'Hope you don't need all of these supplies': Photographer gets fired over petty three-strike policy, spends final two weeks sabotaging business

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Jan 4, 2024 11:00 AM EST

This photographer was doing the work of several people, and their company punished them for it instead. It all happened when this person was working in a photography studio. Photography studios seem to be having a renaissance lately—lots of people began following the "awkward family photo" trend for their holiday pictures. They realized you can go and get pictures taken professionally with your friends or family, and the photographers will help you pose in the silliest positions you can dream up. 

Some people also love to take yearly photoshoots with their babies to celebrate each birthday. Trying to get those kids to stay still, remain clean, and look happy all at once can be quite the challenge. If you've ever met a toddler, you know that staying still is not something they ever willingly do. So the photographers have quite the job cut out for them!  As a photographer, u/PunkTyrantosaurus had some interesting insight into the profession. They shared that they brought a lot of their own props to the photo studio. It seems like this studio was working on a shoestring budget: the OP mentions that their equipment didn't work, and one electronic even gave them a shock. 

Advertisement

  • Still, the OP was planning on staying at this photography job, until a customer had a few complaints about them. For some reason, their job decided to let them work a full two weeks even after letting them go, for reasons the OP explains in the comments section. That's not common practice at all—you wouldn't want a vengeful employee snapping photos for several weeks. This person got some excellently petty revenge on their boss. Maybe that'll make them rethink that silly three-strike policy. 

    Next, check out these moments of instant karma: like one guy who was trying to litter in nature, and ended up throwing his phone off a cliff instead.

  • 01
    Cheezburger Image 9860078592
    via Jannis Edelmann on Unsplash
  • 02
    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.
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 03
    Well the company had a three strike policy. Once there were three issues with you, you were gone. They made you sign off on every single one of the reports. It didn't matter how much later it was that you got your next strike, they never went away. 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 trac
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 04
    The program was supposed to only show you times that an employee would be available for doing photoshoots, and they changed our hours with very little warning, so the photoshoot that I had scheduled the week before that would have been within our hours was no longer. I felt super bad for the mom and daughter who came in early for their photos and helped them sort everything out with a free photo redemption in apology. I still got my second strike for that. Now the last strike... I actually got t
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 05
    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 was pushing her to buy photos: Literally all this company cares about is pushing the photo packages and I was instructed relentlessly to do it more and with more
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 06
    So. Great. I convinced a customer to spend money instead of just giving them free things and not getting a dollar from them. Like the company was always yelling at me to do. And I got a complaint for that. Great. And then the other complaint was even more ludicrous- The customer felt I was being too bossy with the other photographer. The one that I was training. 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
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 07
    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 want me to sell things, or train people, like they had told me to do. So for the last two weeks of my job- I stopped counting all of the money for deposits. That
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 08
    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 genuinel
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 09
    had seemed interested but was unconvinced and that a simple reminder of the offer would probably be enough to get them to buy. Or I would make a note about someone who forgot their passport photos and whether or not they had paid already. 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 reall
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 10
    of the things I had laid out neatly for easy preparation, and put them back in storage. I cleaned up the counters to get rid of all of the notes and passport photos that weren't claimed that day because that was what we were technically supposed to do. 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. W
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 11
    stapler stolen. No worries, I had one at home we could use. And the keys to the storage, the extra receipt paper, the passport paper, where we keep the deposits, where we keep our paper files- they were tiny. And the colour of them was so bland that throughout the course of the day, they would get lost easily thirty times. I had bought a large blue fluffy keychain to attach to it with permission from the boss. Never lost the keys again, not one of us. We had also had a sign when I started there
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 12
    passport photo drop ins. 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
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 13
    This cord had gotten frayed and not replaced. It shocked me nasty enough to leave a burn, so I took it off the camera and brought my own in. I got a call the next day asking me how dare I steal the companies' supplies. I calmly replied that I had just taken back the items that belonged to me. And that they could keep the broken paper trimmer that I had brought in. I even left them a pair of scissors I brought for a back up when the first paper cutter broke. I even brought them a box of paperclip
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 14
    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 only two other employees and they did their work well and treated me nicely. They just had a better sense of doing what they were paid for and nothing else.) And for reference? The employee who t
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 15
    time I raised my voice at either herself or the only other employee, was because it was too loud for them to hear me otherwise. She apologized to me, said that she was worried it was her fault because she had been a little nervous that day because she was dealing with other things, and was worried that the customer had gotten the wrong impression because of that. Said employee then went on to have her own gallery show, leaving shortly after I was fired. Edit: People have raised questions about w
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 16
    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 reminde
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 17
    their kid to take such nice photos. It felt awesome. It's been six years so I had forgotten about that. Edit 2: Just another torturous tidbit about this company- they kept every studio temperature the same as corporate. Corporate was in a very different climate area. It was almost always either meltingly hot all summer or freezing cold in winter. 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
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 18
    completing the circuit. All I know was that it hurt like a , and that it stopped happening after the cord was replaced. Now it seems likely that it just stopped happening because I was then no longer in contact with another good conductor like metal.
    via u/PunkTyrantosaurus
  • 19
    SerenityViolet 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!
    via u/SerenityViolet
  • 20
    Geminii27 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.
    via u/Geminii27
  • 21
    Seegtease 3 strike policies are idiotic and belittling. It's like a mom counting to three. Man if I fired eveybody for being late 3 times I'd never have any employees.
    via u/Seegtease

Want More? Follow Us and Add Us as a Preferred Source on Google.

Tags

getting fired strike photography fired Photo photographer boss workplace-stories jobs job malicious compliance bosses work malicious-compliance-reddit workplace malicious compliance reddit
Scroll Down For The Next Article