Employees Share Tips for Everyone Else

Every job comes with insider knowledge. Here are some tips and suggestions from people in various professions.

• Call center staffer — Just because you hear music when I put you on hold doesn’t mean I do. I can hear every profanity you utter.

• Plumber — If you clear a clog, or have one of those ‘almost’ clogs, keep flushing the toilet over and over five or more times. You want to push the large matter down the pipe until it gets to a bigger area of the pipe, main, or septic. If you don’t, it can just clog farther down.

• Security — If you are in a public space like a zoo, museum, etc. and you lose track of your child, tell a staff member, then stay with that staff member or in that immediate area. We have radios and other ways to contact every staff member, including security, and can alert them all to be looking for your kiddo. Staying with a staff member is also crucial because it doesn’t matter if we find your child if we then lose track of you. The natural inclination is to take off and look for your kid yourself, which I understand, but I promise that we know our facilities better than you do, are more likely to know potential egress paths, and are not panicking like you are.

• Florist — You do not need to know any flower names to order flowers, unless you’re trying to avoid certain ones (most people want to skip carnations). Stick to color, expected size, and budget. The florist will do the rest.

• Hotel maid — Don’t make the bed before you leave. It has to be taken apart anyway and if it looks un-slept in it won’t get changed.

• Shoe sales — Guys, if you’re buying a dress shoe bring dress socks with you. Other socks are thicker, especially athletic ones. I cannot exaggerate the number of times that men returned dress shoes in a panic for a big event and the shoe was now flopping off their feet because they are now wearing dress socks.

• Bartender — I tell everyone to skip the fruit in their drinks/cocktails. No one uses tongs or gloves, whether it’s laziness or time. Fingers are filthy behind the bar moving from soda guns, rags to wipe off the bar, handling money, etc. Just don’t.

• Server — Don’t stack your plates. This results in food squished against the bottoms of other plates. I’m the stack master, I’ll decide the stack-order.