Have you ever been bound by a Non-disclosure agreement? I certainly have not, but I hear a lot about them on the news…especially when it comes to politicians and their campaigns.
But judging by the sound of it, A LOT of people out there in business and other ventures use them for a variety of reasons.
Let’s see what these folks on AskReddit had to say about the contracts they used to be bound to…
1. The cupcake switcheroo.
“I worked at a small bakery in New York City when I was younger. Every morning the bakery would take their day old cup cakes and deliver them to a tour company that did Sex and the City tours.
The tour company would pass our cupcakes off as cupcakes from Magnolia, a significantly much more popular bakery.”
2. The pretzels gods are mad at you now.
“When I was fired from Auntie Anne’s in 2010, I signed a 10 year non-compete/NDA contract, promising not to detail the baking secrets or work for another pretzel establishment.
Well that ended this year so now I can run out and start a pretzel store because the secret I was keeping was making pretzels literally requires 2 products, one of them being water and the other a large bag of pretzel meal/dust/powder.
Quite literally anyone with $2,500 can start a pretzel stand and make perfectly fine pretzels.
It’s not difficult whatsoever.”
3. Sketchy stuff.
“That a married grocery store manager in his late 40s was , indeed, having sex with that 17 year old courtesy clerk in the compressor room.
This was 15 plus years ago when I was a Person In Charge, and not yet a full Assistant Store Manager. Our store in the backroom had a couple of rooms upstairs: a large room that housed all of our electrical breakers and back up generators, and a room that housed all of our compressors that kept our freezers and coolers running. Both were locked at all times for security reasons. They were accessible only through the backroom.
The 17 year old courtesy clerk (bagger), had worked there for a while. She was, uh, not the best worker. She had a habit of disappearing for a half hour or hour at a time. I, and the other PIC’s complained and tried discipline, but the store manager blocked it. So, we just dealt with it. Yes, she was an attractive blonde.
I was in charge one night and we got an alarm that one of the compressors was low. It was my job to check the level, record the compressor number, and turn it in. When I went up to the room, the door was propped open with a bucket. I assumed whoever worked in the room last left it open.
If you have never been in a compressor room before, I have to tell you that it is LOUD! Our store had several diesel engines that powered the compressors.
I proceed in to the back of the room, come around a corner to see the girl, not quite naked, but not fully clothed, being…serviced by our store manager (who had left for the day hours ago). Neither saw me and I hightailed it out of there.
I wrestled with what to do. I was worried about my career at the time, so I called the security hotline and made an anonymous call and told them in vague terms what happened and that they should contact me about details. I’m 100% certain that they knew it was me that called.
A couple of days later, the store manager is suspended, and I’m interviewed, the Assistant Store Manager is interviewed, and the PIC’s. They tell us not to discuss it, so of course we did. I was a little late to the party. Almost everyone knew.
The store manager would use his store keys to come into the backroom, meet the courtesy clerk, and then would hook up in the compressor room. She was not the first teenager he had done this with at this store and others.
They fire the store manager, and like an idiot, he sues. Dozens of people are deposed, NDA’s are drawn up and signed. He thinks better of it, drops the suit and that’s the last I ever heard of him.
The girl quit right after the store manager was suspended.”
4. I always wondered about that…
“The book you’re reading might only be a “bestseller” because the author had enough money to buy thousands and thousands of copies, have them shipped to a warehouse for storage, and eventually destroyed.”
5. Insider info.
“The secret ingredient in Jimmy John’s tuna salad is Kikkoman’s Soy Sauce.”
6. Don’t eat the donuts!
“I used to work for a large gas station chain.
I worked at its warehouse where it creates a lot of the donuts. The room was really hot so we were always sweating. There’s some machines where the donuts get glazed in chocolate. They’re these small machines they look almost like a bbq grill. They always wanted us to be super fast glazing the donuts.
Working in a hot room and working at super fast speeds it was natural for a lot of peoples sweat to just drip in the chocolate underneath us.
Never eat the chocolate donuts from a gas station.”
7. Not messing around.
“McDonald’s made me sign a NDA regarding a robbery that took place during a graveyard shift.
They made me take a fucking polygraph test because they thought my ex and I were involved due to the simple fact that I had stopped by that day to pick up some documents. (I was a manager, I had business to do).”
8. This is pretty crazy.
“I signed an NDA after negotiating a six figure settlement with my mortgage lender. Back in 2013, the bank illegally sold my home, while I was living there and making monthly payments. I discovered this when “new owners” evicted me and my three kids.
At the time, I thought someone was trying to steal my identity, etc. I spent the next two years writing legal documents and had to represent myself in court. (The bank “owned” every legit legal firm I contacted. Also, the first lawyer I hired took my last $7,000 and was promptly disbarred for misconduct with previous cases.) I had no money, no home but I had a laptop, printer and access to the county court law library.
We were about a week away from selecting a jury, when we came to a settlement agreement. In the end, each of my kids (now in their twenties) got an inexpensive new car and I live at the beach. “Which bank?” you ask. I can’t tell you the name, but might I suggest that it rhymes with “case.”
They settled because they were worried that if the case went to trial, it would become public. Then, everyone would know, for certain, that they had lied, cheated and swindled to steal homes from hardworking people. The bank would lose when no one took out new loans with them.”
9. In competition with each other.
“I was a contractor for NASA. I still fully support the agency, but I was extremely bugged when I learned that each separate NASA center (e.g., JPL, Kennedy, Ames, Goddard) hides many of its inventions and breakthroughs from the other centers so that when HQ is ready to assign a big mission (and a lot of dollars) to one center, they have a better chance to compete over the others.
“Look what we invented! Ames can’t do this over there! Give us the next moon orbiter!”
The downside is that there is a ton of reinvention and duplicated efforts going on. Sometimes years of work go down the drain when another center does the same thing faster. My perspective was: you all work for NASA.
Share knowledge, collaborate. I was frequently ordered to tone down anything revealing when speaking to other centers.”
10. That’s gross.
“We re-used buffet style food served in a cafeteria that we’re supposed to compost and record as waste.
The health inspector says anything that’s left open buffet style and serve yourself can’t be taken back and repurposed because it’s not monitored and could be cross contaminated or many other things (nobody should ever eat buffet style if avoidable fyi) but the fortune 500 company I worked for was unhappy about the money they were losing by composting the food so they make us keep it and re-serve it later or repurpose it into soup or casserole or something.
Personally I never did this and just waited for my boss to leave and compost the food but others I worked with were too worried about losing their jobs to go against orders. I didn’t want to be fired but felt morally obligated to not feed people food that was meant to be garbage, so I just sneaky tossed it out when nobody was looking because I got paid really well there.
We all had to sign NDA’s saying we wouldn’t tell the media or non employees about recipes and procedures that covered leftover food and food waste. Eventually my boss discovered what I was doing and I stood up to him about not being willing to reuse garbage as food so we agreed that I’d just quit because while they could force me not to talk about it, they couldn’t actually force me to do something illegal for my job and I was clearly refusing to do it.”
11. Probably a lot of this going around.
“My last company (a medium sized airline) paid their CEO a 10 million dollar bonus AFTER he bankrupted the company.”
12. Fine dining…
“I used to work in fine dining in Oklahoma City.
Cocaine. Cocaine everywhere. I’ve personally walked in on several NBA players over the years, face down in that white girl.
Come to mention it, I’ve seen several of them fucking other guests on the same bathroom counter that their teammates just did a line off of.
Personally got to watch Harold Hamm sign his divorce check. $975 million is a whole lot of zeros in a small space.
Wild times indeed.”
13. Gettin’ shady in Texas.
“I used to work for a construction company in rural Texas, and man we did so much shady shit. Honestly my boss was like the Joe Exotic of construction. Always calling us the N word, cussing us out, threatening to fight us.
None of our haul trucks could pass a state inspection because he was too cheap to fix them up. He never paid his taxes on any of the trackhoes. Anytime the tax man would show up, we would have to drive all the equipment deep into the woods to hide it. He always paid the OSHA inspector off because he knew our shops couldn’t pass inspection.
We had mountains of scrap metal in the woods. Mountains of old oil buckets stacked in the woods. We had an old rail car in the back that was full of oil/hydraulic/transmission fluid. The cap was off so when it rained it overflowed and would just drain into the earth.
I can’t count how many times we would get some equipment in and he would tell us to dump the fluid into one of the ponds. We always had guys up there trying to sell drugs and shit. Telling you my 3 years there was wild.”
14. Well, that’s disappointing.
“My best friend worked at a roadside attraction near Chattanooga, TN, called Ruby Falls (there’s something else called Ruby Falls elsewhere in the country). It’s supposedly a waterfall inside a cave. Of course, the trail to the cave is re-done with all sorts of rock brought in from around the world – I think they’ve owned up to that part now.
But the “waterfall” itself is barely a trickle naturally, and then only in the wetter season. They’ve run a pipe up there to supplement the falls, hidden by cracks and crevices and cemented over, and powered by a pump off to the side, which you can’t hear when the water is splashing down from 100 feet overhead. It’s 99% from the City of Chattanooga (or maybe Lookout Mountain) municipal water supply.
Of course, with such a wet area, old electrical wires going back to the Great Depression, and 300 feet underground, it sputters, or shorts out and stops every now and then. The first rule in the Falls Room is “make everybody leave immediately if the power goes out”, not for safety, but because the fable agreed-upon will be shown as fake.”
As someone who has never been anywhere near an NDA and probably never will be, those answers were pretty interesting.
How about you?
Have you had any experiences like this?
If so, please share them with us in the comments!
