23
votes
Modern myths
What’s the wild enterprise-level rumor or urban legend someone dropped on you while you were on the clock?
Hoping someone here's gotta have a story so insane it sounds like total BS at least
What’s the wild enterprise-level rumor or urban legend someone dropped on you while you were on the clock?
Hoping someone here's gotta have a story so insane it sounds like total BS at least
Not huge, but my only contribution I can think of. I work in healthcare. A person I work with was infected with the original strain/round of COVID. To this day, he suffers from coughing fits every 15-60 minutes that sound like he's trying to cough up both his lungs. He developed significant dyspnea on exertion, along with cardiac issues.
He is fervently and adamantly "COVID was a hoax, and the COVID vaccines are harmful".
It's really disheartening to see from someone whose career is "behind the vale". His role is a registered nurse, which required some kind of higher education and healthcare science based classes. I know there's always going to be people who are this way. It's just extra disheartening to see it from someone who by all accounts should know better.
In many countries, nurses are some of the most vocal professionals AGAINST vaccines. Go figure.
I also have a friend who gets sick very often. If something is lingering around, he’ll catch it. He’s had Covid about a dozen times so far (I’ve lost count), but still refuses to vaccinate “because they’re forcing us to”. That’s it. That’s his reasoning: because someone told him to do it he won’t.
...if he's already had CoViD a dozen times, a predictive vaccine's not going to do much more for his immune system at this point but at least his post-vaccine reaction should be moderate...
I don't know if this is exactly what you meant, but this reminds me of another vaccine-related myth: that the post-vaccine side effects tell you how effective the vaccine is.
It doesn't. You can have a strong visible reaction or no visible reaction, and in either case, you'll have no idea whether your body is properly recognizing the vaccine and producing the proper antibodies (though it usually will be in both cases).
...no, i'm referencing that post-vaccine reactions tend to hit hardest upon initial exposure and become more moderate with subsequent boosters or after repeated infections...
The cognitive dissonance with the antivax crowd remains fascinating. "They're forcing us to" as they freely decline.
I used to be in the French army and, it being a sort of closed-off, parallel universe, conversations were rife with completely unverifiable albeit entertaining tales. The one I liked most was the following: to clean the barrels of rifles, we used small, rectangular pieces of cloth called chiffons calibrés at the end of metal rods. The legend was that those chiffons were cut from leftover bandes molletières (leg wraps) which were part of the army's uniform during World War 1, and which were ordered from various manufacturers in such insanely large quantities that the army still had them lying around somewhere almost a century later. This story was believable because the army, at the time at least, was notorious for using completely outdated equipment and getting scammed by equipment suppliers.
A buddy of mine who was also in the army once told me that they’d get shit for not putting the covers back on analog binoculars lenses. The reason they were given is that it’s paramount they put the covers back on because the sun light (and the moon light at night which was even worse) will damage the binoculars optics and they’ll become dark and stop working overtime.
...UV exposure can deteriorate optics over time; i wouldn't worry much about moonlight but you'll still benefit from keeping dust + condensation off the lenses...
Hm, not so much a rumor but a story from the IT sector... I guess everyone that works in this area has at least heard of companies that do cyber security very poorly...
Well this is not a story about that kind of company ...
I have been working as a contractor for a company that is on another level. They went all in the cyber security, with obscure proprietary vpn software that does not do traffic tunneling very good, well it does not do anything well, its a pain to use and UDP traffic is a problem, they have configured it so it pushes to the work computer about 16k of different routes. That is not the only software you need to have installed on the work computer for security reasons. The other one is running multiple python scripts periodically with admin privileges, mostly disk scanning of vulnerabilities. And its not even a financial or security oriented company. There is a specific behavior from employees that I noticed, when questioning people on this topic: "let the security team handle it, its not a problem for me" for things that could be done on an individual level are now offloaded on the security team and software. Which in my opinion is a red flag.
It’s all about compliance and ticking that box on your audit! Whether the software is effective or not doesn’t matter, but you can now tell your vendors “we’re secure we have a VPN and regular virus scans”. Poof you’re now SOC2 compliant and certified!