Gaming The System With These Unethical Life Hacks

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Gaming The System With These Unethical Life Hacks
Photo Credits: Liz Welsh (CC BY 2.0)

Look, you really shouldn’t do any of these. It’s not cool, man. Not cool.

Every single one of them is unethical and is basically a dick move — but hey, these are still interesting to know. Do not recommend though.

Anyways. Onto the list.

Get around the paywalls of online publications.

Ever stumbled upon a headline in New York Times, New Yorker or Harvard Business Review and when you are about to read that one article, boom, you get slapped with a paywall announcing that you exceeded your monthly free quota?

Who the hell actually subscribe to every publication they read right?

The solution to bypass these paywalls is simple. Every browser allows us to browse in secrecy without storing cookies, login records, and browsing history. This mode stops the paywalls from seeing the number of articles you have read.

In Chrome, switch to Incognito Mode by going to ‘File’ > ‘New Incognito Window’, or you can press ‘Ctrl(or CMD)+Shift+N’. For Safari and Firefox users, it’s called Private Browsing (open “New Private Window”). For Internet Explorer users, it’s called stop using Internet Explorer.

You can get any phone charger you want for free.

You can get any phone charger you want for free

Every Starbucks coffee shop in the world has shedloads, yes shedloads, of assorted phone chargers left by other guests. People simply forget about them and walk away.

All you have to do is to approach one of the staff there and claim that you left a charger somewhere in the shop.

“Hey, I’m sorry but I left my phone charger here a few days ago.”

The staff will go inside and come back to you with a bunch of chargers found lately.

Voila! Take your pick.

And if you need to convince the staff that it is indeed your charger, simply say: “Yeah this is the one, it has scratches along the corners.”

Well, which one doesn’t?

Get free shipping every time.

Get free shipping every time.

Tired of not meeting the minimum order requirement for Amazon’s free shipping? Of course, you are.

Here’s what you can do.

Fill in the balance by adding items only available for pre-order. Like an unreleased book, Bluray movies, or video games. They all count toward the minimum order requirement for free shipping. And you won’t be charged for the pre-order items until they actually become available and are shipped out.

Simply Add to Cart and wait for your item to be dispatched. Then cancel the pre-order fillers.

Vending machines that say “Keep the change.”

Vending machines that say

There is this magical item called duct tape that can be used for a variety of minor to major emergencies, from artwork to clothing, from fixing a broken headlight to mouth taping your snoring partner.

Here’s one more for the road. You cut a strip of this wonderful material, and stick it to the roof of the vending machine’s change dispenser. Then at the end of the day, you harvest that nice stash of coins with a slash of your pocket knife.

Make your resume more discoverable.

In case you don’t know, many employers and recruiters use programs (such as Applicant Tracking Systems or Automated Resume Screeners) to weed out irrelevant resumes.

Improve your chances of getting through the system and into the hands of a real person by peppering keywords that relate to the job (assuming you have them) into your resume’s header or footer in white fonts.

Sneaky.

Hide your mistakes in a written examination.

Hide your mistakes in a written examination.

In the above answer, it should say ‘potential energy is greater‘ instead of ‘lesser‘. A few incorrect words were deliberately struck off and replaced with the correct ones (i.e. kinetic; velocity; acceleration).

It’s a little messy here and the marker won’t have the patience to check line by line. Instead, he will scan quickly through the answer, only to find himself focusing on the struck words. Because that’s where you seemed unsure. And mistakes usually sprout out of uncertainty.

So the next time you are not sure about part of your answer, direct the marker’s attention away to the next line, by striking off some random words there and writing the correct one beside it.

Get more time for your assignment.

Get more time for your assignment.

Another hack for students. Sometimes you just need an additional day or two to complete your assignment.

Open your document with Notepad instead of Microsoft Word/Powerpoint.

Remove a big chunk of gibberish text from the Notepad document and hit Save. This will corrupt it.

Submit your assignment and continue working on your paper while waiting for the professor to contact you about the error. If you are not done yet when he calls, pretend to ask for more details and say you will look into the issue.

Finish your paper after the deadline. Permit yourself to a celebration dance.

The box of cash.

The box of cash.

You are with a friend.

Place $20 into a box and ask your friend to do the same.

Now the box contains $40 and you both know it.

Sell the box to your friend for $30.

And you both walk away with a $10 profit.