Now Craycken was one helluva gig because it wrapped up a long ongoing story of corpo slop I’ve dealt with all summer that year. I get to the place and the owner immediately says “Hey, you’re actually here!”
“Well, of course I’m here, I never miss a shoot,” I replied and that kicked off the epic tale.
Story goes like this – when this place signed up for the delivery service from a certain corpo that rhymes with “beats”, where you seriously have to beat any contact with the sales rep after they get your signature on paperwork for any hope of assistance hence after, they got the typical shoot scheduled but the assigned tool of a photog never showed up. They rescheduled, and once more – to no avail. These guys just ran without any pics for a while and when they managed to get a hold of their sales rep – she informed them that she’s no longer with “GooberBeats.”
“Say, by chance, did your rep have an Asian name and a Cali phone number?” I asked because I already started getting excited as hell inside having a good hunch where this might have been going.
“I think so, yea,” replied the owner and as my eyes lit up, I told him the epic ballad of that sloppiness from the past summer on my end of things, and it went a little something like this:
This comfy-office-chair-with-AC of a thing kept sending me on wild goose chases all over the area with every restaurant being completely unaware of the supposedly scheduled shoots, or restaurants that rescheduled shoots with her, in writing, and that memo failed to reach me every single time. All of those cases I milked the hell out of the money owned because if some twat wants to waste my hours of gas and sitting in traffic, that will NOT be on me. I did my part of the job and it wasn’t even the restaurants’ faults like not being explained they’d have to actually cook dishes and thus refusing to do so (had plenty of such as well). So the culmination of that slop seemed to have gotten her ass fired! Happiest news I’ve ever heard on these jobs, though I did feel for the the Craycken ending up with the short end of the stick.
“So, how did you guys manage to get another shoot scheduled then, since your contact was effectively cut off without much of a replacement notice?”
And what the owner told me next was absolutely mind-blowing to me, “So apparently once we made them enough money, our account status bumped up in ranking and someone higher up the chain noticed that we had no images up and proceeded to expedite the solution after many apologies.”
“And thus I’m here, eh?” I replied and we had a pretty good laugh about the whole thing.
Moral of the story – if you pick up some dead-end office job you absolutely couldn’t be bothered with, at the very least don’t be a total twat if you know it involves several other parties’ time and especially money! If you’re some product support working with clients whose MS Office doesn’t want to install on one computer out of a dozen, it’s not the end of their world, but when you have cooks slaving away on time-sensitive food orders, photographers who have to deal with all the hassle of traffic and parking, and this all ultimately reflects onto the restaurant’s reputation – just do your damn job or let someone else actually do it!
As for Craycken – it’s a cool Asian and Cajun kinda fusion with lots of good sea as well as land and air options.
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