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Tell us your naughty stories

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191–200 of 379 posts

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#191
recently, I got a ridiculous discount on groceries. the grocery store uses automated checkout machines and frequently gives gigantic discounts on overripe bananas ($0.27 per pound). I actually prefer overripe bananas, so I've bought them enough times to know their numeric code. whoever runs the system took away the entry code for cucumbers for some insane reason, even though they still sell cucumbers, so when I was buying cucumbers, I was like wtf? and I put in the overripe bananas code. then I realized that I could do that for anything, so I bought a round of groceries where I told the automated checkout machine that everything I was buying was a bunch of uber-discounted bananas. I got my whole grocery run for $0.27/pound.

around 2005 I accidentally smuggled a joint through airport security. It was in my shirt front pocket and I stank of weed. I didn't know it was in there at the time, and I didn't realize the odor was on me either. the first searcher guy got a beep off my belt or something and was really nasty about it. he sent me to a second searcher guy, saying (practically yelling), "you don't get a second chance!" I just made an effort to be nice to the second searcher guy. it wasn't hard; this was in an area where people of my ethnicity are usually subtly standoffish/condescending/assholes with people of the second searcher guy's ethnicity, so I was already ahead of the game just by treating him like a regular person. I found a way to make him laugh, he let me on the plane, and an hour or two later, my plane had landed, I was in another airport waiting for my connecting flight, and I discovered the joint in my shirt pocket. I couldn't figure out anywhere to buy a lighter (it was a US airport), and I didn't want to see if I'd get away with smoking it in the smoker's lounge, so I just took it out of my pocket and swallowed it and it got me a little high.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#192

Free College Hack: In high school, I had a rough time with family stuff and my grades started to slack. I knew that getting a scholarship would be crucial if I wanted to go to college in the future. However, my grades simply weren't going to cut it for the Florida Lottery Bright Futures scholarship. I needed a 3.5+ GPA, a 1250+ SAT score, and 60 hours of community service in order to get their best 100% scholarship.…

Geez, awesome story. How was the rain forest? Motivation for moving there? Do you regret turning down the scholarship?

Just an FYI. Panama City is a city like all other cities in any developed country. Most of the provinces are equivalent to "towns". If you do move to somewhere in Panama that does not qualify for this description, you're basically living in a real rainforest LOST style. With the amount of bugs you get in a rainforest, I'd regret not taking the scholarship if that's the case :)

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#193

When I was in 6th grade ('94) I scanned articles from our encyclopedias onto our 386 and then used OCR software to make it usable as a class research paper. You can imagine what happened the following year when I got dial up. _________________________________________ I also had a computer hardware class in high school that the teacher would often leave for extended periods of time. The other students and I get enough…

I love the delayed delivery feature. My friend works as a personal banker, and often has to stay late calling on prospect lists* (which had a conversion rate of near 5% - it was really a waste of time). When he was done he was supposed to email the branch manager with the results of the night (appointments, sales, etc.). He liked the OT, but most of the time he already had his appointments and sales met, so I suggested the delayed delivery feature - send the email at 7:30 with your results, get the OT, but don't stay late.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#194

My college would sponsor students' travel expenses to go and do volunteer work at a major game dev conference (if you volunteered, you'd get to see it for free). The problem was that the sponsorship only covered game dev majors. So I quickly declared a double major. Bonus perks include access to lab with the best computers on campus. I need to remember to drop it before I graduate ... Too bad I was busy with other wo…

GDC, I'm assuming? I figured that's why there were way more volunteers than the conference could possibly have required.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#197
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant - I wish you posted this tip earlier when I went to Africa. Will do it the next time I go to India for sure.

It won't work in India. Because they don't take bribes at Airport (at least).

oh yes they do, in delhi.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#198

I used to work as a salaried employee for a consulting firm. I'd record my hours on a timesheet so that they could bill the right clients, but anything over 40 hours a week was ignored on my paycheck. The understanding was that if ever your hours dropped below 40, you could bill an overhead number to make up for the difference, thus the fairness of not getting paid for overtime. So a year in, I only managed to find 3…

Don't kid yourself. You were called into those meetings because, like at many companies, there was a promise of time in return for extra time put in but, like at many companies, that promise was never intended to go both ways.

The first meeting was because you dared to utilize their promise and get some time in return.

The second meeting was because their usual course of action in such first meetings backfired on them and you were in the room to get brought back into line (specifically, back onto salary.)

You didn't mention quitting in response or forcing them to give you a raise in acknowledgment of your efforts. Did you?

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't roulette a losing game? Or did you have some optimal betting strategy?

Roulette can be beaten by a shoe computer. Basically you tap your foot each time the ball passes a certain number. The computer uses the time between taps to compute the velocity of the ball, which is used to predict where it will stop. Then you bet on a quadrant of the wheel by the predicted stop. This was first done by people from MIT I believe.

Excuse me, UCSC students in the 1970's. Those interested can read more here: http://physics.ucsc.edu/people/eudaemons/eudaemons.html

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#200
post #183
post #43

I am a 25% partner of website X, which earns in the low six-figures. The 75% partner has a majority rules attitude, and all accounts and passwords, and when he decided unilaterally to take a nice salary, and then reneg on a buyout agreement, I could see things turning wrong. Having built the site (technical cofounder, translated as: free coder) I have a backend to all of the user's email addresses (10,000 or so, havi…

Why oh why would you agree to become the technical cofounder for 25% of the company when the other cofounder takes 75%? Was there a bunch of infrastructure, technical or otherwise already in place so that your portion of the work was that negligible? In any case, yeah you still have right with your 25% contact a lawyer.

Necessity, three years ago. A pitfall on the way to breaking free.
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