Why I called this my "dream job"

Before I knew better, when I was still a youngin' fresh out of high school trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, the idea ofbecoming a photographer and owning my own studio was my dream job. This was before I realized that I do not dream of "work", at least not in the kind that you have to do to earn money to live, but I was freshly 18 and emerging from a sheltered life lived in a very conservative home and I thought this was the goal everyone aimed for: to have a job you love to go to every day.

Along with this really naïve view of work, I also held the belief that if you go above and beyond for your boss and in your role, you'll earn your job security and your boss will see how totally valuable you are and you'll have a job forever! And the weird thing is when I look back to that young version of me, I think I really believed this. I think I really honestly was behaving in a way where I thought that the more I put into a job, the more job security I was making and the less I'd need to worry. Although, also looking back, I am incredibly grateful I learned that this isn't true at a really young age instead of figuring it out after a layoff at a job I thought I'd have "forever".

How I got the job

While I was getting my senior photos taken, I started chatting with the photographer a bit about my photography work in yearbook class and how I was teaching others to retouch photos. He seemed really impressed and started tossing around the idea of me coming to work for him and doing retouching & color correcting work after I graduated from high school the following semester. He was a really well-known photographer in my city at the time, so I not only felt special that I got to have my photos taken by him but also that he was paying attention to the work I was doing in my class to teach. That he saw value in my skills was something I hadn't really experience before.

The first two years

The day after I graduated high school, I started my very first job for $10/hr working in the back office of his photography studio. I'd do a lot of secretarial work along with retouching photos, but after a while I started helping him design background for photoshoots and scout new locations. He kept talking about training me and teaching me his craft, almost like an apprentice. I was floored; this is what I wanted! And how lucky of me to just land in a role where I'd get what I had been dreaming of doing?! My boss also hired a few of my friends over the busy summer season for extra help in the office, which to this day is still such a fun memory for me. Who doesn't want to get paid hanging out in a back office with their friends, joking around and "working" all day? The dream.

This continued for the first year and a half, maybe almost two years, where things were as normal as a job can be. The only weird thing that I can remember happening during this time is that a coworker of mine also did her own photography on the side and my boss apparently saw this as a threat of some sort as he either fired her or asked her to leave (I think it was the former but my memory is fuzzy). All of this is hindsight, obviously, because looking back at this time in my life makes me I feel like I was really oblivious to the inner politics of working for a small business. And really oblivious

The unraveling

My boss was, unbeknownst to me, having some marriage trouble that eventually led to a messy divorce process where there was a young child involved. I really have no details of what was going on in my boss' marriage at the time, only that his personal life issues started spilling over into my work life at a rapid pace. He started going out, partying, and dating around. He'd hold parties at night in the photography studio (I mean it was basically a large dance-floor type space with lighting if you moved the props out of the way) and I'd arrive in the office in the morning to find bottles of alcohol strewn about and leftover lines of coke on the desks. I was still a very sheltered girl at the time so I naturally just cleaned things up and didn't say anything and didn't really react at all other than kind of being grossed out at how stinky the office got and bleaching everything. I hadn't ever been around drugs enough to really know what they were or how they affected a person, nor had I consumed any alcohol so I was really, really clueless.

Soon, my boss started dating a new woman who was around pretty consistently. She also seemed to be very involved in the parting life and was potentially the person who drew my boss into it in the first place. She hung out in the office from time to time and also would do little photoshoots with my boss during his downtime. One of these photoshoots I was asked to retouch, and involved boudoir photos of my boss' girlfriend in very compromising, very lacking-in-any-clothing poses. I think this was the first time I remember feeling very uncomfortable around my boss, and what he was asking me to participate in. But, I still did it, retouching all of her marks and stray hairs to look airbrushed and perfect.

The last two years

I don't remember a lot about the rest of this time. I know my boss showed up to work a few times very heavily under the influence and wrecked a few cars because he thought people were chasing him (they weren't). At one point I asked him to help me photograph a friend's wedding and he showed up coked out of his mind and I ended up trying to cover for him and sent him home early. I was horrendously embarrassed. I think this was the most memorable time of seeing my boss on drugs for me. He also started dealing, and unfortunately I got involved in that more than I would have ever liked to.

At some point, his family held an intervention and sent him to rehab. I think it was mostly his mother and father, but I don't really know. All I know is that I showed up in the office one morning and the two other women I worked with informed me that our boss wouldn't be coming to the office for a while and that we needed to all take turns covering his photoshoots for him. Wild, right? So we all took turns photographing what I'm sure were very confused clients, offering them discounts because our boss was "out sick" and we wanted to be accommodating. I remember this actually going really well, I think the three of us were better photographers than my coked-out boss, no contest.

When he came back from rehab, he was....different. Livid? Distrusting. Paranoid. He fired one of the other women, or maybe she just left at some point. He accused me of trying to take over his business while he was gone and said I had poor performance and blamed this on my relationship at the time (which to be fair was my very first relationship and was a bit rocky at best). He called me into his office one day and accused me of trying to steal things that were still very clearly placed on my desk at the time, and I was fired. I was honestly really upset at the time because I still had this idea in my head that if I was a good little employee and covered him while he was away, I'd be invincible. I helped save his business, and his reputation! Look at all of the things I had done for him! But...nope, that's not how it works. His drug-fueled paranoia got the best of him.

A little vindication

Looking back, this was probably the best way for me to get out of this situation because I am not sure I would have ever exited on my own and it really did escalate to a very unsafe, very toxic work environment. But after I left, I did walk around for some time wondering what was wrong with me and why he let me go. Can you imagine? Thinking the problem was me after all of that?

I don't ever want to be the type of person to take pleasure in the suffering of others but after the way this guy treated me, I wasn't surprised to come across this local news article a few years back.


https://www.ketv.com/article/investigators-man-accused-of-harassment-the-alleged-culprit-of-swatting-incident/7651149

TLDR of the article is my former boss called the police on an ex-girlfriend of his, claiming that her son was shooting people with a gun in her home, because he was upset that she got a (probably well-deserved) protection order against him. He had been stalking her for a while up until the time he was arrested for performing the SWAT call, which was probably a horrible and nerve-racking experience for her. I feel so bad for his ex and her son who got caught up in his drama and absolutely did not deserve for this to happen to them. However, I felt really good seeing that he's still basically a drug-fueled paranoid man who does crazy things like this, and I think it allowed me to finally let go of the baggage from being fired from this job that I didn't realize I had been carrying around all this time. It's honestly wild to me that I've been walking around all of this time with the idea that the problem was me - that I did something wrong and if I had been "better", he wouldn't have let me go.

As crazy as this story is, I did learn a valuable lesson about job/employer loyalty from it. I mean, I learned a lot of other things too about drugs and the underground party scene that I never wanted to learn, but most importantly I learned that jobs won't take care of you, you have to take care of you. Remaining in an unsafe or unhealthy situation does not buy you any proverbial points from an employer; they'll still fire you or let you go at will when they want to. Working 60+ hours, sacrificing weekends and any sort of life to work for a boss that sees you as disposable is absolutely not worth it.

And despite some jobs that I've had wanting me to "exceed expectations" in my on-the-job performance, I always keep this story in the back of my mind as a reminder for how going above and beyond for a job worked out for me.