Steven Pam Photography
420 Victoria Street, Brunswick
P.O. Box 33, Brunswick West VIC 3055
Phone (03) 9940 1434 - Fax (03) 9381 0700 - Mobile 0412 206 437
www.stevenpam.com.au

The most embarrassing day of my career - and how I turned it around

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a graphic designer, with whom I'd never worked before, to do some head shots for a small city law firm.

I was keen to impress the new client - and he was also keen to impress the law firm, since it was his first job for them, too.

We both attended the shoot, arriving with plenty of time to set everything up carefully. One by one, our lawyers arrived at the appointed times. About a dozen in all, including the partners of the firm.

Most of our legal eagles were obliging with their best smiles. Everything was going as smoothly as we had hoped.

It wasn't until about 24 hours later that the poo hit the proverbial ventilator.

You see, up until now, I've never had a problem downloading my photos from the camera memory card onto the computer. It has always worked. Every photo appears on the hard drive, just as it should.

Since it all seemed to work pretty well, I never bothered to introduce any kind of audit to the process to check if all of the images were there, before emptying the card for the next shoot.

Anyway, back to the story. After I thought I had downloaded all of the shots onto the computer, I formatted the memory card and headed out to another shoot.

Well by now you've probably guessed what happened. It turned out I had wiped the memory card without having actually downloaded the photos successfully.

That, on it's own, wouldn't have been too bad. We have software to recover deleted files from memory cards. But once I re-used the card on another shoot, the images were lost forever.

Well, as you can imagine, when I realised what I'd done, I experienced a sinking feeling similar to the one you get when you realise that the former Nigerian head of state whom you just sent $5,000 as an 'advance fee' on the US$18 million he is going to deposit in your bank account turns out to be less than genuine. Or something like that.

Anyway, after I had composed myself, it was time to eat some serious humble pie. I called my new client immediately, 'fessed up to my mistake, apologised, grovelled, apologised some more, and offered to call his client and do the same.

Oh, and I also said "of course I don't expect you to pay my unless this is resolved completely to your satisfaction".

In the end, everyone was very understanding. We scheduled a re-shoot, and we all agreed it was lucky the photographs weren't of an unrepeatable, one-off event.

So what's the moral of the story?

Come clean about your mistakes. Your honesty will be respected. Put strategies in place to prevent them happening again. You'll be building a better person/organisation, one mistake at a time!