14 Weird Things That People Learned Because of Their Jobs

The world is full of surprises, and there’s always something new to learn. Thanks to the internet, we now have access to information about how things work and how items are made, knowledge that wasn’t always readily available. However, despite the internet, there are still many things we don’t know. Check how these people learned a valuable piece of information because of the jobs they were working.

• “It costs about 95% less to make dental crowns, bridges, etc, So an $800 full zirconia or emax unit may be about $40.00.” The68G*** / Reddit
• “IT, the tech probably knows you are lying and will just play along. The average user has no idea that help desk are usually looking at logs and health data on your PC the moment you get on the phone with them.” BeRad_NZ / Reddit
• “There is a whole wealth of historical information (and information generally) that is not available online at all. Digitizing things takes a lot of people power that many libraries/archives simply don’t have.” Hadrianic / Reddit

• “Not telling your kids about going off to sleep for surgery because it’s ‘better if they don’t know’ is horribly traumatic for them. The look of fear, confusion, and betrayal on their faces is unforgettable. They do so much better when things are explained to them in an age-appropriate manner. You ‘protecting’ them makes it so much worse.” ChickMD / Reddit
• “As an X-ray tech, it’s rather outrageous how doctors hand out certain exams like candy. CT abdomen/pelvis exams are the equivalent of 3 years of background radiation. They are the most common exams.
  Don’t get me wrong. They are necessary for a lot of people. But not for how many we perform.” stuffedcouchpotato / Reddit
• “I work for a company that distributes ice machines for a major ice machine company. Just do yourself a favor and say no ice. People do not clean these machines.” PaulVarjakJr / Reddit

• “You’d not eat at half the restaurants you go to if you saw the kitchen, if you worked in the industry that jumps to 75% cause you recognize the flaws that someone who hasn’t worked in the industry would miss or think are normal. The last 20-25% are barely above board.” Caithloki / Reddit
• “Unless you know an accountant who specifically specializes in personal taxes, your buddy who is an accountant probably doesn’t know anything more about your taxes than you do.” BigAggie06 / Reddit
• “I work in medical billing and coding (in the US). 9 times out of 10, when your insurance denies coverage for a procedure or service, it’s an error on how it was billed/coded by the provider office, and you should research it with the billers and your insurance before you pay.” moonrulesnmbr1 / Reddit

• “Strawberries are not berries. They’re considered an ‘aggregate fruit’ because their seeds are on the outside, and because the ‘fruit’ consists of multiple smaller fruits. In the literal sense, the ‘berry’ on a strawberry plant is an engorged, enlarged flower STEM, also called a receptacle.
  Raspberries and Blackberries are also not ‘true berries,’ but are also ‘aggregate fruits,’ because each seed is surrounded by a single droplet, and an aggregate of these droplets is what forms a ‘blackberry’ or ‘raspberry.’
  Pumpkins, bananas, and peppers are ALL ‘true berries,’ because they are self-contained fruits enclosing multiple seeds.” Sweddy-Bowls / Reddit
• “How rotten a lot of bridges are. I work in highway maintenance, and quite a few of them are in hideous condition and overdue for replacement. I can think of one where the deck is more or less held in place by gravity and moves up and down independently of the structure beneath, which is coming misaligned because of a lateral force put on it by eroding river banks. Fortunately, that one is finally under contract to be replaced this year. ” 2ndOfficerCHL / Reddit
• “When you call into a company and speak to someone in their call center, odds are that no matter how much you hate that company, the person you are talking to hates it far more. If you’re not a prick to them, they will likely look for any loophole or break they can give you.” cugamer / Reddit

• “Expensive cars KEEP BEING EXPENSIVE. The tires are expensive. The parts are expensive. The people who work on them are expensive.
  Buying a Porsche or a BMW isn’t a one-time splurge. This might seem like a no-brainer to you, but I worked in a garage and I promise I saw someone having that unpleasant realization every day.” catalfalque / Reddit
• “Early childhood trauma is visible in teeth. Trauma in this sense is anything that causes a stress response in the body. Could be illness, or parental separation.
  Longer explanation: teeth grow at a predictable rate. Almost exactly like trees. If you bisected a tooth and examined it under a microscope, you’d see rings of growth. Growth is disrupted in times of stress. The first stress ‘ring’ we all had on our baby teeth is from birth. Other stressors can create other disrupted growth rings in baby teeth. The same is true for adult teeth, as they are still forming.
  My former professor was a pioneer in dental anthropology. For his work on these stress lines, he’d ask his zoo colleagues to send him the teeth of deceased primates, or just teeth that had to be pulled. Would demand no other information be given at first. Then he and his grad students would section the teeth. Put them under a microscope, and print out the pictures.
  They’d mark visible signs of disrupted growth. And, with knowing that birth is the first disruption, and the rate at which teeth grow... they could then give day counts for every growth disruption after birth. Once they collected their data, my professor would then ask their zoo colleagues for the daily health logs for the primate.
  What they found is that each growth disruption exactly corresponded to stress events in the primates’ lives. Some instances were from illness or the like. But, to me, the most interesting event he told us about was seeing a stress line on the tooth that exactly corresponded with the primate, as a baby, being removed from its mother for a period of time to do necessary health checks at the zoo. This caused such a stress response in the baby that it was visible in the tooth growth.” soitgoes_42 / Reddit

Some simple, useful tricks can benefit many generations, but often get forgotten and become “grandma’s tips.” Here are some tricks we learned in school that still work today.