The image above says "The hard working employee and I on payday (Our paychecks are the same)".
I am convinced it should me "me", not "I", since the sentence without the other person in reads
"[The image below depicts] I on payday [...]".
I've seen at least half a dozen similar cases in "meme" format pictures, and on certain English speaking internet forums it feels like nobody else has noticed.
Am I barking up the wrong tree here?
It should be "me". At one time it was common in some dialects to say things like "The employee and me are paid the same." This should be corrected to "Sally and I", but the correction is now often wrongly applied. We now see statements like "A bonus was given to the employee and I", instead of "the employee and me".
"The hard working employee and I on payday" is not a sentence, it is a fragment.
There is no verb, so the main prescriptive rule about when to use forms like "I" vs. "me" don't really give a definite answer (it would say to use "me" in a sentence like "This is a picture of the hard working employee and me on payday", but "I" in a sentence like "The hard working employee and I on payday look like this").
In practice, native speakers tend to use "me" in fragments like this except for after "and", where many use "I". However, the use of "and I" outside of the subject of a sentence is widely regarded as a "common mistake" (as seen from comments here). The use of "I" in this context is assumed to have originated as a "hypercorrection" (basically, an overcompensation for a grammar rule taught in school: to avoid using "me" as part of the subject of a sentence), but descriptive linguists differ on how they explain its current use.
The question of whether to use "I" or "me" in this context was previously asked at photo caption ... me or I?. This was wrongly marked as a 'duplicate' of Should I put myself last? "me and my friends" vs. "my friends and me" or "my friends and I"
