ITT we vent about work and employment

Ahammer18 · Post by **Ahammer18** » Sun Aug 09, 2015 11:55 pm #111120

I work as a cashier at a local grocery store, and we are usually the busiest in the area due to our lower prices. Here are several things that REALLY get on my nerves.

1. Women who pay with cash that was stored in their bra against their bare breast
2. People who try walk ahead of their wife/mothers cart when looking to check out and 'scout' for an open lane
3. People who come in my lane after I close my sign and my lunch is at 13:00 and its 12:59
4. When my bagger is really fucking slow and it effects my productivity
5. When I accidentally ring up the wrong item and customers act like I did it deliberately
6. When people open up a snack for their kids in the store and I have to ring up the slobbery wrapper
7. Paper bags, the slow everyone down and they are a pain in the ass

Thats all I can think of right now

Akkryls · Post by **Akkryls** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 12:07 am #111122

RETAIL.
IT'S FUCKING AWFUL.

Takeguru · Post by **Takeguru** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 12:21 am #111126

Fucking couponers were the fucking bane of my existence when I worked at a grocery store.

Especially the ones that messed up cutting them out and the barcode won't scan and fucking shit buy a fucking paper guillotine if you're going to do 100s of fucking coupons weekly

Mister_Doc · Post by **Mister_Doc** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 12:24 am #111129

I push baskets at Walmart. It bloooooows

Ahammer18 · Post by **Ahammer18** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 12:25 am #111130

For those of you who don't know:

Stores do not lose money on coupons, the manufacturer pays back the value of the coupon, plus a premium, so the store actually makes money. Customers seem to think that we're out to get them when we literally CAN'T take their coupons.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 12:29 am #111132

I love my job and everyone I work with.
It's taken a long fucking time and a lot of jobs and random projects and other shit trying to put a means to an end but I've finally found a place I'd be comfortable spending the rest of my career working at.

I work for a company that sells Magic: The Gathering cards online. They're apparently pretty big? I haven't played the game in over a decade and I'm trying to resist getting back into it despite being saturated with it all day and most of my coworkers being pretty big on it. It's actually a pretty small team of people for the volume we do, but it's wall to wall nerds and everyone is just all around great and happy to be there every day doing what we do, myself included.

We sit around and talk about anime, video games, whatever all day while we work. We get paid well and the benefits are great. We can have up to an hour lunch if we want it, most people only use that extra time to get in some games of Magic on lunch. We have a bunch of different leagues going for different formats of different games. There's a bunch of community cards and shit in the break room if you want to just grab a random deck from some random game and play it with someone else. One night a week people stay late and play board games and other shit together. There's a bunch of alcohol in our break room if people want it, nobody cares if you go off on lunch and have a beer or two so long as it doesn't impact your work or become a problem.

I'm in fucking heaven. It's so good.

There was a recent arms race at work to get the biggest, baddest Nerf gun and people were frequently being assassinated or breaking out into different firefights around the room. I had a fucking Nerf revolver stashed into my packing materials like a goddamn spy in case I had to defend my team from threats. Someone had a chaingun. There was a sniper team. Someone was dual wielding assault rifles.

invisty · Post by **invisty** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 12:31 am #111133

I would gladly see my salary cut in half if I could have a job I enjoyed, or some friends in life. A stupid-figure salary does not buy money or friends, and I can't even find someone to go on a holiday with.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 12:33 am #111135

invisty wrote:I would gladly see my salary cut in half if I could have a job I enjoyed, or some friends in life. A stupid-figure salary does not buy money or friends, and I can't even find someone to go on a holiday with.

Yeah man. If I look at it that way I'm taking a pay cut of seven dollars an hour from my last job but the difference between being excited to go to work and spend the day with your coworkers vs. wishing the building would burn to the ground with everyone including yourself trapped inside is priceless.

Work to live, don't live to work. You gotta eat, you gotta work, but you don't have to feel like shit all day every day to do it.

Takeguru · Post by **Takeguru** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 12:34 am #111136

Oh, I guess right now I'm technically unemployed.

There's that, I suppose.

I could get a part time at the Fuckin' Gamestop on post but really, I'm pretty okay with not doing that.

I watch my sister's kid for room and board and what she gets in child support goes to me as payment, so it's not all bad.

Don't make enough to get hit by taxes and I have no bills so I'm living fairly easy.

invisty · Post by **invisty** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 12:49 am #111138

An0n3 wrote:Work to live, don't live to work. You gotta eat, you gotta work, but you don't have to feel like shit all day every day to do it.

Thanks Anon, I'm certainly looking at shifting on at some point in the future. I'm sacrificing a chunk of job enjoyment for a year or two such that I might gain some financial security, but my life has improved more than ever so I can't complain.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 12:53 am #111140

invisty wrote:
An0n3 wrote:Work to live, don't live to work. You gotta eat, you gotta work, but you don't have to feel like shit all day every day to do it.
Thanks Anon, I'm certainly looking at shifting on at some point in the future. I'm sacrificing a chunk of job enjoyment for a year or two such that I might gain some financial security, but my life has improved more than ever so I can't complain.

Dude if you want to relocate to my frozen chunk of hell I can let you know when we're hiring again. A lot of people here have teamed up and share apartments and shit together as well. It's as much some kind of fucking cult of nerds as it is a place of work.

Come drink some of this delicious kool-aid bruh.

invisty · Post by **invisty** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 1:09 am #111143

It sounds like a fantastic opportunity, but by the sounds of it I'd have to give up sailing, which keeps me sane.

EndgamerAzari · Mon Aug 10, 2015 1:19 am

I had an interview two weeks ago from tomorrow and I haven't heard anything yet. There was only one other guy with a third potential candidate so I figured my chances were at least 33%. I was on vacation last week, and told the hiring folks so, but I think they would've called me if they had good news.

Fuck, I don't want to go back to that cubicle for nine hours tomorrow. Anything but that. I want to be a Goddamn librarian.

Ricotez · Post by **Ricotez** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 1:38 am #111149

My state scholarship is about to end so I've been poking around for jobs a bit, hope I can fill the gap that will leave so my parents don't have to. Demand for bachelor-degree computer scientists is through the roof, but I have to find one I can combine with my master.

Hornygranny · Post by **Hornygranny** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 1:53 am #111151

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 2:45 am #111160

invisty wrote:It sounds like a fantastic opportunity, but by the sounds of it I'd have to give up sailing, which keeps me sane.

You would have to settle for sailing on what was, at one time, the second most polluted body of water on the entire planet.

So I mean maybe this is like next-level challenge mode sailing. You can ride a boat on the lake, but don't fucking fall in.

Wyzack · Post by **Wyzack** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 3:03 am #111165

Is it second to that fucking cesspool river in India with dead people floating iñ it?

Anywho I am right now working 50 hour weeks and not getting paid doing what I love as part of a biotech startup company trying to make a name for ourselves, and I work at mcshittles on the weekend to make some money. It is pretty tiring.

As soon as we get some orders or customers or whatever on my good job I can quit slinging burgers and just do what I enjoy, but some days it feels like it is never gonna happen

Takeguru · Post by **Takeguru** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 3:16 am #111172

I think that Colorado river wins now.

Aloraydrel · Post by **Aloraydrel** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 3:18 am #111173

I work at my stores bakery department making pastries/donuts/cupcakes/cakes/and cake orders or working the front selling shit. All you get is people asking "Was X made today?" and despite a apple horn being made last night before I closed up people wont buy it.

Best part is I get to sit in the back on my phone 80% of the time during nightshifts which is just cleaning up/setting up anything that needs to be put on display and bagging/throwing away rolls/donuts/bagels.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 3:27 am #111175

Wyzack wrote:Is it second to that fucking cesspool river in India with dead people floating iñ it?

Anywho I am right now working 50 hour weeks and not getting paid doing what I love as part of a biotech startup company trying to make a name for ourselves, and I work at mcshittles on the weekend to make some money. It is pretty tiring.

As soon as we get some orders or customers or whatever on my good job I can quit slinging burgers and just do what I enjoy, but some days it feels like it is never gonna happen

We've been trying to clean it up for decades, so it has dropped. It was second to a body of water a nuclear power plant in Japan shit its pants into at one point.

Recently we tried to have this celebration where it was clean enough to swim in. So a bunch of local celebrities and people swam around in it from a dock to show the good people of our fair city how great it was to swim in.

They later repealed that and said they fucked up. It's actually still not good to swim in don't do that.

I hope all those fuckers got like...free hospital stays or something. Jokes on you, asshole.

Jeb · Post by **Jeb** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 3:29 am #111177

I literally just gave up 8 years of slinging sammiches to be the sole tech support guy at a local isp.

Been there a week and couldn't be happier and wouldn't go back for anything.

callanrockslol · Mon Aug 10, 2015 4:12 am

An0n3 wrote:I love my job and everyone I work with.
It's taken a long fucking time and a lot of jobs and random projects and other shit trying to put a means to an end but I've finally found a place I'd be comfortable spending the rest of my career working at.

I work for a company that sells Magic: The Gathering cards online. They're apparently pretty big? I haven't played the game in over a decade and I'm trying to resist getting back into it despite being saturated with it all day and most of my coworkers being pretty big on it. It's actually a pretty small team of people for the volume we do, but it's wall to wall nerds and everyone is just all around great and happy to be there every day doing what we do, myself included.

We sit around and talk about anime, video games, whatever all day while we work. We get paid well and the benefits are great. We can have up to an hour lunch if we want it, most people only use that extra time to get in some games of Magic on lunch. We have a bunch of different leagues going for different formats of different games. There's a bunch of community cards and shit in the break room if you want to just grab a random deck from some random game and play it with someone else. One night a week people stay late and play board games and other shit together. There's a bunch of alcohol in our break room if people want it, nobody cares if you go off on lunch and have a beer or two so long as it doesn't impact your work or become a problem.

I'm in fucking heaven. It's so good.

There was a recent arms race at work to get the biggest, baddest Nerf gun and people were frequently being assassinated or breaking out into different firefights around the room. I had a fucking Nerf revolver stashed into my packing materials like a goddamn spy in case I had to defend my team from threats. Someone had a chaingun. There was a sniper team. Someone was dual wielding assault rifles.

You have found Nerdvana. You already won the thread.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 4:24 am #111184

We had like, a Geneva convention meeting when someone introduced this:

[youtube]uCoo7tok-gg[/youtube]

It shoots foam balls at 100fps. It's semi-automatic. Magazine fed. It only costs like, $50.

We had to stop work to talk about what would happen if the arms race got to a point where people were smuggling these into the building and unleashing on people and we collectively decided to call an armistice and a de-escalation of threats.

Post by **oranges** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 5:05 am #111188

Hornygranny wrote:REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

ye bro, ye ye

EndgamerAzari · Mon Aug 10, 2015 3:25 pm

Didn't get the position. They're keeping me in the pool for the opening of a second position in 6 months.

Not sure how to feel right now.

XSI · Post by **XSI** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 3:44 pm #111306

>Unemployed
>Government says that if I am unemployed, I have to work for them
>Get send to shithole where I'm pretty much forced to place stickers on drill bits all fucking day

Fuck

ThanatosRa · Post by **ThanatosRa** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 8:40 pm #111373

I work for a subcontractor that is hired by a satellite ISP here in the states.

However, I work for a specialized "Tier 3" section where do remote access computer repair. The amount of ignorance especially among rural customers is astounding. People who have NO BUSINESS having computers.

Oh, and I've learned to hate nearly all routers with a burning passion. Christ, if I just had the money to actually Get my A+ cert classes, I could do this for twice as much on a smaller scale.

BUt hey, I'm living comfortably.

tedward1337 · Mon Aug 10, 2015 10:23 pm

I work at a living history museum set in the year 1866. I have to dress up in period costume, and avoid killing the tourists who come in at 4:58 when I close at 5.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 11:48 pm #111415

Thought I'd snap a picture of the arms depot on the way out tonight. The sniper rifles and assault rifles seem to have been taken home by their respective owners, but there's still some crazy stuff in there. There's a lever-action nerf rifle that's pretty fucking awesome, a chaingun, and other stuff.

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 12:43 am #111431

Hey this is a venting thread, not a "Look how awesome my life is guys" thread.

I used to work as a cashier at a fairly busy Safeway Supermarket. I didn't mind the customers as much as the terrible fucking hours they always gave me. 8-hour shifts either starting from 6AM or closes at Midnight.

The only time I really enjoyed it was when I got Head Cashier for the shift and got to stand behind the Customer Service desk. Most of my time there is spent looking pretty while controlling when people get to take their breaks. Not nearly as monotonous as regular cashier work and is actually pretty fun with the variety of things I got to do.

Nothing special from my current work life though, other than bad timing with added responsibilities and crucial decision making moments happening around the same time I am making my first home and car purchases.

RIP hobbies in the mean time.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:27 am #111438

Don't you currently work for Bioware?

I imagine your office experience is pretty similar. By your standards, shouldn't neither of us post in this thread then?

Mister_Doc · Post by **Mister_Doc** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:27 am #111439

Since I work outside I don't usually have to deal with customers directly, just all the trash they throw everywhere. It's been a hot and humid summer so that sucks ass. There is never an absence of screaming children to be heard.

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:31 am #111440

An0n3 wrote:I imagine your office experience is pretty similar. By your standards, shouldn't neither of us post in this thread then?

I'm sure everyone has something to gripe about at work. Doesn't matter what you do.

C'mon anon, post some bitching.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:40 am #111441

Well I work downtown so I get accosted by fucking lunatics every day.

Today this crazy lady asked me for change for the bus. And that wouldn't be anything spectacular except her one arm was doing this crazy twisty twirly shit like she was either at a rave or trying to cast some kind of hex on me.

The other day this guy was walking around with his pants around his thighs scooping up handfuls of rocks and throwing them at people or into traffic. It was actually kind of nice to watch an even crazier person attacking the regular crazy people that walk around. When I last saw him he was grappling with a street cone. The next day our local news reported that he was arrested shortly after I saw him.

I watched a woman get out of a taxi cab and start screaming "I AINT NO WHORE" and march off down the street. The guy stopped the cab in the middle of the road and walked after her shouting "IT AINT LIKE THAT IT AINT LIKE THAT". He then ran back to the cab, drove up the street a few blocks (I was walking in the same direction) to get out and keep walking after her saying the same shit. I can only guess this was some kind of Taxi Cab Confessions thing gone horribly wrong.

Two days ago this guy shouted "GIMME YOUR SHIRT" at me from across the street, when I looked at him he laughed and waved, so I gave him the "What's up" nod and laughed back at him. Later he stopped me again and explained he really loved my shirt and asked if he could be the lead singer in my rock and roll band (I am not in any band, I was not carrying any musical instruments).

People have come up to try to bum cigarettes from me and I have told them I don't smoke while smoking a cigarette.

Ikarrus · Post by **Ikarrus** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 1:59 am #111446

Outside the Safeway I used to work we get a couple of regular bums. The worst is this one guy in a wheelchair with no legs. He begs for money, but if you don't give him any he becomes satan incarnate and gives you the verbal assault of your life. Sometimes he even becomes aggressive and tries to attack you, too. Attacked some of the stocking clerks around the back of the store a few times, too.

We can't even get rid of him, the shit.

bandit · Post by **bandit** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 2:02 am #111448

you all are fucking lucky

try being freelance

not knowing what your income will be month to month, chasing down accounting departments / clients regularly to actually pay you on time

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 2:08 am #111449

Nothing I ever did freelance qualifies as freelance because I never got paid once.

I stopped doing that really fucking quickly.

If you ever want to experience being regarded as a talentless piece of human garbage try calling yourself a photographer and doing portraits/wedding photography/pet photos/etc. It doesn't matter how many years you've spent in classes, how much money you've sunk into equipment, or how meticulous you are about getting your lighting just right and going through all the post-production.

A whole life of people dodging paying you, complaining that you didn't live up to their non-existent specifications, or just straight up devaluing everything you've done awaits!

I'm trying to move up into my company's content team on the merit of my ability to help them generate audio/video content and parcel it out on the internet, and just explaining how that could benefit them is kind of a nightmare in and of itself. In an age when anyone can do that via Periscope and whatnot, or just hack something together via their Mac's free bundled audio/video editing suites it's kind of a hot mess.

Yes you can already do this thing that I'm describing being able to do for you, but I'm offering to help you do it with a higher fidelity of audio/video quality while maintaining a minimal impact on your server's bandwidth and without awful compression artifacts or the other associated woes of fitting big video in small packages. No I'm not a software engineer, choosing and embedding a player will be up to your web devs. Yes you will have to invest in a bunch of editing suites and a workstation for me to use so this will be "above board" and not me doing this at home on my own equipment. Yes I will probably also hound you for some lighting equipment, some lavalier mics, a switchboard, lenses, and a bunch of other stuff on top of my wage.

It's a really, really bad sell when people don't understand what differentiates bad production from good production.

nsos · Post by **nsos** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 2:30 am #111456

'b-but you can do this job for free right? for the exposure? :^)'

Falamazeer · Post by **Falamazeer** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 2:34 am #111457

An0n3 wrote: People have come up to try to bum cigarettes from me and I have told them I don't smoke while smoking a cigarette.

The rampant mental health issues he describes indicates california, but this quote is the most damning evidence, that shit is annoying.

My work history sucks ass, but I'd like to describe my favorite job, which is also my least favorite job.
galvanizing, The process of plating steel with zinc to preserve it. On one end of the plant, you have three nasty chemicals, Caustic soda (Sodium hydroxide) boiling, sending off vapors that will gag you, coat the inside of your throat in what feels like pepper spray, and to the unfamiliar, a good passing cloud of the vapor will often choke you so bad you'll vomit, then the acids, either sulfiric or hydrochloric, usually dilluted enough to fuck your clothes or eyes, but not exactly melt the skin from your bones, but working around it for a shift will mix with the sweat on your brow, and when a salty bead of sweat rolls into your eye the pain is instant and alarmingly shockingly bad. then the flux, ammonium chloride, it winds up a rusty orange color, is water it's not so bad, but adding the dry powder is the stuff of nightmares, for one, it's such a fine powder like talcum that ANY breeze will kick it around, and then the struggle for oxygen is ON. it's such an irritant a good puff will make you feel like a swift punch in the throat closed your windpipe, and you'll suffer for it all godamn day.

during and after all the chemicals a veritable host of dangers await, be it the delicate ballet dance of the many forklifts hauling in new products, trasfering old baskets or any number of other chores, you have acid weakened chains carrying loads of unsecured rods girders and other products above your head, and finally you have the kettle of zinc. Kept at an eternal 850f this long vat of potential heavy metal poison waits to splash an unsuspecting worker as new product comes in bubbling off the steam from the cleaning and flux solutions that prepped em, often roiling and boiling if not blasting and popping, there you must stir the products beneath the surface while leaned over the sweltering heat as the surface tensions are broken and rebroken by the many transformative effects happening to the outer layer of the product, which at any moment could reach critical mass, should the steam become too trapped under the zinc, allowing it to build to a final crescendo and burst forth to freedom raining molten hell down upon the unsuspecting workers nearby.

pray you never work in such a setting, pray.
Luckily it's behind me, I worked two different plants, I got scarred up from an explosion at the first one caused by a bad flux tank heater, Told my boss it wasn't safe to proceed, but he sacked up and tried to prove me wrong, managed to get one basket under without the steam building too fast and he got lucky, I tried the next one, boom. it was too wet. so I got scorched up.
Got scars dotted up my left arm and one decent but faded one that melted through my face shield on my forehead, and the worst one from middle finger knuckle to past index finger knuckle that's so cooked the nerves are dead on the back of my hand.

But at least it payed pretty well, and I learned a LOT about non-ferrous metals, not just zinc, and in general, knowing how a plant operates within it's confines can be invaluable in many other settings.

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 2:39 am #111459

nsos wrote:'b-but you can do this job for free right? for the exposure? :^)'

That's blatant enough most people know to avoid it.

The trend of having a bunch of people compete to produce content, and picking the one you like the most as the "winner" and only paying that guy for that thing is much worse.

A lot of folks are so desperate or so stupid they'll work on something and submit it, maybe get paid or probably not, and in the end they encourage this horrible fucking idea of having a bunch of people do a bunch of work but only paying one person for it and calling it a "prize".

It's all a part of devaluing visual media as a work. "BUT MAKING VIDEOS AND DRAWING AND PICTURES IS SO FUN FOR YOU TO DO ALL THE TIME RIGHT? GETTING PAID FOR IT IS A BONUS!"

This whole "anyone can do it" mentality that technology and youtube have spawned is fucking cancerous too. Yeah, any idiot can slap a video together and upload it somewhere (if you need proof, look at my fucking awful channel). But there's a whole other tier of knowledge and effort that goes into something actually well made yet a lot of folks are too blind to actually notice the difference. I can record video on my phone! This video looks so much better than the stuff I make on my phone...this guy must just have a really nice phone.

Falamazeer wrote:-snip-

Central New York, actually. The way our economy and housing market is going, we're on the fast track to becoming the next Detroit.

Have you talked about your job before on the forums? If not you, I remember someone else talking before about their work in metallurgy and forging and all the horrible injuries and scars they accumulated in a really really brief amount of time doing it.

DrPillzRedux · Tue Aug 11, 2015 2:50 am

I wish my county would adopt the no backboard on every trauma policy.

Falamazeer · Post by **Falamazeer** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 2:55 am #111464

Yep, I covered it on the old forums once, It was fairly fresh then, my head/face healed up nicely, you can still see it on the forehead, but it's not distinct like it once was, only the left arm ones kept the dark color, Who knew shea butter lotion wasn't just a marketing term?

I still got stripes on both legs and forearms from wiring, which I believe I described in more detail then, wherein the wire comes in a large coil, and some dumb motherfuckers cut it at an angle rather than straight with the lock cutters, meaning when you're twisting two of them together to tie a rod to a rig you'll gash yourself deep on syringe angles wires and ten hour days, six days a week usually, sometimes seven, those little fuckups accumulate quickly.

ThanatosRa · Post by **ThanatosRa** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 4:56 am #111490

You know what's horrible? People who know just enough about network security to be in terror of being hacked or having their network breached, but not enough to know how to up their chances of Not being so, and knowing that it's not as common as some folks think sometimes. I mean holy crap lady.

bandit · Post by **bandit** » Tue Aug 11, 2015 5:37 am #111496

Falamazeer wrote:Yep, I covered it on the old forums once, It was fairly fresh then, my head/face healed up nicely, you can still see it on the forehead, but it's not distinct like it once was, only the left arm ones kept the dark color, Who knew shea butter lotion wasn't just a marketing term?

I still got stripes on both legs and forearms from wiring, which I believe I described in more detail then, wherein the wire comes in a large coil, and some dumb motherfuckers cut it at an angle rather than straight with the lock cutters, meaning when you're twisting two of them together to tie a rod to a rig you'll gash yourself deep on syringe angles wires and ten hour days, six days a week usually, sometimes seven, those little fuckups accumulate quickly.

do you work on space station 13 or something

Timbrewolf · Post by **Timbrewolf** » Wed Aug 12, 2015 1:27 am #111698

bandit what freelance work do you do?

Stickymayhem · Wed Aug 12, 2015 9:13 am

An0n3 wrote:Nothing I ever did freelance qualifies as freelance because I never got paid once.

I stopped doing that really fucking quickly.

If you ever want to experience being regarded as a talentless piece of human garbage try calling yourself a photographer and doing portraits/wedding photography/pet photos/etc. It doesn't matter how many years you've spent in classes, how much money you've sunk into equipment, or how meticulous you are about getting your lighting just right and going through all the post-production.

A whole life of people dodging paying you, complaining that you didn't live up to their non-existent specifications, or just straight up devaluing everything you've done awaits!

My Mum has been a professional photographer for like 20 years. She spent ten years working for studios but the whole business model is fucking insane. You can basically go in and get free make-up, drinks and a nice day out with fun professional photographers who make you feel great for like three or four hours but if at the end you don't buy any pictures all you lose is a 20 pound deposit and you can fuck off, leaving everyone upset and exhausted like a fucking parasite. People would game the fucking system.

The problem is it was fucking impossible to get anyone to come in otherwise even back then. Now the entire industry is dead. It was clearly a ridiculous business model but almost no studios like that exist now even in London.

The two of us set up a private photography studio a couple years ago where I basically managed everything. We'd drive out to shopping centers everywhere, set up a stall and sign people up for their information. Then later I'd have to call a hundred people and try to convince them to come down for next to nothing. My Mum would kill herself trying to make sure they had an amazing time for hours and hours and then I'd have to photoshop 400 pictures in an hour before flicking through 400 pictures narrowing them down to about sixty for an hour or two with the clients making polite conversation and generally trying to entertain them and showing them their best pictures.

We'd get it down to like 60 pictures, and then every fucking time they'd say "So about the price..." like all they see is a fucking image they think they could snap with their phone and not the fact that they've just spent an entire day draining the life from a family with a dying business. They would end up, after all that, buying at most 4 or 5 pictures and just leaving us broken having worked for a tiny fraction of the minimum wage and just having to wipe a hundred amazing pictures off the drive to do it all again the next day, if we even have a client lined up for then.

God that was a fucking vent nothing has ever made me hate people so much.

Post by **oranges** » Wed Aug 12, 2015 9:17 am #111763

Why would you not take payment up front?

Stickymayhem · Wed Aug 12, 2015 9:22 am

oranges wrote:Why would you not take payment up front?

I tried every possible configuration of this and it just never worked. If you put almost any barrier to entry literally no one will ever come.

My idea was to put in a deposit of £60 and you get five pictures with that but it was so much harder to get anyone to come and you'd almost never get anyone who would be willing to pay more than that. They just saw it as 60 quid for 5 pictures that they could just snap in the bathroom mirror for free instead.

The studios with hundreds of photographers couldn't figure this out and neither could I. Portrait photography is just a weird mess that's dying right now.

The business basically relies on good-hearted customers who won't abuse the system. You'd get one of these people who will actually see the effort and value in this stuff and they'd pay hundreds of pounds for it. But it was so rare to get them.

EDIT: Also photographs are incredibly hard to value. Once you've taken 400 pictures they are in a weird state of being technically worthless but with a nebulous kind of effort behind them that's hard for customers to really get a grasp of. They just see several hundred pictures and wonder why I'm being a dick and not putting all of them on the disk instead of just 5. The CD costs the same either way right?

callanrockslol · Wed Aug 12, 2015 10:03 am

nsos wrote:'b-but you can do this job for free right? for the exposure? :^)'

Being skinned and turned into a flag is free exposure too.

Stickymayhem wrote:I tried every possible configuration of this and it just never worked. If you put almost any barrier to entry literally no one will ever come.

Make them sign away their rights to the photos and sell them on the internet. Easy money.

Akkryls · Post by **Akkryls** » Wed Aug 12, 2015 10:07 am #111771

Stickymayhem wrote:
oranges wrote:Why would you not take payment up front?
I tried every possible configuration of this and it just never worked. If you put almost any barrier to entry literally no one will ever come.

My idea was to put in a deposit of £60 and you get five pictures with that but it was so much harder to get anyone to come and you'd almost never get anyone who would be willing to pay more than that. They just saw it as 60 quid for 5 pictures that they could just snap in the bathroom mirror for free instead.

The studios with hundreds of photographers couldn't figure this out and neither could I. Portrait photography is just a weird mess that's dying right now.

The business basically relies on good-hearted customers who won't abuse the system. You'd get one of these people who will actually see the effort and value in this stuff and they'd pay hundreds of pounds for it. But it was so rare to get them.

EDIT: Also photographs are incredibly hard to value. Once you've taken 400 pictures they are in a weird state of being technically worthless but with a nebulous kind of effort behind them that's hard for customers to really get a grasp of. They just see several hundred pictures and wonder why I'm being a dick and not putting all of them on the disk instead of just 5. The CD costs the same either way right?

I think there's this huge group of people in society who don't understand the fucking concept of the "Service Cost".
Because you're too fucking lazy to do it yourself, you come out to get someone else to do it. Because they do it for you, you get charged for the materials used PLUS the service cost, because that's how a business fucking works

It irritates me when people come into the shop where I work, ask for a drink and then balk at the price because "they could make it at home". Well, that's nice. Go home and make it then.
I'm pretty sure people are just spoilt by chains like McDonalds where they sell everything dirt cheap, because it likely is mostly dirt and they have such good supply contracts due to years of business.