Don't forget your connection pose. Oh wait, forget it.

Things at Sears Portrait Studio go in cycles. Every quarter there's a brand new crusade against something ranging from labor numbers to an element of 5 star photography. Let's use connection poses as an example, a type of pose that made up your 5 star photography grade.

First off, it was impossible to properly define a connection pose since it was an umbrella term for poses ranging from the child looking at a toy to a cute expression (this is as vague as it sounds). The difficult part was that sometimes in evaluations, we would get marked off points for not having a connection pose despite copying something directly from the training manual. Other times, photographers would get rewarded for having a connection pose and we were unable to figure out why.

The crusade ultimately lead to everyone having to go through their sits weekly to find and track their connection poses (with the free time that no one has). We also had a meeting in which we went through some sample sittings and sometimes we just had to say "You know, you're right. I don't know why you didn't get points for this connection pose" which makes it hard to enforce. Also this meeting was scheduled 2 days ahead of time and was a mandatory Sunday-before-open meeting for all associates, but that's beside the point.

Once we got everyone on the same page with connection poses and were able to get them as consistently as the vague criteria would allow, the corporate office tells us to forget connection poses: we're now going to focus on inventive/extreme angle poses and forget about tracking or grading connection poses.

Time to get on the phone and tell everyone to change their schedules: we've got a new mandatory meeting tomorrow evening.