Saturday morning my wife and I went to have our church directory pictures made. It was the first time that we have had our pictures taken professionally in our two years of marriage or five years together. We had a number of candid pictures taken over the years by friends, but nothing of a formal nature. We will get a complimentary 8x10 mailed to us in a few weeks, along with undoubtedly a solicitation to order even more stuff.
We went back into a Sunday school room when our names were called and shook hands with the photographer. As he reset his equipment, I started to mentally formulate exactly what kind of traits one would need to be a professional photographer. After about five seconds, one became very clear: a portrait photographer has to be willing to actually touch people. I felt like a plastic toy as many different ways as he was trying to set up the shot he wanted. The entire time I was thinking how this would make a great premise for a Saturday Night Live sketch.
On the table across from us was his laptop, and sitting on his keyboard was one of those 90s era 3.5" floppy disk. "For what?," I wondered. "Not even one of those photos will fit on it." The assistant came, grabbed our disk and led us to another room in the Education Building for reviewing the proofs. The widescreen computer monitor did not help their sales pitch, stretching every photo. All the same, we carefully picked out which photo we wanted in the book and which one they would mail to us.
Most of their arrangements suited families with more than just two people in them. We decided not to bother with any additional pictures this time around. As the salesman went to print off a receipt for our zero-dollar sale, he remarked "I bet you haven't seen one of these in a while," gesturing to the dot-matrix printer that leapt to life and shook on the table. He explained that they still had a stockpile of the carbon paper that they need to move through before they would even think of updating. When I asked him how they even get ink for them anymore, he said that he had boxes of it stacked up at his office. I guess that fits in the category of "if it isn't broke, don't fix it."
Parts of the day's experience helped me forget for a time the cares and worries of the past few days. It was an odd combination of peace and eagerness.