Has your boss ever asked you to do something that you deemed questionable?
If so, well join the queue, because Reddit users are confessing all the dodgy tasks they were once made to do at work.
From shaking rats out of Christmas trees, to straining cockroaches from syrup – they’re spilling all the juicy (and, quite frankly, gross) details.
Here’s a word of caution before you proceed – these anecdotes might make you rethink some of the shops, restaurants and gyms you visit…
1. Worked at a nursery (plants, not babies) that sold Christmas trees in winter. We had to have two employees per customer in the lot at all times. One to talk to and distract the customer, the other to hold up the particular tree they were interested in and shake the rats out while said-customer was distracted. – TheHeliox
2. Restaurant: We would reheat sauces for several days and depending on how many times this had happened they would look and taste completely different. I told my friends and family to not eat there as there was plenty of sketchy s**t going on there. – ThePopojijo
3. My old boss invented a fake employee that he would blame all mistakes on when speaking with customers. Once in a while, he would tell the customers he “fired” that imaginary employee and then come up with a new name for a new imaginary employee that would be the new sucker. – loonygecko
4. My uncle used to work in a restaurant many decades ago as a teenager. It was his job each morning to strain the cockroaches out of the pancake syrup containers on each table. – kthulhu666
5. I worked at a gym for a year. We gave out keys for lockers in the locker room, and most people would hold onto them. One individual would stuff the key in his underwear, sweat, and then give it back to us after working out. We couldn’t (and wouldn’t) tell anyone where that specific key was previously. We, of course, sprayed it with disinfecting spray, but I felt bad for whoever had the key next. It was always the same dude, too. – netflixa
6. I worked at a grocery store with a bakery. The fresh baked bread was fresh baked, the fresh baked garlic bread was the bread that didn’t sell yesterday with garlic butter on it. – angelofsecrets
7. Former Geek Squad here. We weren’t allowed to perform computer hardware installs in front of customers. Managers didn’t want them to see just how damn easy it really is. – carl_global
8. I worked front desk but would help out maintenance if needed. One day we pulled and cleaned all the a/c units and my job was to take a shop vac and suck up spiders in the a/c hole in the wall. I’m talking thousands and thousands. – McRibSucks
9. I worked in a bakery/lunch shop. One day I came to work and found all the cakes and slices had mice footprints and little nibble marks. I went to throw them out and my boss said “hell no, just run a hot knife over the icing. No one will know”. I no longer ate cake there. – Bi-times-2
