Yes the reign of terror that spawned the majority of the content used in this blog is coming to an end. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what song I would use for the title, what I would discuss here. I've sat down to write over the proceeding months, and everything I've written could get me sued or killed. So let's just break down the way this came about.
The expiry date on my contract when I signed it was April 30. Around the last week in January, I received a call from my Vegas boss asking me an important question.
Vegas Boss: Would you rather transfer back to the office in Vegas or to the office in Macau?
Me: [after a pause] The project is still two months away from being finished.
VB: I've been instructed to ask
Me: Well.... Neither really. But I guess I'd be willing to listen to an offer to move to Macau.
VB: Okay I'll let them know.
Me: When would this supposed transfer take place?
VB: When does your contract expire?
Me: April 30th.
VB: Oh.... Wow.... Umm.... I've been led to believe this will be happening in the next week or so.
The next day I had the following exchange with my local boss:
Local Boss: So you've decided you don't want to transfer back to Vegas or to Macau, huh? Okay, I'm going to send you a letter giving you your 30 day notice, so your last day will be March 8th.
Me: Whoa, whoa whoa. I never said I wouldn't transfer. I said I'd hear an offer to transfer.
LB: Huh, that's not what I heard.
Me: Well that's what I said.
The next day I got an email containing a letter that read, "Since you have refused a transfer, we are terminating your contract." Somehow I had refused a transfer that had never been offered. It must have been a Lunar New Year Miracle. In the interim 30 days notice they are required by Vietnamese law to give me, I was asked to complete project photography for both the project in Vietnam (the one I said above was still 2 months away from completion) and another one in Manila. My travel was scheduled for the week of March 4th.
"But wait" I said....
Let me get this straight.... You want me to shoot a project that's not finished, and is nowhere near finished, then you want to fly me to Manila on the final week of my contract to shoot a different project? When am I going to do the finish work? That's takes about triple the time than the actual shooting. So I devised a plan:
Take the rest of the month of February off. I already worked the first week of February. Tet accounts for the second week. The company has to pay for my accumulated vacation anyway, so I offered to use it and then take whatever days in February that were left as unpaid leave. My final thirty days would begin March 1, whence I would fly to Manila, shoot, spend a week finishing those photos; then go to the Vietnam project, shoot, and spend my final week editing those. This gave the Vietnam project nearly another month to get closer to completion, but also gave me enough time to finish the photo work properly. This came with the added benefit of being available for the Vietnam project people, who know very little about my work, to contact me with questions for an extra month. It came with the extra-super-added bonus of costing exactly $0.
The response? First silence. Then through an intermediary I learned that the Eyes-Only response was, "We have people who can do Photoshop."
I suppose it had been a while since I was reminded that I am nothing more than an automaton being paid company money to press a button and transport a camera and tripod from here to there without being beaten up or arrested. I said I'd do it simply so I could be away from my desk for two weeks.
While I waited to depart to Manila I received an email congratulating a client on winning, not one, but TWO internationally recognized industry awards. The project in question I designed. I also took the photos that won the awards. The email made no mention of the team involved in the creation of the project. The email blast was not even directed internally, but sent to clients. I only received it because I have a pretty good relationship with the marketing person in Vegas. After begging and cajoling to be put on the mailing list for nearly a year, she finally caved. As I read the email I tried to forget that I'd never been invited to an industry awards show, despite being the sole supplier of entry content for FOUR YEARS. Their website has displayed nothing but my photography for more than two years straight.
I am TetVeg. I come programmed with photography skills that you may exploit for marketing purposes, not pay me and then ask for the $1500 of photo equipment you bought for me after I supplied you with over $200,000* in free marketing photography. They didn't even buy the camera I use. We're really talking about a single lens.
*How do I calculate that number? Well the normal (on the low end to be frank about it) cost for a nice photo like the ones I do is about $500. 500 photos, $500 a piece.... do you need a calculator? I hear tell of photographers doing the same thing as me who charge $5000 a DAY for the service I've been doing for, well, nothing.
Yep you read that correctly.
After supplying the company with more than 500 beautiful and complete photos, they are asking me to return three lenses they bought for me in 2008. I have not earned them, despite winning them numerous awards, providing magazine content for at least a dozen spreads (in which they conveniently forgot to give me photo credit), and literally thousands of client presentations. They created an inch thick book for marketing purposes that is composed almost entirely of photos I took, but I could not have a copy until I was given permission by the OWNER of the company. The president of the company said, "absolutely not.*" If I was a client they'd just give me one for free.
*This is an interesting story in and of itself. I was called into a meeting in 2010 to sign a paper in which I agreed to work 50-hour work weeks indefinitely, while being paid less than minimum wage for all overtime. The meeting was to be held between my boss, the president and the head of HR. I took this as my first (and last as it turns out) opportunity to have a quasi-review and discuss all the ways I'd gone above and beyond the call of duty and what they were doing to me was downright criminal. I pared the "I saved you" number down to $100,000 and told them I expected to be compensated. Then I showed them the book, where I'd flagged with bright pink Post-Its the pages in which my photos appeared... I used a lot of Post-Its that day. The response? "If everyone charged us retail price for their services we'd be out of business." And that was it. No discussion. No what-ifs. Sign on the dotted line and go back to your desk chain. I was so shocked that I couldn't think to say, "You pay me to design lights for you, not take photos." The HR lady then flat out lied to me saying that my overtime pay rate was time and a half calculated over 50 hours, and not half time calculated at fifty hours. I should have quit when I got my first paycheck, in which I brought home $42 for 17 hours of overtime. Instead I worked 18 months of Fridays for less than minimum wage before being shipped to the third world. My boss, bless him, looked the other way while I spent all of those Fridays screwing around and doing nothing. He got it. He was, and remains, the only one.
So I shot the project in Vietnam. I had to skip about half of it due to the fact that it was unfinished. I can't really describe the feeling of depression I knew after pouring my heart, soul and guts into this project for nearly two years, I'd end up with photos that look like crap. I'd dreamed about the day I could walk through with my camera and tripod and capture the fruits of two years of suffering. It was not to be. Had I known this nine months ago what I would be writing today, I would have made more effort to write here.
So what do I do now? The "PWCDP"s* all live in Vegas, and here I sit, halfway around the world with 50Gb of photos and nowhere to put them. The solution? The president will fly to Vietnam from Vegas and carry with him a 120Gb solid state hard drive onto which I will load the photos. He will then return to the PWCDPs with my negatives. From there they will figure out, without my help mind you, how to make them look as pretty as I do. Because, you see, dear reader, a photo like this is not just made up of one shot. It's a bunch of shots all put together. The best parts of two to five shots all assembled into one mega-shot. How will they know what is what? I am the only person who has both been inside the property and knows Photoshop. To most anyone else, the negatives look like something shot by a hacky photographer. Massively under- or over-exposed shots that must be then edited and reassembled digitally. Doesn't that sound like a fun job for someone with no knowledge of what the actual building look like? And we're not talking about a couple hundred photos here. Over the past ten days I've accumulated thousands of photos that will have to be sifted through. Who knows the order and what goes with what? Me and only me, that's who.
*That's People Who Can Do Photoshop to the layman (or laywoman -I suppose).
When I arrived in Manila, I arrived without a contact. What does that mean? That means that I had no one at the project I could call and say, "Hey I'm in town, can you please call off the attack dogs and thugs you have guarding your property so that I might bring my camera over and snap some photos?" In addition, my company had been kicked off the project, and I'd learned through my non-company network, that the mere mention of my company to the wrong person would result in immediate expulsion from the property, possible jail-time and maybe an ass-kicking to boot.
I can already picture how this will all turn out. I'll return the lenses like a retriever. If they aren't willing to give them to me for five years of loyal photographic service, then I'd rather not have the poison in my house. I can buy a new lens, but I have to go to America to get it (see below). I can't buy karma. The negatives will be sent back to Vegas. No one will know what to make of them. The final photos will be underwhelming. And the company will never contact me again about photography work. Their reasoning will be that I "dropped the ball" on the last assignment. I will be left with no lens for this kind of shooting, no photos because they technically belong to the company, no photo credits to my name, no pay for the work done and a nice don't-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass-on-the-way-out send off.
The meringue on top of this shit pie is that a clause in my contract states that upon either completion of the contract or my termination I am entitled to a flight home -that is a flight back to the US. I indicated in my decline of the offer I eventually received to transfer to Macau that I wanted to explore other options. They took this to mean I am not coming back and are now resisting adhering the terms of my contract.
At 17h00 tomorrow I think I'll aim for this attitude:
And I apologize for the whiny-pants after not writing for so long. Happier times await! Dick jokes will return next week!
I know, I know. Another cover. But it's a damn good one....
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