Just another day...

Texting - me to boss: How much must a customer DESERVE it before I am allowed to pluck her left eye from her inconsiderate skull? ... Hypothetically speaking.

boss to me: You can't do that, my friend. Sorry you had a bad one.

me to boss: Can I convince you to do it for me?

boss to me: lol, I don't know, man. I kinda need this job.

me to boss: I'll talk you into it in the morning.

Typically a 1/2 hour before we close, I start turning off all the equipment and cleaning up, counting down the cash register till and such. Once the doors close I take my paperwork up front and get it signed off on and my shift is over 5 minutes after the store closes.

I am not obligated to keep the machine running until 1/2 prior to close; being a 1 hour lab, 59 minutes until close and I could start shutting down and cleaning, but I generally like my customers and want to give them as much up-time as I reasonably can.

In an effort to bend over backwards in exceptional cases, I can sometimes hold out until just 15 minutes before close to shut down the equipment...  but that's about all I can really muster without going into unapproved overtime.  And now-a-days unapproved overtime is the only type of overtime there is, and it is frowned upon.

Tonight at T-minus 31 minutes until closing time, my phone is ringing.

I answer with my usual business greeting and on the other end of the line is a frantic mother who needs pictures tonight for her son's Eagle Court of Honor in the morning.

"A failure to plan on YOUR part does not constitute an emergency on MY part." I thought, but did not say.

She asks if she can get an order to me in the next 5 minutes, if I could still have it ready for pickup tonight.  I explain that it depends on how many images are in the order and what sizes she is ordering; without knowing that I can't tell how long it will take to print.  She lets me know she needs about 30 5x7 lustre prints.  I tell her that IF she gets the order to me in the next 5 minutes I can still get that done tonight.

At 20 minutes until close she calls back and lets me know she just hit the send button, and asks if I have her order to print yet.  I do not, but manually tell my computer to pull new orders down from the server and it starts downloading...  all 174 images for her 4x6s, 5x5, 5x7s, and 8x10s...  I try to tell her I'm not certain this will all download and print before the store closes, and she says she'll be here in 10 minutes and can wait for them if they won't kick her out once she's inside, then hangs up...  Well, Fuck.

A part of me want to say 'Fuck-it' and shut everything down.  "Tried to tell you it wouldn't be done tonight, sorry." But I have a reputation as a photo-miracle-worker, and my lab has a reputation of being one of the best in the metro, and my company is known WORLD WIDE for treating it's customers exceptionally well... so I commit myself to making it happen...

I'm irritated but not at eye-plucking levels yet...

She gets there a few scant minutes before the doors go down, and wonders around our closed store while I finish up her order.  I'm packing them up at closed+10 when she comes back by to pick them up and pay.  As I'm ringing her up she says "You know, I really did order more than I'm going to be able to use, I can return the ones I don't need, right?" ... ... ...

Are you shitting me? ... not quite there yet...

"Ma'am, we offer a satisfaction guarantee on all of the products we produce; if for any reason you are dissatisfied with the quality of the work we did, we would offer you a refund for the product, but normally on a custom order of photographic prints we would expect you to want what you have ordered."

"So if I return them, tell them that they are too fuzzy?"

NOW... now is when I'm thinking, It wouldn't be homicide if I just ripped out one eye... she would live, she would even adapt to having a fairly normal life.  She could be a pirate for Halloween. She's EARNED it!

"Thank you very much for doing this for me tonight, most people wouldn't have."  You're damn strait most people wouldn't have and YOU'RE the REASON people don't want to help people.  I bend over backwards for you and whilst I'm contorted so, you try to find a way to slip a knife into my back!  Your son may be an Eagle Scout, but you, madam, are an awful human being.

One of the managers I hold in high regard once said something that stuck with me...  and it kept ringing in my head tonight: At our company "we bend over backwards for our customers, but don't bend over forwards for them!"  I feel like she's trying to give it to me up the ass in this one.

Photo Throwdown!

I need to put my ass-kicking boots on!

My photolab no longer has the equipment to develop film into negatives.  I can print from negatives and I can digitize them and save them to a disc (16Base Resolution 2048 x 3072). If you come to me with a roll of film, I send you to one of two local, independently owned photo labs that do good work. It costs more than we used to, but it's how they have been able to afford to keep offering that service when it was no longer cost effective for us.

Today, a customer returns from having visited one of these two labs and lets me know that the worker there was bad-mouthing the work we do.  Not only that, but spreading falsehoods about it. My customer had her film processed there but was going to have it digitized with us because we charge a pittance of what the independent lab does for the same resolution scan. Their staff member asked her if she was going to bring us her film and she affirmed that she was. Then the employee told her when we scan negatives we destroy them afterwards instead of returning the film. (Not True) My customer said if she had the scans she couldn't care if she got her negatives back, she was using us anyway. Then the employee misinformed my customer that we send them off to China to be scanned. (Ridiculous) I think she has my company confused with a different, less wholesome, retail giant. After all the work I've sent them, and with all the effort we put into producing a quality product, I expect more respect from the workers there.

AAMOF this post is now a few days late because instead of polishing it up and posting it, I sent an E-mail to the owner of the little independent photo lab...  He responded that their employee meant no malice, and was working under misinformation.  Furthermore he personally loves shopping at our place and finds folk there friendly and helpful.

The journey of a thousand miles

Dr's visit yesterday was stupid.
I was an hour early, after having dropped off the boys at daycare.
I signed in, filled out some paper work.  About 20 minutes before my appointment they call me back to draw blood for my labs. Phlebotomist gushed about how great a vein she'd found to draw from... then missed. Eventually she has her vials full and I am back in the waiting room, waiting. 20 minutes after my appointment they call me back... but it's a doctors office, so there is nothing unexpected about that. They take my weight. 397lbs, dressed. That's 12 lbs heavier than was when I checked myself last week in my skimmies... but I don't think sweats and a tee weigh all that much, so I'm going to say this "last hurrah" eating may have been a little out of hand. They take my blood pressure and the nurse tells me the doc will be in to see me in a bit. After about 20 minutes of cell phone games pass, the nurse comes back in and says she needs this room to preform EKGs, since it has a table, and they are moving me to a room that doesn't have one. It's more than 30 minutes after that when Doctor Hoehn comes in to see me. "So, looks like we have you booked for the 10th. You start your liquid diet yet? Sounds great. You got any questions for me? Well then, lets knock this thing out of the park! See you in 2 weeks."
Couldn't I have handled that by phone.  I realize you had to draw labs today, but I really could have left after that.  Oh well.

For the next two weeks the most solid thing I'll be eating is Jell-O.  I have vanilla flavored Whey Isolate protein powder, that I can tell I'll be sick of by the end of this, to replace meals. And I am to consume no less than 64oz of "clear fluids" each day... and sugar-free Jell-O counts as a "clear fluid" but somehow vodka and light rum do not. Also on the OK list are broths, sugar-free sports drinks, crystal light and it's ilk, Iced tea, and of course, water.

Day one of that unpleasantness is nearly behind me  now. It was a day at home, feeding the kids without eating. Tomorrow I brave working in a grocery store with a food court, and going out to a restaurant without eating for the first time.

I'm told they will surgically remove my appetite at the end of this two weeks. If successful, a hungerectomy would exercise the greatest personal demon I face.  Not the only one, but the most critical.  I'm told that if I stick to the plan, that I could conceivably be a 200lb man someday. I'm not certain I can wrap my head around what that would be like. How that would feel.

Consumption has been tied to my identity so long, some of my friends are worried they won't know how to relate to me once I can no longer finish a pint of beer in less than a second... Sometimes their fondest memories of me where when I finished 10 of McDonald's double cheeseburgers though "Dave the Cave" thew in the towel after just 8 (one of mine was actually a triple... probably a mistake, surely the cook wasn't taking sides or placing bets); when I ate a third Chipotle burrito because the manager said It'd be on the house if I could. 2 1/2 large pizzas. 75 hotwings. 12 "blazin" wings in 42 seconds. Piles of this, gobs of that... times I had turned eating and drinking into an event.

In our highschool video it was nerds vs. jocks. I had some of the trappings of both sides, but really fit in better with the geeks, dweebs and dorks. So that's the side I was cast on, and in the training montage before the big showdown, my staring role was "no... no more... I can't... no..." and another nerd coaxing me on and handing me a snickers, which I shove in my face, gnash 3 or for times, then swallow mostly whole, as it pans out an you see piles of wrappers littering the area. That's what people think of when they think of me.

I was the slow fat kid on the swim team - the one leaving people gasping "why do Speedos even come in that size?" I got prank calls at home about that. In grade school, a nemesis of mine had taunted and teased me enough on one afternoon bus ride that I blew. I pinned him against the wall of the bus and punched him in the chest ribs and torso three, four, five times. "hit me again with those fat dough-y fists!" he chided. Instead of obliging I grabbed his head and rapped it against the window, spider-webbing the glass. Just then the bus driver pulled me off of him. Mom had to take me to school for 2 weeks. She was pissed.

My best friend in grade school was quite athletic. Along with being one of the fastest and strongest kids in our grade he could jump the highest and the farthest.  In an era of Michael Jordan worship, my buddy took the moniker "Air Rich." His heavy side kick? "Ground Mike."  In our weekly music class there was a hugely popular song (at our school) that all the kids would sing along to about some oddball superheros and the chorus went "Faster than a speeding hippo, stronger than an aging flea, taller than a Chinese bag-worm and thinner than... the Washington monument." after which my class took to calling out "Mike?" and turning to where I sat. I could go on indefinably.

No kid escapes his schooling without emotional baggage. Much of mine is centered around my stomach.  I am looking forward to life after food.

Toddlers Aren't the Only Ones

When I said toddlers are assholes, sometimes they grow into adult pricks. I suspect someone in the age range spanning adolescent to adult is the responsible party for dampening what would otherwise had been a perfectly lovely Christmas.  Coming to the realization that someone pillaged a camera and my two best lenses from my car whilst it was at my house, delivered competing emotions.  There was the sinking frosty darkness in the pit of the gut, spawned from being helpless against the violation of my sanctuary, but also there was the boiling lava of unbridled rage desperate for someone to victimize.

Fe Fi Fo Fum, Mother-fuckers!

If you were to chart the two emotions over time, they grew steadily and steeply immediately following the discovery of my loss, slowed their ascent after about an hour, then began to fade much slower than it rose, an hour after that... but anytime I talked about it the wildfire of unfocused fury spiked again, and the icy, inky gut-punch never really did.

This long removed from the initial shock of the theft, I am feeling less like a homicidal viking berserker and more like an irritated rattlesnake.  I will subsist and mayhap with the begining of a new year I will let go my anger or find a productive channel to pour it into, but tonight it lives inside of me and does nothing to improve me or my situation.