for decades. Its known as 3-cueing. This has badly exacerbated literacy deficiencies and the general decline of American schools.
What’s scarier is this: research overwhelmingly shows that reading skills crystallize after traditional phonics instruction ends. It’s known as the Matthew effect. In other words, if a child isn’t reading proficiently by the time they’re supposed to, they will likely NEVER become proficient readers.
So as a secondary language Arts Teacher, there’s a really depressing undercurrent to what I do: if a student is a poor reader when they get to me…well, the damage is done.
Theodore Lee is the editor of Caveman Circus. He strives for self-improvement in all areas of his life, except his candy consumption, where he remains a champion gummy worm enthusiast. When not writing about mindfulness or living in integrity, you can find him hiding giant bags of sour patch kids under the bed.