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You don’t know a good thing until it’s gone: a phrase that is applicable to so many areas of life. And it fits quite neatly in the sense of employers who are asking far too much of their best workers with little recognition or fair compensation.
This media designer slowly found themselves, over time, burdened with more and more responsibilities that were unrelated to their own actual role, over time eventually taking on the equivalent roles of “at least” four people. Finding themselves on the hook for their own materials and equipment as if they were a contractor despite, you know, being employed by the company. Over time, they built up their own inventory of all the necessary high-end equipment, totaling many thousands of dollars, that they were using for their work to host all of the company’s production needs.
Foolishly, their boss let them know that the company was “downsizing,”… aka they were being laid off so that the company could employ someone fresh-faced and cheaper. Well, it turns out “cheaper” is a relative thing when the company doesn’t own any of its own equipment, and the company was short-sighted and foolish enough not to realize what it had going for them was a good thing… The media designer, of course, took all their equipment with them, seeing the fear slowly growing in their boss’s eyes as they packed everything up that was theirs.
The poster unfortunately didn’t elaborate on what happened from there, but we’d like to think that, having all the necessary equipment already, they went on to start their own business.