I've seen users who have every file set to 777. They do it to "avoid permissions issues"

My guess would be mounting an NTFS partition - with ntfs-3g it will load everything as 777 just by default, since it can’t translate the permissions.

Well, everybody has 1777 as /tmp (with the sticky bit).

  $ ll -d /tmp
  drwxrwxrwt. 20 root root 4096 Mar  3 12:19 /tmp
  $ mkdir mytmp
  $ chmod 1777 mytmp
  $ ll -d mytmp
  drwxrwxrwt. 1 luser lgroup 0 Mar  3 12:19 mytmp

[dead]