'The store closed down not two months later': Employee fired over technicality, takes their stuff and leaves company nonfunctional

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    Font - Posted by u/PunkTyrantosaurus 264 Fire me because I did my job? Okay. Hope you don't need all of these supplies. XL OC I love taking photos of people. To the point that I have two resumes for applying for jobs and one of them is specifically for photography work. So I was psyched when I got a job in a photo studio! It was a chain and it wasn't like high quality work, but it was still awesome. I took a lot of photos of very cute babies in particular. Well the company had a three strike pol
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    Font - Okay. Doesn't seem like a great business model but okay. And being fair, I did get two strikes which were very reasonable. One day I missed work because I forgot to set an alarm. It was a super irregular schedule and it wasn't always easy to keep track of. Mea Culpa. The next strike happened because I scheduled a photoshoot for before the beginning of a shift accidentally. The program was supposed to only show you times that an employee would be available for doing photoshoots, and they c
  • 03
    Font - Now the last strike... I actually got two on the same day. Around Christmas, our store goes nuts. We have to have twice as many people working in order to keep everything in order. During that, I was training a new employee, and helping with her photoshoots and my own and running cash and taking passport photos and teaching her the rules for them and and and- It was a nightmare. What made it worse was that one customer submitted two complaints that day about me. See, this customer felt I
  • 04
    Font - The one that didn't know how to do the job yet so I had to tell her how to do things. Apparently I deserved to be fired for telling her how to do things. I was heartbroken. It's been a few years now so I've gotten over it, but I was so happy working as a photographer. But here's where the malicious compliance finally kicks in. See, by my nature, I end up doing a lot of work that isn't actually my job because I want to help. I enjoy feeling useful. But they're firing me because they don't
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    Font - I stopped actively recruiting customers, which is what you're supposed to do in your down time, cold call previous customers and prowl around the attached mall for people you can convince to get photos. (The best tactic was always to find people with new young ones, tell them how beautiful their baby is, offer them a free print of one of the photos after a shoot. Almost no one passes that up because then they have a wonderful photo to hold on to. I didn't feel guilty doing it because it g
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    Font - And then on my last day, the truest malicious compliance happened. They wanted me gone. Okay. I took my name tag and packed it away. I went into the photo studio and grabbed the kids toys I had brought in to help get young ones to cooperate. (Babies don't really understand a stranger saying smile for the camera- but if you shake a rattle at them and make silly faces, they're very good at smiling for that.) I cleaned up all of the things I had laid out neatly for easy preparation, and put
  • 07
    Font - And then came the real part that this title refers to- Over my nine months working there, a number of issues had come up with the things we worked with. For the passport photos we needed a paper trimmer to slice off the edges quickly and neatly. We had one when I started- and then it broke. I brought in a replacement. It got broken too. Still, we needed one, so I brought in another replacement. We also had gotten our stapler stolen. No worries, I had one at home we could use. And the keys
  • 08
    Font - Well my boss accidentally dumped her coffee on that sign after she tripped one day. So I went out of the way to get a new one printed, bought a plastic sleeve for it, and set it up with a cardboard backing so it wouldn't break or get ruined. It was better than the old one. So of course, when I left, I took my sign, my keychains, my paper trimmer, my stapler, my toys, and notably, my shutter button. See the camera had a shutter button attached that would allow you to move about while snapp
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    Font - The store closed down not two months later. Crazy how when you fire your hardest worker over things that you told them to do (and one missed shift, mea culpa) other employees are less than enthused about the chance of the same thing happening. And no one else worked nearly as hard to keep everything in the black as I did. (Not to say there's anything wrong with that, I liked everyone except the manager since it was ly two other employees and they did their work well and treated me nicely.
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    Font - Simply enough- there was no one to cover my shifts. One employee was in China celebrating new year's with her grandparents, one was working on her own photos which became her gallery show, and the manager would be very very over fourty hours if she worked my shifts too. And I needed the money and wanted to say goodbye to some of the kids and parents who I took photos of every month. (Relatively common, a lot of them wanted photos of their babies as they grew and changed.) Though this has
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    Font - Edit 3: It has been brought to my attention repeatedly that a shutter release cord does not have enough power to do that much damage which leads me to believe that one of the commenters who suggested it may have been an issue with the flash set up in the studio is probably right- that I was just completing the circuit. All I know was that it hurt like a bitch, and that it stopped happening after the cord was replaced. Now it seems likely that it just stopped happening because I was then n
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    Font - SerenityViolet +1. Just crazy. I don't even get the 3 strikes thing. People occasionally make mistakes. I would not give a strike unless it was egregious. And they completely failed to take into account your hard work and dedication! 2.8k Reply Share FatherDuncanSinners +1. I don't understand the strikes never falling off. 1.9k Are you going to tell me that I could get two strikes, have an unblemished record for the next ten years, and then get fired because I got my third strike for some
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    Font - Geminii27 +3 And this is why, if you ever bring anything personal into work, you make sure you have legal records of being the owner of that item from before that date. Ideally, purchase receipts, if you bought it for that purpose. But otherwise, something so that when the employer inevitably accuses you of theft, you can show without a shadow of a doubt that the item is and always was your private property. 408 Reply Share
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    Font - Seegtease 3 strike policies are idiotic and belittling. It's like a mom counting to three. Man if I fired everybody for being late 3 times I'd never have any employees. Reply Share 492 TheFluffiestRedditor +2. I'd have to fire myself 160 Reply Share
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    Font - EchoGecko795 +3 I learned early on to never ever bring my own stuff for company use. Send an email for a request and just let the undone work pile up. Reply Share 193 PunkTyrantosaurus OP Yeah we did send the requests. But the company never gave us anything. Because we could technically function with what we had. (They even thought that about the paper cutter. Don't know how they expected us to do that, but they did.) Reply Share 57 ...

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