People Who Signed Now Expired NDAs Share What They Couldn't Tell Us Before
When you get a new job, you might be asked to sign an NDA. The contract states that you can't speak about any behind-the-scenes activity within the company for a certain period of time.
From a moving company to a national bank, signing that piece of paper is crucial for work. This contract can also be found when you're getting an early glimpse of an exclusive or unfinished product.
If you accidentally break your NDA, you can face severe penalties, including getting sued. After the NDA ends, however, you can dish on that hidden stuff to your heart's content.
These people broke free of their NDAs a long time ago and shared what went down. As expected, some of their stories are insane. If you're ever been confronted with an NDA, you'll be able to relate to the following stories.
Don't forget to check the comment section below the article for more interesting stories!
#1 Gotta Keep Them Separated
I interned at a major daytime TV talk show. My job was to give audience members either a red, yellow, or purple card based on how attractive they were and to seat them accordingly.
Good looking people got yellow and really good looking people got purple, which meant hey got sat in the front and waited in the nice big room with free pizza and AC. Red people waited in the overcrowded room with no AC and got seated last.
When they asked about why they were in different rooms, we had to say it was because of a fire hazard. Since the audience is on camera, they specifically told me to seat fat and handicapped people in the back and corners. Ratings!
Also, the guests on the show were incentivized to overreact.
#2 Fake Money Don't Work Here
I signed an NDA when I worked at a bank. We had to censor information in documents. One time, an old guy bought a car in his wife's name. He ended up missing a payment date.
Turns out, he was scammed out of his money by a con-artist who told him the monarchy would be restored with its own money, so they should invest in it at a reduced price... The poor guy tried to pay the bank with fake money.
#3 Complain Online Instead
I used to work for a first-line support call center, operated by a very large IT heavyweight.
I was working a particular account and was advised that if anyone asked to make a complaint, we had to direct them towards the complaints area on private intranet (which we did not operate or have access to).
The secret which we were told to keep, on the threat of disciplinary dismissal, was that the complaints area didn't actually exist. There was no complaints procedure to skew the customer satisfaction figures from the desk to entirely positive.
The assumption was that people would just not be able to find the complaints area, give up and not bother pursuing the complaint.
#4 The (Encryption) Key To The City
Part of the way digital content is protected when transmitted on HDMI interfaces is by the use of encryption. To make this work, every HDMI device must contain a unique encryption key.
This is enforced contractually, or at least it was where I worked. If the ROMs we made for use with HDMI contained a duplicate key, we were liable for a $10,000 fine per duplicate.
We had multiple instances reported to us of us providing ROMs with duplicate keys. The system we had for writing the keys was managed by one guy, and he had apparently screwed up a few times and re-used a key file.
Each key file contained hundreds of keys. Had our companu ever found out about this, we would have been on the hook for fines totaling millions of dollars. They never found out, because we never told them.
