But to be in an SUV with no weather spotting training in an area under a Tornado Warning seems to be a bit to dangerous. I'm only a year into this photog thing and in a small market, so I'm interested in knowing if this really is what I signed up for?
Your assistant ND is a fool. Unfortunately this business is full of fools. You can see a few on this very thread. You have not had sufficient training nor are you paid enough to justify putting yourself at risk. You did not "sign up for this."
I have worked with managers like yours. A particularly bad one once told me that doing a live shot of a thunderstorm rolling in was "part of the job." What I discovered is that it does no good to argue with them. These types
know they're asking something stupid. They're asking because they want the confrontation. They want you to argue with them, so they can pull out their authority and beat you with it.
You have a few options.
You can just suck it up and do it. When you're dead, you can rest easy knowing you were a team player and a loyal employee.
You can refuse. If you're going to refuse, you have to be ready to go toe to toe with them and possibly be fired for insubordination. Usually these bullies huff and puff... and then back down like cowards when you end up in the HR lady's office telling her what you were told to do. However, if you don't get fired outright you can pretty much expect that the manager will be building a paper trail on you after that. Then you'll find yourself unemployed several months later for a bunch of stupid crap you didn't actually do.
You can go to HR yourself and report what you were told to do. The problem is that HR is there for the company's protection, not yours. They won't see you as a victim of a bad manager. They'll see you and the manager both as threats to the company. Sometimes they'll see you as the bigger threat and work with the manager to find some way to get rid of you. So you have to be ready to lose your job with this method also.
You can weasel. Personally I think this is the most prudent thing to do. When the idiot assistant ND tells you to go chasing a tornado, say, "Yes sir!" and head out the door. Then get lost for a while. Don't hurry to the location. Sorta drift that direction. When they call asking for reports, tell 'em you haven't seen anything yet, but by golly you're looking. Sound enthusiastic! Unless they have equipped your news unit with a GPS tracker, they don't know where the hell you are. Eventually they'll call you with a damage report in a particular location, and you can head there then.
And here's a tip on getting rid of them on the phone. If you're in the middle of a conversation with them, and they're giving you sh*t about not being in the right place, start to say something and then
hang up on yourself in the middle of a sentence. Nobody ever intentionally hangs up on himself. They'll assume your phone cut out. Then just don't answer for a while when they call back while you continue to "look" for the storm. They'll assume the storm is f*cking with your phone. Call back a little later and say, "I've been trying to reach you guys, but the call wouldn't go through. Any instructions on where you want me to go?"
Several years ago, when I worked for my idiot assistant ND who thought lightning live shots were "part of the job," our competitors got a little overzealous also. They put a photog in a truck labeled "Storm Chaser" or some such nonsense and sent him out to chase storms. The thing is, that DMA is mountainous, or at least hilly, and you can't see a wall cloud coming over the next ridge. So he's driving along toward the tornado, being steered toward it by his newsroom as they watch the radar. Suddenly the tornado dipped down over a ridge right on top of him. Sucked all the windows out of the car and spun it around on the highway. He wasn't injured. But he came damned close, and never had a chance of getting any video at all.
Don't kill yourself for this job. It isn't worth it. You're not paid enough for the risk, and you won't be a hero. In fact, the idiot manager who sent you out to do it will be so afraid of wrongful death lawsuits, OSHA investigations and insurance investigations that he'll denounce what you did as stupid and deny that he ever told you to do it.
