Five Photos...

Do you ever wish that you hadn’t been listening to what the preacher said at church? I have to say that I have been feeling that way a bit recently. Why couldn’t he have just shut up? You see, now I’ve heard what he said, I have no excuses.

I have no idea what most of the sermon was about now… all I remember was the part about how we treat people. Are we friendly to the checkout operator at the supermarket? Do we reflect a God of love or are we just as bad as the rest of the world?

This thought annoyingly intrudes upon my conscience on Sunday afternoon as I stand, in a quiet rage, at Camera House. All I want to do is get five photos printed in a hurry. Sounds simple, but apparently on Sunday it’s not.

There is now a proliferation of these self service photo machines, purportedly to make things simple for us. There are about seven of these machines at the shop I was in and they were all being used. So I stand between the racks of photo frames, trying to avoid being run over by pushchair wielding mothers searching for a frame to make their ugly baby’s photos look good. And I wait…… finally a machine becomes free but before I could start loading my pictures a shop assistant asks me if I am a “special member”. I stare blankly at him for a moment, incomprehension furrowing my brow before remembering that I have a gold membership card entitling me to cheaper prints. Apparently though, the shop has just updated their systems and now I need to get a new card… before I can load my pictures.

So I follow him up to the counter, losing my place at the machine. There then followed a conversation with the assistant that, if you saw it in a movie you would fire the scriptwriter, it was that confusing. He looked confused, I felt confused, I may have even lost consciousness for moment. To abridge the conversation… even though they had my details on their computer already, I had to give it all to them again to get my new card. But the way the assistant approached this was with a logic that felt like a Salvador Dali painting, complete with flying goats and melted clocks. My blood pressure was slowly rising.

Finally I am free to go back to the machines…. Except that they are all busy again. More waiting in the aisles, reading the fine print of price stickers.

Have you used one of these photo machines? I ‘m pretty good with computers but I still found the process difficult. A touch screen with more options than the menu at the foodcourt next door. And it doesn’t seem to follow a good logic. But I get it done, I’m now on the home straight. Ha.

The machine spits out my receipt and I go stand back in the queue to pay… as per the old system. I wait in the queue for maybe 5 minutes before being told that the system has now changed and I don’t need to pay until I come back in an hour to pick up my photos. Grrrrrrr!

I dutifully come back in an hour, money in hand, expectation building, excitement at seeing my photos… to find that they have been cropped oddly, cutting off an important part of the picture. So I vent a bit to the assistant, not too politely, and shove my photos back across the counter to him before striding back to the machine again to have another go. The problem is that the stupid machine software that is supposed to make things easy for us all, fails to show when a photo is bigger than the print area. This is something that every home printer tells you automatically… but somehow the brilliant programmers of this machine can’t get it right. Going through it for the second time I find a microscopic “edit” button well hidden that when pushed shows me all the cropping and sizing controls I need. Of course when the brilliant programmers developed the system they put it next to the whopping big button that shows you the full picture with no cropping in evidence.

So I go away again for another hour to wait for these new pictures to be ready. That’s when I start to think about what that preacher said and I start to feel a little convicted. It’s not the poor assistants fault that he’s lumbered with a crappy system. It’s not his fault the new owners of the company have changed all the procedures that are now confusing the customers. It’s just that he is the guy standing in front of me feeling my frustration as I vent it at him.

So when I came back for my pictures I apologised to him. Then we a had a good talk about how his job is difficult and I apologise again. His manager came over too and we all had a good laugh and left on a really positive note. It’s not easy to show God’s love to people when you are as easily annoyed as I can be… and I wish I never heard that preacher! But in the end I guess I’ll be better off for it.