Your work's creepy secrets

October 19, 2019 2:11 AM

What is the creepiest thing you don't talk about in your profession is a 5,800-comment reddit thread with many illuminating answers. [Content warning: Child abuse, body horror, death, more]
posted by growabrain (20 comments total)

It's less common now, but in the early days of ESI (electronically stored information) discovery, when lawyers for the other side in corporate litigation were going through emails and files that the creators/owners (we call them custodians) really never expected anyone else to see, they definitely used to find child porn.
posted by praemunire at 3:23 AM on October 19, 2019 [3 favorites]

That CW is no joke.
posted by lalochezia at 4:04 AM on October 19, 2019 [3 favorites]

Yeah, four screens worth and I bailed.

Do we really need this thread? It feels like rubber-necking.
posted by wenestvedt at 4:13 AM on October 19, 2019 [6 favorites]

I find it interesting to consider professions absent from the Reddit comments: which lack creepy secrets, which had no one even see the Reddit post, and which have the most creepy secrets with a concomitantly powerful code of silence, even in anonymity.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 4:54 AM on October 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

I couldn't read much of that thread. Pretty harsh stuff.

I've worked in retail for most of my life (35+ years now). The creepy I see isn't probably what most people would consider creepy. For me, the creepy is seeing just how much people are attached and controlled by stuff, by things that by any measure they do not need. About half of my career has been selling music, something which people have a deep connection with.

Many of these people don't really have anything they love except their records. I've been in houses where records are in every conceivable storage place and many inconceivable places. I have multiple customers who do not have dishes because their kitchen cabinets are storing records and CDs. I have one customer who uses her stove as storage (it's unplugged and she never uses it).

Reading that, many of you are probably envisioning an episode or Hoarders, where you have to work your way through a maze of stuff. No. These people are neat and orderly and otherwise "normal". They just can't stop themselves from acquiring things.

I have one customer who's lived in the same apartment for decades. Around him, his neighborhood has changed and become a community that is not safe and he does not enjoy. But his apartment is a large 2-bedroom filled with records and the man has a bad back and can't lift a box of records AND he doesn't trust anyone to touch his records so he can't hire movers. (I and my staff have offered to move him for free -- and he knows we know how to handle records. Nope!) So he's gonna live the rest of his life there, miserable, because of his addiction to stuff. This man has so many records that he had 3 times as many records as I had in my record store!

I've had multiple customers sell records to me and then rebuy them -- the exact same copy of the record! -- over and over and over again because they need money for groceries or rent and then when they're flush again they just have to own a copy. I cannot envision the jonesing they must be doing when it's out of their hands. The worry that someone else may buy it must be bad for their mental health.

Stuff can be just as addictive as drugs or booze. It's really, really creepy to see.

Here is the most concise encapsulation of my client-base and is absolutely verbatim:

Dude tells me he wants to buy a certain record. I've been selling to him for 15 years and know he already owns it.

"You don't need this. You have it already."

"Yes, but this is the best-sounding pressing of this particular record."

"Which is how I know you already have it."

"Yes, I have six copies."

"Why are you trying to buy another one?"

"It makes a great gift."

"Then why do you have six copies?"

"I don't know anyone worthy."
posted by dobbs at 5:24 AM on October 19, 2019 [84 favorites]

Oops, I forgot to add a CW
posted by growabrain at 5:24 AM on October 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

Honestly, I worked in schools for 13 years and didn’t learn anything “creepy.” I learned a few kids were clearly getting hit with a belt at home, which is sad. One teacher had an affair with a realtor.
posted by argybarg at 5:55 AM on October 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

Reply All recently put a call out for “your scariest stories” and my reaction was to think about all the absolutely terrifying (break ins, abuse, stalking) things that have happened to me and my loved ones.

It’s weird because I think scary and creepy (at Halloween time in America) are coded more like spooky, but for everyone one person who has had something spooky happen to them I’d bet there are 100s who’ve had something terrifying happen to them.

This thread is very real about that and it’s not for me.

I’m just thinking about our expectations around scary/creepy/spooky this time of year and people’s lives experiences.
posted by CMcG at 6:08 AM on October 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

I’m just thinking about our expectations around scary/creepy/spooky this time of year and people’s lives experiences.

It's really only in recent years that it's become pretty clear to me that my lifelong addiction to the fictional creepy probably has something to do with my brain trying, all day long, to keep from focusing on the kind of creepy/awful in the FPP.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:32 AM on October 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

We need creepy/awful/frightening in our public life and fiction and play, because it is a real part of life.
posted by argybarg at 6:45 AM on October 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

I worked as a teacher in elementary and middle schools, and honestly the extraoardinary thing is how many of them are in great shape and functioning just fine, and their parents love them. But you remember the sad stories.
posted by Peach at 6:51 AM on October 19, 2019 [9 favorites]

I don't do this any more, but in my job I used to have to deal with the paperwork of people who had gone through traumatic events and then needed exceptions made for them, more or less. This was especially weird when:

(a) You'd find out about someone who is presumably in a position of authority in a local business with children who's being abusive, but the person wrote out their story "anonymously" enough that you can't figure out who the guy is to avoid him.

(b) I found out all kinds of awful TMI about someone that a friend of mine was acquainted with (and went on and on about), and then that someone became what I'd call a "frequent flyer" at my office. So every time this person came up yet again and again all of that shit would go through my brain.

(c) At one point I found out that someone I know and like went through a period of time where he was stalking an ex. It sounds like he's gotten over that behavior as far as I can tell and well, been sufficiently dealt with, but I wish I hadn't found that out. I never would have figured him to do that, but I guess we all have our insane moments.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:53 AM on October 19, 2019

Hey, PSA: if you’re a writer, AskReddit is a gold mine of interesting true stories and the sorts of lies people think are plausible sounding enough to get them fake internet points. The single to noise is several of orders of magnitude worse than MeFi of course, but if you spend some time and figure out good questions to look for people having asked, you can come up with a lot of inspiration fuel.

That said, I’m not sure “I think the answers to the AskReddit post are interesting” is a High enough bar for a MeFi FFP. Once in a while is probably fine but someone could dig one of these out every day for a year and there’d still probably be plenty of ones worth reading, so I don’t know if “hey this larger web forum has personal stories that are kinda like what you come to this site for but lower quality with a lot more dross” is a great... anything really. but that’s what these will all boil down to in the end.
posted by Caduceus at 7:21 AM on October 19, 2019 [9 favorites]

Ok well. I read that for a while and have reached an unfortunate level of uncomfortable with the death stories. I am a middle-aged woman in fair health. I leave this comment here in hopes of saving the next person who knows better than to read a bunch of stories about impending death, even though many are quite peaceful.
posted by Glinn at 7:42 AM on October 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

Ok well. I read that for a while and have reached an unfortunate level of uncomfortable with the death stories. I am a middle-aged woman in fair health. I leave this comment here in hopes of saving the next person who knows better than to read a bunch of stories about impending death, even though many are quite peaceful.

Yeah, I wish I hadn't read some of that.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:11 AM on October 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

One nice thing about working for a large company that gets a lot of media scrutiny is that there are policies to prevent a lot of the creepy stuff that could happen, and pretty much everything I could think of to add to that thread has already been the subject of a major media exposé and/or lawsuit. I keep a lot of secrets for my job but they aren't secrets I feel weird about keeping.
posted by potrzebie at 8:12 AM on October 19, 2019 [4 favorites]

I couldn't get through that thread earlier and I'm not going to try again.
posted by Splunge at 8:50 AM on October 19, 2019

That thread makes night shifts in nursing homes sound very exciting. When I worked nights we mostly spent the time between rounds doing ironing and grumbling about the day staff.
posted by Catseye at 9:14 AM on October 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

I don't think this should be here, either. I thought it was going to be cool hidden tunnels or haunted apartments or things like that. that's creepy. I was not expecting explicit violent details about stillborn fetuses or dead bodies or child abuse.
posted by FirstMateKate at 9:35 AM on October 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

The single to noise ratio is a great name for a dating service
posted by chavenet at 9:37 AM on October 19, 2019 [5 favorites]