Holly, a Harvard seminarian and activist, invited Twitter users to DM her the dirty secrets of their industries, which she then anonymized and posted in a megathread with more than 600 parts (as of this writing); while many of them are mild or self-evident, many of them are the kind of sphincter-tightening or blood-boiling confessions that you always suspected might be true but hoped like hell were not.
Some of them are also a little uplifting (library workers are reliably helpers with immigration paperwork, say, but also increasingly wracked by violence and the effects of unchecked poverty and the erosion of social services), and others are, well, just terrible:
* Arkansas teachers beat the shit out of their students, especially disabled kids, kids with developmental delays, etc
* Whether you get arrested in NYC is largely a function of whether the cop is eligible for overtime
* Your always-on smart speaker is sending your private conversations to random, badly paid contractors
* “Celibate” priests are getting laid like crazy
* Starbucks’ rulebook is full of gotchas that let managers discriminate against troublemakers, racialized people, and anyone else they dislike
* Billion dollar battleships are built by stoned meth-freaks
* Remote disconnect meters are crapgadgets built by low-bidders and they are prone to bursting into flames
* Southern universities have a quiet understanding with racist old white alums that their donations will only to scholarships for white kids
* Environmentally sound plastics are ignored so that big companies can shave pennies off their costs
Lots more, too.
What's a dirty secret that everybody in your industry knows about but anyone outside of your line of work would be scandalized to hear?
— holly (@girlziplocked) January 16, 2019
(via Naked Capitalism)