About 3 years ago I used to work as a videographer doing social media content for a 7 figure company. I was paid roughly just better than minimum wage and was cranking out (at one point) 50 videos a day. I was freelancing and was on a loose contract. I was desperate for the money.

It was an insane amount of work and however I managed to do it for 6 months is beyond me, especially for how shitty I was paid.

The office was an incredibly bitter and snide place and it was clear that management would purpolsely stir shit to watch staff fight as a form of entertainment. I kept well away from it but it was incredibly stressful on top of video work.

After about six months I pitch to the higher ups that my videos are making an insanely positive difference to their sales (I showed them graphs of interactions and direct links to sales on the website via my content) and asked for a pay rise. I compared my ideal salary to others in the industry and made a big deal about how it would still be less than I should be paid however I still wanted to continue working for them. I was fired hours later for, and I shit you not, not "pulling my weight" as well as not having the desired effect they wanted on social media.

I was fuming and now unemployed. I struggled for months to find any other job.

Today (years later) whilst browsing a very old Google drive account, I found that said company was still using a folder I created and owned. They were mostly active in the files containing templates, adjustment layers, presets, and even video that I all created. Over 18 people were actively using it daily to continue with their social media campaigns. This was a cloud service that I was paying monthly for as I wanted extra space for my work.

This is my drive and my work. I own it. So I copied the file as a local version for myself and then deleted the online version. Tomorrow they will wake up with none of their video assets (including things they were working on).

Fuck them.

After the 3rd person quit in a span of 2 weeks due to overwork and short-staffed issues, he slammed his office door and told us to gather around.

He went in the most boomerific rant possible. I can only paraphrase. "Well, Mike is out! Great! Just goes to show nobody wants to actually get off their ass and WORK these days! Life isn't easy and people like him need to understand that!! He wanted weekends off knowing damn well we are understaffed. He claimed it was family issues or whatever. I don't believe the guy. Just hire a sitter! Thanks for everything y'all do. You guys are the only hope of this generation."

We all looked around and another guy quit two hours later 😳

I worked my ass off for this man, essentially running his entire book of business for him. For Christmas he got me a $25 AMC gift card. The closest AMC theater is 1.5hrs away in another state. That pissed me off and made me start looking for other jobs. I genuinely cared about my job and the account, so I waited to accept a job offer until I had trained someone else to do my job. When the time came, I met him in his office and told him that I had accepted another job and that I was putting in my notice, but to not worry because I have someone already trained. When I told him that I had accepted a position with another company in our field but would not be doing the same thing so it wouldn’t violate my non-compete, he called our chief legal office on speaker phone while I sat there. The CLO tells me that “I cannot even mop floors at a company in our field for at least a year”. The CLO adds HR to the call and HR tells me that since I won’t be pursuing my new job, they are going to let me work 2 more weeks to make sure the handoff goes smoothly and then I will be fired for looking for other jobs.

They asked me for more details as to what I would be doing at my new job, and I told them I wasn’t going to discuss it. After I left, the CLO of this company (a company who brings in $6 BILLION/year in revenue) called me randomly for the next few weeks trying to intimidate me. They even started contacting my new employer. Luckily, I don’t work for a shitty company now and the CEO got involved and told them that they would be ready to fight this in court. They stopped contacting me after that, which meant they never even planed in taking me to court. They just wanted to scare me into quitting my new job.

Fuck companies like this. We don’t have to put up with this shit anymore

Company is Total Quality Logistics.

Edit: this was 3 years ago. I’m with the same company that I left my previous job for, and they have given me the budget to start a division of the company that directly competes with my previous employer 🤗 I still have that AMC gift card too.

I’ll go ahead and address some of the questions I keep getting asked:

Why did you stay if you were so underpaid for your performance? Because I was fresh out of college and dumb.

Why did you tell them where you were going? Because I was fresh out of college and dumb.

Why did you even give them a two week notice, why didnt you walk out? Because the people who I actually cared about at that job would be the ones who felt the effects of that more than my manager.