What is something you learned in your line of work that other people wouldn't know

If you ask a computer expert to fix the weird thing Outlook just did, or explain why Excel is suddenly writing Gibberish into your tables –
Even if we wanted to explain it to you, we can't. No human being alive on earth knows the reason and how to fix it.
Some of us are really good at poking it till it behaves again.
Others are brave enough to venture into the dark lands of learn.microsoft.com .
But what awaits us there are articles written by Copilot about how it worked before Microsoft changed it again for no reason.
- learn.microsoft.com
  You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and AI generated answers.
  
  Seems like everyone's solution there is to reinstall Windows first before troubleshooting.
  
  Reddit.com/r/askreddit
  
  answers
  answers dot microsoft dot com
- First, I do NOT work in IT or anything like that. But I seem to be the most tech savvy of all my coworkers. Occasionally one of them will ask for help and I'll fix something for them. Sometimes one of them will comment that I am good with computers or something. Honestly, I figure things out just by clicking on everything. I think sometimes people are too afraid to click too many things for fear of breaking stuff, but there's not a whole lot that can go catastrophically wrong imo. I tend to just click shit until I figure out what to do.
  
  I do work in IT and make six figures clicking on shit till I figure it out.
- Speaking of Excel, here’s a fun little experiment into the nature of binary numbers and rounding errors.
  Start with some number and add a fraction like =A1+(1/3) to it. In the cell below, add that same fraction to the previous one. Copy this formula downwards and watch the numbers grow. After about 50 rows, you’ll have a number that looks like something specific, such as 71, but it isn’t exactly. There’s a sneaky rounding error hidden in there. The actual number is very close to the one displayed, but not exactly what you think it is.
  If you’re using IF statements or XLOOKUP with numbers like this, you’ll run into some perplexing errors. If I recall correctly, you can even test the number with =A50=71, which will return TRUE but the xlookup still fails. It’s been a while since I tested this one, but I remember it being really weird in all sorts of unexpected ways. It’s weekend, so I’m not touching my work computer today.
  You just need to know that a long series of fractions causes weird binary rounding errors to happen behind the scenes. Adding a series of whole numbers and neat decimal numbers was perfectly ok though.
  Also, trying to explain this to some coworkers won’t be worth the effort.
- Tech support is mostly turning things off and on since it fixes a lot of things. And I mean actually turning them off and on, not just turning the screen off and on. Then turning setting off and on. Lots of checking what should or shouldn't be on and trying it the other way.

The better you get at coding, the less you'll probably write code. This is for two reasons: you can't fuck up code that isn't written and you need people that understand the bigger picture to focus on making that picture clearer. This unfortunately leads to junior and mid-level developers writing most of the code. But it's not like things would be 10x better if senior devs wrote everything, because even for someone experienced coding well is fucking hard.
- Coding: expert level fitting a square peg into a round hole. Every now and then you find a square or rectangle hole.

In IT the first problem/question should always this:
Is it a people problem or a technology problem?
IT can fix technology problems, managers need to fix people problems
if someone gives an IT person a people problem and they try to fix it, it will probably not go very well
same if you give a manager a technology problem and ask them to fix it
this is the most important lesson that leaders needs to understand
- My supervisors will try to fix it for 3 minutes and post a question in the chat.
  If that doesn't't make it work, it's an it problem.

Working with electricity is actually quite simple in a lot of respects, and I make a lot of money mainly because people are afraid of it (and rightfully so, me too). But many of the small things like changing plugs/switches out and hanging fixtures can be done easily by anyone with a basic knowledge hand tool use and basic rules like a) turn off the main if you don't know which breaker you're working with, b) check that it's off with a meter or hot stick, c) even then, don't directly touch the shiny parts, and d) match your colors exactly as you found them (take pictures to be safe). Granted I've been doing this for 10+ years, but even a layman can save themselves a service call with a couple basics and YouTube is a great resource for such things.
- My favorite electrical tip is swapping the capacitor in your AC when it stops working. $12 on Amazon. $175 for a service call. I keep a spare.
  
  Better yet, having a (halfway decent) multimeter and knowing how to use it is huge. A good one can test capacitance, but simply tracing voltage isn't too tricky.
- This. I just recently hung a ceiling fan with the help of YouTube and it’s still on the ceiling.
  
  Hope the box you mounted it to was rated for a ceiling fan :D

When I worked in local television news, people would probably be shocked about how frank and open newscasters often were during commercial breaks. We got direct satellite feeds of the national newscasts, and they didn't mute the mics or turn off cameras during breaks. We got to still see and hear them while local commercials ran.
I remember Katie Couric going off about a bunch of dumb shit during commercial breaks. I especially remember her being a demented cheerleader for the War on Terror, especially behind the scenes.
There used to be a video of her cutting a Native American historian from a special on Columbus Day and saying "what does he know about Columbus anyway?" after chiding him for having negative things to say about Columbus. Since they were short on time, they made the decision to cut him from the program. I'm having trouble finding it now.
The 1995 film Spin is made entirely from direct satellite feeds from between commercial breaks. It was specifically about the 1992 election and how both Republicans and Democrats "massaged the message" with the news media, but watching it you'll get an idea of how it works, because a lot of the clips are from commercial breaks. (The video I mentioned about Couric and the historian might even be in this film, it's been a while since I've seen it).
Mediaburn has a copy of the film to watch on their website.
https://mediaburn.org/video/spin/

Millions of government employees work hard every day on so much shit you'll never see or understand that does in fact make your life so much nicer than you deserve when you complain about government workers.
And I'm NOT talking about the cultic worshipped military. I'm talking civilian civil servants at all levels of government.
SOME people are really gonna wonder why everything's getting shittier and never make the connection that their idiotic notions about government led to it.
- I have some gov contracts and I can confirm this.
  Also: the big complaint about working with gov is either apparently expensive stuff and/or apparently slow progress .
  Reality? We as citizens require a crazy amount of justified checking and validation from every part of gov because it affects people's lives that things take longer and cost more to do right ... and many times that to back out a fuck-up and not kill anyone. (Oh Hi Elon)
  
  I see people who openly complain about government workers as no different than those shitheads who are willing to mistreat food service workers.
  
  Also: the big complaint about working with gov is either apparently expensive stuff and/or apparently slow progress .
  And it isn't different in the private sector. Except that there is less controls usually.

Academia, USA.
You’re getting the exact same quality of education for introductory classes at a community college, state school, and private school.
I know because I teach the same suite of classes at all 3 as an adjunct. Same book, same syllabus, same schedule, same assignments. The only difference is the price tag, and I’m hardly alone in that.
Actually, scratch that. You’re getting a better education at the community college because the people in charge there bother to remember that I exist and treat me as an equal.
- I got degrees from both a community college and a major research university. The two don't share instructors, but on average, the quality is much better at the community college.
  Community college instructors are there to teach. They go to continuing education classes to learn how to do it better. Some classes at a research university are taught by similar, dedicated instructors, but some are taught by the professor who drew the metaphorical short straw that semester, and who'd rather be focusing on her research. She will put in her best effort, don't get me wrong, but her first priority is research.
  That is to say, for anyone thinking about a degree, don't overlook the value of community college.
  (ETA: I work at a research university now; the research professors who also teach are some of my co-workers.)

I'm in accounting and considering what I read in the news, it was surprising to me how honest it is in real, regular, non public companies. We get real audits that are trying to validate our records, we give them our real work to look at, try so hard to figure out the real cost and revenue each month and year, to allocate things correctly, nobody is pushing for some fake result, only for a clear picture.
Those companies with fraud? A lot of things have to go wrong, and someone has to be really trying hard to defraud, and needs to convince others to go along with that. Most companies hire accounting because they actually want to have a good picture of what's going on financially.

I don't work in a kitchen anymore but the amount of single-use plastic used in chain restaraunts is soul crushing. Most folks have no idea
- I don’t work in a microbiology lab any more, but OMG the amount of plastic waste was unbelievable. Keeping everything sterile (as in germ free and DNA free) does not come cheap! If it’s small and cheap enough, it’s going in the trash. If it’s small but expensive, you’ll autoclave it. If it’s big, you’ll squirt lots of ethanol on it and hope it doesn’t ruin your day.
- Oh you think that's bad, don't look at the medical field
  
  Going through hospice with my parents I saw this first hand even in that brief time, and imagined how it must be going on constantly in every hospital and facility everywhere. And the thing is, it's necessary in most cases because going back to how it was done before would be a nightmare just from the aspect of things being sterile.

The drinking water systems in the United States are so precarious and vulnerable, that I’m genuinely shocked we haven’t had more widespread issues with the water supply. The systems are made up of thousands of locally-managed interconnected intakes and outflows, and oversight is spotty and combative.
Please use a water filter. And thank your local utilities and maintenance people for their hard work keeping us alive.
- I saw a survey of small town watertowers in the US. There were a terrifying amount of dead birds in there, and living birds shitting.
  
  And that was with the EPA in existence. Just wait until the rivers catch on fire again. Psychotic idiots.

Your house is insanely easy to break into unless it's built with special materials or has steel bars over all openings.
Disregarding the fact that windows break, pretty much every residential door (both interior and exterior) can be busted down by anyone with a decent body weight or with a framing hammer. Hammer thru the door skin, or claw pry on the jamb to force the latch to release, or even just bodyslamming it can be enough to separate the lock block and stiles and the doors will simply fall apart from there.
- Half of security is just making them be noisy enough to get worried someone will check
- Learning how locks work made me realise that locking a door is basically just like putting a sign on my door saying "please don't burgle me :) ". That terrified me at first, but I came to realise that nothing had changed and that I was no less safe than I was before. Turns out that the social contract is the main thing that keeps people in line
- You reminded me of this old film from the 1980's:
  https://youtu.be/F2GK9xZJhvQ
  B & E from A to Z: How to Get In Anywhere, Anytime
- "Haha, deadbolt... I just smash the door in."
  "I can pick most locks with a credit card."
  "I know when you're home... and when you're not."

All big banks run on horrendous excel spreadsheets ridden with errors
- They're not errors. They are expected deviations from reality. And if you fix them, YOU are wrong.

Financial institutions are not as secure as you think.
Every once in a while I will see someone ask "We bank online why can't we vote online?" Banking is secure enough that the money the banks lose is less than the money they make. Also not all lose of funds will hurt the bank if the individual is scammed, since individuals are supposed to keep their accounts secure and not fall for scams.
Your bank is using old technology and Excel for a lot of internal records keeping. Most fraud detection is a cost to the bank not a money maker. Stopping money laundering, human trafficking, ect means the bank doesn't get that money and has to pay people to investigate it and shudder report to the government.
Like almost every other business out there they work off of poorly made or old tech and the lowest paid people are push to more work with less time and resources.

This is common knowledge by now I think, and yet evidence shows common doesn't mean people remember. If you ship anything, fragile or not, be sure to pack it like it's going to be thrown, dropped, get wet, and stepped on. It's not even that workers in shipping do this (most damage is usually either bad packaging or mechanical damage in the automated parts), but things happen between point A and point B, many of them unavoidable. And I see SO MANY packages that consist of just some thin cardboard with a few pieces of tape, or a plastic bag that's easily torn, or documents/letters that are smaller than the label we put on them(??? That won't get lost :/ )
Pack things like you want to to make it there. Just look at packages you get successfully, and I guarantee on many you'll see marks of the war zone they went through. Now imagine if they had been sent with an old worn out box you found in the garage and threw some tape on and didn't bother putting any protective packing inside because "it'll be fine if it bounces around a bit".

The bespoke software that runs most of the business world is actually way simpler than a lot of people think.
If you're a university student and some company hires you on the first year to work on a business analysis system to be used by a major regional retailer, you might be thinking you must be some kind of a wunderkid, but it also just might be because this system really isn't that complicated, and you had no idea about the average salaries on this field, so they hired you on the cheap.

It’s often really fucking stupid to get a phd.
- This can't be said enough. It's almost always not worth the strain on your mental health. You're not a student but a worker for your professor and getting paid way too little

That business is just constant problem solving one after another and going through as many to-dos as you can day after day, while still maintaining sanity. That is persistence.
That business is always a house of cards that can fall apart anytime and so you must always keep your eyes on it. That is exhausting worry.
That business is so hard, you'll be tempted to quit everyday. To overcome that urge to quit you'll need a much bigger purpose or mission that drives you. Purpose brings determination.
That business really is about value creation for the entire ecosystem (customers, employees, vendors) and that a business is not above that ecosystem. Wall St & American capitalism is short sighted because it demands you pass lesser and lesser value to that ecosystem quarter after quarter, and that is like a slow axe to your own foot.
That most modern economic theory taught in business schools and used by execs in the biggest companies worldwide is all flawed because it fully relies on capturing and optimizing all sorts of business data, but the truth is that it is impossible to capture real world in data.

Broken/buggy software usually is not developers/QA’s fault but management and clients.
Consulting want something that conforms exactly what is signed and as fast as possible, if there are later bugs that doesn’t invalidates what was agreed or new features take longer to introduce it means more money as maintenance/evolution contracts.
Clients often don’t see why they should pay extra and include extra time for better code. Also they prioritise stupid things like changing the font in a page over fixing a bug in the checkout page.

I'm a software developer making big bucks and I'm lazy and stupid
- What are big bucks? This always seems relative.

How to read well and closely as well as how nonsense academia can be. A recent work I read had multiple minor claims that were not factual while maintaining their main point. It made me realize how it’s hard to have everything right in a work but also how academia and research in general is like a tower of dominos, unless one person questions it the field will continue to build on bs claims.
- I am glad Cory Doctorow has come a long way, but man, this was a major gripe from me about him when he was first getting popular in the blogosphere. He made some outright false statements about the history of Napster in the early 2000's, and it made me furious. I remember being like "motherfucker, you lived through this how did you get it so wrong?" He's been a lot more consistent for about a decade or more now.
  
  Thanks for getting me to look up who that is! I knew his work but not his name.
  That’s very frustrating. I wonder if that’s better or worse than in academia? People get called out and theories challenged, maybe a new edition is printed, or books challenging it. In blogs will someone often edit old posts for accuracy like the news does recently?

Lotta boring crap about PLUs, SKUs, UPCs, TPRs, and such. Stores have dedicated pricing staff for a reason. One trick that might be interesting, but not surprising, is the way stores hide price increases by putting a product "on sale" this week, so it's cheaper than last week, but raising the regular price, so it costs more when the sale price ends.

Don't think there are any particular quirks of logistics that are super hidden.. maybe the most surprising thing for me was the amount of plastic waste? But even then I feel like that wouldn't surprise most people
- I fear that no amount of plastic saving by the general population will even come close to the amount of plastic wasted at the industrial scale.
  
  Real, unfortunately.. like the amount of plastic I recycle at home in a month is probably less than we go through at my warehouse in ~30 minutes.. not even accounting all the plastic in the other stages of shipping.. having worked one step down the line from my current job, we used thrice as much there basically.. and of course the stuff we get at the warehouse is also all wrapped in plastic by the previous guys

Youth worker here: How much fucking work it is to just keep things from falling apart constantly. People assume most of my work is planning and doing activities with teenagers. But a lot of the time I'm like 50% caretaker.
- Your field is chronically under staffed, right?
  It's probably not going to change until the workers stop thinking they're doing this to help people and start realizing that they also have a job to live off themselves. This goes for most health and care related professions here in Germany. Bad pay and very long hours, many in the field still think that exploiting yourself is virtuous.
  Common sense tells you that people get paid in relation to what importance their job has or how hard it is. That's not the case though, people get paid what they can be paid.
- Entropy is a real monster that rarely is part of the forward thinker. It is great to understand it as a young person, it will make you a master of your trade when you reach the leadership spaces

Horoscopes on radio shows? Made up on the spot or stolen from google. And I'm willing to bet the ones on newspapers and websites are too.
I wonder how many astrology girlies would have their hearts broken by this.
Learned this when I interned at a radio station. (My field is communications; Journalism + Marketing.)
- All horoscopes are made up, it's how they work
- I'm curious what anyone who truly believes in those horoscopes thinks is going on. Do they assume the Skippy and Dippy Morning Show crew have a licensed fortune teller casting star charts and meditating in a back room somewhere while the rest of the guys are giving away concert tickets and making prank phone calls to celebrities?
  
  I don't know. One of my friends in college was an astrology girl but I made a point to not ask her for details (OR tell her about the thing I learned at my internship--)

Brazil nuts aren't nuts! They're fruit seeds. The fruit is the size of a cannonball.
- Most cannonballs were quite small, the really big ones, the 32 pounders, have a 16cm diameter.
- House : You idiot!

The depth and diameter of my sinuses

Most public school teachers have very little say about what happens in the school or the curriculum. We're just carrying out orders and hope that students will go along.
Student discipline can only be applied with parent and administrator cooperation. If admin doesn't do anything about bullying, fighting, or cheating, then the school is screwed.