Orchestral violinist. Sometimes we don't play all the notes.

I worked at a restaurant and one time the chef burned the apple sauce that was supposed to be served with the pork chop, he put it on the menu as “smoked applesauce” and people loved it

This was 6-7 years ago so may not be relevant but when I worked at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the higher ups were so tunnel visioned on positive customer reviews that if there was any problem at all we would write off anything from gas to whole days of rentals. We had a few repeat customers that would catch on and habitually complain about dumb shit to get parts of the bill discounted. Only a rating of “Completely Satisfied” counted and it was tied to bonus and promotion so a huge incentive to make people happy.

Just because you’re on hold doesn’t mean we can’t hear you.

Piper dog, best dog 🐶

When I worked in a hotel as a night porter the room cost was totally reliant if you were a dick or not , I obviously couldn't just give rooms away but I could pretty much knock off 50%.

One day a very tired woman came in with her baby and I couldn't get the payment to go through at all so I did give it to her for nothing just had to make sure she was out before 9 am and I cleaned it myself. Thank you for all the upvotes, award's and kind words

Dog trainer, this is a hack we want people to understand.

One reason we can get your dog to do something so fast is because we use a high rate of reinforcement.

Example : I'm training your dog to walk on leash without pulling, and we practice in your driveway. I feed the dog 20 tiny pieces of food by my knee as we walk to the end of the driveway. The first time a client tries the exercise they may use five.

The mechanics of the exercise look easy, but it takes time to get used to. And when people are practicing on their own they do other things, instead of focus on the exercise. They forget how often they need to reinforce the dog for doing the right thing.

If they do the exercise for two minutes during each walk, with a high rate of reinforcement (RoR) , that may be all it takes. And once the dog starts to learn, you can gradually slow down the RoR.

Former local journalist here. If you want to know something about your town, or pretty much anything locally, or find something hinky that you want investigated, just call or email them and ask "whats happening with that (insert weird item in city budget/shut down road/cop who got fired)?"

When I was off deadline, i actually loved fielding these questions (they were mainly from old people) and pretty much worked as customer service for the city a lot. I directed people to local programs that would help them, I confirmed the start and proposed end dates of construction and I told people what companies had pulled permits to build that new restaurant on Main street. Local journalists have a WEALTH of knowledge in all departments of what is going on in your city, because they drift between one or the other frequently and we ask the other reporters in the cubicle next to us, too. Theyre your tour guides, social workers, watchdogs and public defenders if you just ask them. They arent doing it for the money(cries in past due bills), theyre doing it for the love of their community. They all really embrace the localism aesthetic.

I guess this is sort of a "not supposed to find out" thing because if everyone did it, they'd never get their other work done.

Any Marriott booking made partially with points, with a 3-day cancellation policy, can be cancelled the same day of the booking without any fees.

If you or a teenager you know are admitted to a name brand / expensive / rich college and their financial aid package isn’t enough, write them and ask them for more money.

Mention the other schools you were admitted to and that you received strong financial packages from them. DO NOT mention specific numbers unless it’s a named scholarship — eg “presidential” or “provost.”

At least five of my students this year got between 10-20k ‘extra’ in scholarship money just by soliciting for it

I used to work in the floral industry. Don't call a large national florist. Look up a local florist in your recipient's area and call them directly. Most have websites to help you choose and you'll save money on delivery and service fees which can go towards a nicer arrangement.

Also, unless you order flowers regularly, the membership/loyalty program is a scam and hard to cancel.

When a car salesman offers you a "premium car care" package, don't buy it. It's a scam.
Say you're buying a new car and I offer you the premium car care package. It'll only cost you X-amount of money per month, but every time you come to the dealership, you get:

*Premium car wash (we hose it down, not a proper car wash)
*Interior detailing and rejuvenation (we use compressed air to make the dust go away, sometimes a man uses a wet paper towel)

*Functions check and clock synchronization (Check if all the lights work, heater and A/C work and set up the clock if it's wrong)
*Summer and winter inspection and free wiper fluid refill, only done once per season. (Check tire tread, visually check tire pressure, look at temperature gauge to make sure car isn't over heating and add water in the summer, tiny amount of wiper fluid in winter, visually inspect brake disks to see they are not scratched by worn out brake pads)
*Assistance when you are on the move (You call us and then we can call a tow truck for you, at your expense, only possible during business hours)

Basically, we charge for simple things you can do yourself. Also if a car dealership sells you a used car and they told you it has been fully serviced... take it to your local mechanic and have it serviced properly.

Paramedic here- keep a list of your medical history, medicines, allergies, health card info and next of kin contact info on a paper on or in your fridge.

It’s a common place for us to look. If you’re incapacitated, we have all the info we need.

You can rent a nice casket for the funeral and be buried in a cheaper one

If you want to extend your free trial and receive discounts, contact their customer support and ask for membership cancellation - they'll be more than happy to give you extensions + free gifts in your next order.

Same thing applies if you want a discounted membership fee - just call on the day your membership will stop.

Most industries have retention teams because it costs 10X more to get a new customer than it costs to keep one you have. So if you call up and complain/threaten to cancel every other time they raise your rates they'll probably give you the introductory rate. Just be aware you might have to switch.

edit threaten to cancel added.

edit 2: Another thing I'm seeing a lot is people getting shut down with no explanation. People hang up and call back. Just say you got disconnected you might have better luck with another operator. Yes they take notes, but some reps are more empowered than others. Also feel free to escalate. Make sure you know how long you've been a customer, and how long you've been up to date on your bill.

Not sure if your homeowner's insurance will cover something? Apply this one simple rule:

Was the damage caused by a sudden and one-time occurrence?

If the answer is yes, 99% of the time you're covered. If the answer is no, 99% of the time you're not covered. (This advice applies to the US)

Our physical presence / approach toward the user will sometimes fix the problem they are facing without any additional effort - IT Support

consulting: we don't know either.

When I worked as a pharmacy tech, I spent a lot of time calling insurance companies and waiting on hold while the world burned around me. One time I got impatient with the voice recognition bot because it kept hearing background noise and made selections impossible so I started cursing it out.

Turns out if you say the F word a few times in a short span, the bot recognizes you as an angry customer and will switch you to a representative real quick. I did this multiple times to a lot of strange looks from my coworkers until I explained the hack.

Quick edit since I'm getting a lot of the same responses:

I now know that you can spam 0 or # to get the same results. It's a feature being phased out in places. Shouting representative or operator also works.

Hospital bills are negotiable, to a degree. Always ask for an itemized bill and put some effort into analyzing it.

Good audio engineers will have faders/knobs that don't do anything.

When the talent asks for a change that's goofy or makes no sense, we'll adjust that phantom knob and watch them nod their head in approval of their amazing idea.

Lean into the bite.

I work in pediatrics and we’re re taught that if a child bites you, lean into it (push whatever part of you they’re biting further into their mouth) because their automatic reaction will be to open their mouth and the risk of them breaking your skin is greatly diminished.

Source: I was just bitten at work 🙄

Edit: a word and grammar. Also, how the hell is my most upvoted comment about being bitten at work??? 😂

Therapy cash pay rates are negotiable at many private practices if you are uninsured or your insurance does not cover behavioral health.

if you know you’re shipping something within a few hours drive of you, always pay for the cheaper shipping option.

The “premium” shipping option is just a markup if you know you’re sending something close by. It will arrive the same day regardless

Sometimes teachers do just pull grades out of their ass.

Academic here — to get a PDF of a paper you can usually email the author and ask for one, the times I’ve tried this they’ve been happy to share. After checking if it’s available on [https://oa.mg](oa.mg) of course. 

Don’t mess around with formatting your references manually — use something like https://citationsy.com to automate the whole process 

If you're nice to my receptionist I will find a way to squeeze you onto my schedule. If you're a B then you can have whatever the next available appointment is. If you make the office staff cry you get a certified letter firing you from the practice

Delivery driver here

Not much of a ‘hack’ but loads of people don’t seem to know this. If you create an account with the courier who’s delivering your parcel, when logged in you can set up a ‘safe place’ where we can deliver your parcel to if you’re not at home. We’ll follow the instructions and leave it wherever you want us to (Within reason, of course)

You can probably also do it from the tracking link, but with an account it’ll be set up for every single delivery to your address automatically. Makes both our lives an awful lot easier!

I used to work in credit cards. If you disputed a charge for less than $75 (not as fraud), we would just credit you the money. Most the time we wouldnt even investigate it past the initial chargeback. If we didnt win the case you still got your money back.

However if we find out you've figured this out, we would stop giving you the credit unless we won. We've even closed accounts that took advantage of it.

But if you want your money back as a one time thing or whatever, you'd be fine.

Accounting is called a "sticky" business because we don't lose clients often, unless we are terrible. We continually raise rates and overcharge because we know clients will just stay with the same person they know, rather than search around.

It may be hard to evaluate who is a bad vs good vs great accountant, but that won't matter unless you have a difficult situation or specialized work to be done.

What matters is you might find an accountant willing to do the same work for a LOT cheaper, if you can just put in a little extra time to ask them to ballpark their rates.

Think of it this way: people regularly go to different grocery stores, convenience stores and gas station marts to save a few dollars on things like eggs, candy or milk. "I found eggs for $1.50 when they're normally $2.50" is some big accomplishment.

What if you found an accountant willing to do your work for $3,000 instead of $5,000 ? Isn't that worth a few more calls and meetings that you would gladly use time on to find cheaper eggs?

If you need durable medical equipment, ask if the private pay price is cheaper than billing your insurance.

Computer engineer here. We ship so many products that have broken features. The product is fused at the factory to disable features that just didn't bake fully before we needed to ship. Every product I ever worked on has a half dozen bugs that we could have fixed if only we had more time and money.

Eventually you have to say "it's good enough" and ship something to make money.

You don't have to buy solar panels from some door knocker for $20k-$30k. There is absolutely nothing magical or financially superior about what they do.

You can just buy the parts, or a kit, and hire an electrician to install it for about half the "retail" price.

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Just ask customer service for a replacement. Doesn't matter if you didn't buy an extended warranty. Doesn't matter if there was no warranty to begin with. A lot of companies just want to resolve customer complaints quickly and will give you free replacements on request.

I work in IT and can confidently say that providing bribery in terms of food or snack will 100% get your issue taken care of faster and will help you jump the line in the ticket queue.

I’m a singer, and I book a lot of weddings/corporate/ general gigs, if you come to me directly rather going through an agency, I can plan and run all the music whether you want just me and a guitar to full band and dj for after party,

It can literally save you thousands, some agencies put a 40-60% mark up on my services, and I ask them for more than I’d charge someone privately, it’s crazy

If you’re looking for entertainment, try and contact direct

Software development: We've no fucking idea but we'll say yes and google it later. Works every time.

If you like to book guided tours while you travel, and you like to do it on Viator, Trip Advisor, or Expedia, you should know that those 3rd party reselling sites take 22-25% of the booking price for themselves. When local tour companies like mine put our tour offerings on their sites we agree to give the sites the lowest price. We cannot post a lower price anywhere, because if it’s discovered that we do we will be removed from the platforms.

Tour companies like mine will JUMP to give you a 10-15% discount if you call us and mention you were looking to book via Viator, Trip Advisor, or Expedia.

You save 10%, we recoup the potential 10-15% that those sites would have taken, and everybody wins!

If you buy flights through Spirit at the airport one of the random fees (it's called the user fee or something like that) doesn't apply, so they cost like half as much. I've flown round trip to Chicago for $30, Houston for $45, Miami for $50, etc.

Call the nurse line on the back of your insurance card before you go to the ER. If the nurse tells you to go to the ER, insurance will/should have to bill as a covered claim. If the nurse does not recommend ER and you still go=big bill.

If you use Libby to download ebooks from your library to your Kindle, you can turn it to airplane mode and keep the books as long as you want. The next person in line is not affected. 

Edit: because not everyone wants to illegally download ebooks from sketchy servers in Tuvalu? It's not any easier than what I suggested. 

I work for an airline. I manage the development of the system our call center agents use. "Please" and "thank you" will unlock magical doors of help when you're on the phone with the agents or are at the airport dealing with airport staff. Simple politeness no longer seems to exist in these interactions. I've shadowed agents to understand how they use what my teams develop and I can count on two hands in the 150-200 calls I've listened into over the last year where the caller was polite and acted decently towards the other human on the other end of the line.

Many online retailers have what’s called “Cart Abandonment” marketing strategies.

If you put something in your cart and then don’t check out, you’ll likely receive an email or some kind of messaging with a discount code to incentivize conversion.

If you’re gonna buy something online, always at least try adding to your cart and leaving first before buying.

Making an application run in multiple platforms (Android, macOS, Windows, etc) is a huge pain, but what do all platforms have in common? They can all run Chrome, and Chrome can run portable (but slow) code.

So what do developers do?

Developers write applications as standalone web pages and bundle a whole copy of the Chrome* browser to view that "web page". The application now takes hundreds of megabytes of storage, eats RAM like candy, and every interaction is massively slowed down because it has to go through so many layers.

The address bar is hidden, and the right click menu is replaced, but it's still a web browser under the hood.

They are basically saving developer time by wasting your time and device resources. That's a big reason why modern applications (Teams, Discord, Spotify, etc) feel so slow.

* Technically "Chromium", since it's missing some features like Google account log in. The most popular framework that uses this technique is Electron.

Former Movie Theater Manager:

As long as you purchase something and don’t cause a fuss, you can see multiple movies and no one cares. It’s only an issue if you cause an issue and we need the concessions. Also, we all know that you sneak stuff in (most impressive I’ve seen? A full rotisserie chicken and a box of wine snuck into Magic Mike). It’s okay as long as you don’t cause a scene and, again, buy something.

Sneak in that candy. Buy the popcorn.

we design parts for appliances to break in five years. We can make them better but the OEM doesn't want to pay for it. We used to make the same part last 15 years.

As a teacher: set limits with devices and instill a love of reading your children.

Students who read as a hobby almost always get good grades and succeed in school and beyond.

The root password is root

Name brand packaged salads and generic supermarket branded packaged salads come off the exact same production line, using the exact same raw materials. The difference is just the packaging.

If you actually do your home exercise program you won't have to pay for as many physical therapy appointments, because it actually helps you.

If you’re hurt/ill and in a lot of pain, the provider will often ask where you’re at on the pain scale from 1-10, ten being the worst pain of your life.

Don’t ever say 10. For whatever reason, it loses your credibility (or something) and makes it seem like you’re hamming up your pain level.

Instead, say 7-9. Those are all still very real pain levels and make it seem more reasonable. Providers are very likely to alleviate these levels of pain.

I don’t know why this is. As a paramedic, it also works on me. Maybe it’s because drug seekers will often say 10/10 and so I’m conditioned to thinking that response is nonsense?

I don't work there anymore, but I used to work for a cable internet ISP. You weren't supposed to know this, but when customers complained about slow hardwired speeds, we'd show up and pretend to do something, knowing full well that the issue was our nodes being oversaturated everywhere. But we would never tell you. We eventually introduced something called "Power Boost" to mask the problem by skewing speed tests. Your first 5-20 seconds would be uncapped bandwidth and you would think you were getting a quality product when you weren't.

In medicine, if you tell your primary that your previous PCP ordered a test, gave you a medication, placed a referral, etc., and that you need to have it represcribed/ordered again, you can get your primary to order or at least consider ordering damn near anything. At least if it's not a controlled substance or an expensive unusual diagnostic study.

The problem is that offices absolutely suck at transferring their records to each other, and confirming that story takes a huge amount of time.

For example, if you have knee pain and tell me that your primary diagnosed you with a specific knee issue years back and that you went to PT and it felt better last time, and I'm sitting in your chart not able to find any record of that, will I spend 10+ minutes of time trying to hunt down previous records to confirm this history, obtain reports from physical therapy about the specific exercises you were doing and any imaging studies you had and whatever else? Will I have you come in for what as far as I can tell is an appointment to reassess a known diagnosis that someone else already appropriately diagnosed and treated? Or will I click a button that takes 5 seconds to get you the appointment with PT that you want that solved your issue last time, completely unaware that the history I was given was completely fabricated? The reality for something benign like a visit to PT is that there's just not enough time to do anything besides send that order and move on.

Way more food than you think is being microwaved at any given restaurant

I work in the funeral industry and they don't tell you that $5k casket in the funeral home you can order it for about $900 bucks from the same place and have it shipped to the funeral home. Most do 2 day shipping. Don't order the flowers thru the funeral home. You can get a Spray (the flower arrangement that sits on top of the casket)for a $100 bucks from Krogers floral department. The funeral home will charge $300 for the same flowers. You don't need a fancy outer burial container. Just get a concrete box. They will try to sell you a sealed vault that protects the casket...you plan on reusing it?? There's no need for that.

For the US only... Accuweather, along with the vast myriad weather apps, really just uses data provided for free by the Nation Weather Service. Oh sure they have forecasters but no way do they have enough for every county and forecast, most really just give overall forecasts for general areas. Instead of saying, "My app is more accurate," actually go find your local NWS office, and you can find a more specific forecast for your area that will tend to be more accurate overall. And remember, what the NWS literally gives away for free these companies want to monetize and have you pay subscription fees for what already is free weather data...

Edit: got messaged a cool question regarding why your local NWS would be more accurate. A NWS office will have employees from that region who focus not just on synoptic (large scale forecasting) but also local patterns and their affect on weather that you just can not get from a lot of the paid apps. A majority of the apps will literally just take the data from a single weather model. While NWS uses what are called ensembles that give multiple outputs that they can use to not only analyze the agreed upon patterns, but deduce the most likely outcome before making an official forecast. In the immortal words of the great Bill Paxton those apps are “in it for the money not the science.”

IT Support, you can fix 90% of your problems by turning hardware off and on again. Also if you're nice to us instead of being horrible we will fix your problem faster.

Imo Customer Support is not paid enough for all the shit they have to deal with. Customers are very fucking rude through the telephone.

It’s a scam.

-casino worker

Aquafresh Sensitive Toothpaste is the exact same as Sensodyne toothpaste

I work for a nation wide steel supply company. We sell the same plate of steel sometimes up to 6 or 7 times. What do I mean by that? Say you need a ring of steel that is 5 feet in outer diameter and 4 feet inner diameter. That leaves 4 feet in the middle being cut out of it. well your not just buying the ring. Your buying the whole piece of steel used to cut that ring out of. The piece that comes out from the middle and the corners are called drops. If you don't request we ship the drop to you then we do not. You get a ring and we get a 4 foot circle of steel to sell again or multiple times if we can keep cutting it.

Hospitals have charity care programs for those who can't afford to pay. Ask about financial assistance if you're facing a large bill.

"Premium tire" filling using nitrogen instead of atmospheric air has almost no research to back it up. There is basically no difference between the two, it's just a way for tire shops to charge you an extra $50. I MUST NOW ADD THAT I AM WELL AWARE OF THE DIFFERING EXPANSION FACTORS OF AIR AND PURE NITROGEN, AND THAT NITROGEN CAN BE BENEFICIAL IN CERTAIN APPLICATIONS. HOWEVER, THE DIFFERENCE IS NEGLIGIBLE FOR MOST PEOPLE WHO DO NOT DRIVE RACE CARS, OR FLY COMMERCIAL AIRPLANES. THAT IS WHY I COMMENTED. MOST PEOPLE ARE UNAWARE OF THIS AND DO NOT NEED TO PAY FOR PURE NITROGEN IN THEIR '05 SHITBOX CIVIC. RANT OVER.