Some of the difficulty of the change is my technological
challenge; I haven’t figured out how to override the automatic cropping for
size (my old shop used to let me adjust the auto crop before placing the
order). But at least I can get photos at only about double the previous cost
(13-cents for 4x6 photos) if I get over 100 at once. Well, I’ve been building
up for a while. I hadn’t sent my mom photos of the new grandson, or any photos
of him growing (he’s five months old already). I hadn’t sent photos from our
Thanksgiving trip, or Christmas with the kids visiting. So there were plenty—over
200 that I was printing.
It took a while to put in the order, and while they said
they’d be ready in an hour, I wasn’t able to get back before an evening event,
so I stopped in just before 9:00 PM. I should preface by saying the regular
Wal-Mart photo guy, there during most daytime hours, has been knowledgeable and
helpful. But he was gone for the day. In fact, the equipment in the photo
section was covered, and I wasn’t sure I could still get my photos, but I was
going to be gone the next day, and the day after that was my packing day, so an
extra trip to the photo section would have been inconvenient. So I looked to
the nearby electronics section.
There were two workers there. I asked them if they could
help me pick up my photos. No answer. They spoke to each other, in Spanish. I
speak Spanish, but whatever was said was mumbled, and they didn’t respond to
me. I repeated my request. The young man, still without speaking to me, went
toward the photo center, so I followed. He asked my name, which is a little
hard to understand and spell, so, while I said it, I also got out my claim
ticket, which had my name on it. He saw the name; he heard me say it. But he
kept looking in the Ms (instead of the Ns) and saying “Is it such-and-such?”
No. And I showed him again how it was written on the claim ticket. He brought a
stack from the Ns, a few Nguyens (the most common N name around here) and then
mine, which was a sizable stack of envelopes in itself. I told him which ones
were mine—the ones with my name clearly written on them.
the alphabet book I made for my granddaughter during a flurry of crafting |
There was a note attached that 7 of the photos needed
copyright permission. This was puzzling, because I thought they were all mine.
The young man started looking through the photos to find out what the problem was. He
found photos of a book and decided that must be the cause. It was a
one-of-a-kind book I made myself, for my granddaughter—an alphabet book with
animals made from thumbprint drawings. I took the photos of the book to show my
daughter, whom I was going to see on the trip, because the book had turned out
so cute. There was no copyright infringement. My book; my photos. So he kept
looking.
Eventually I opened up one of the envelopes that had a
separate envelope in it; these were the questionable photos. It was my fault; I
had downloaded photos from my son-in-laws Facebook page, of him. They were team
photos, and I didn’t have any such photos of him, so I wanted to save them. But
I hadn’t looked at them for a while, and I hadn’t realized they were not photos
he had posted; they were photos he was tagged in, done by a professional
photographer. I saw the little icons on my computer and thought, I’d like to
show these to my mom. Once I understood, I said,”These are the problem. I had
forgotten I couldn’t print these. So I’ll just leave them and buy the other
photos.”
The young man kept looking through all the other photos,
saying he couldn’t give me these without copyright permission. I repeated my
explanation, saying I just wanted all but the 7 photos copyrighted ones, so
just subtract 7 x $.13 from the total and I’d pay.
He didn’t know how to find out what I owed, so I should just
come back tomorrow. Now, Wal-Mart is open 24 hours a day, and I was there in
person, ready to pay. There should be no problem. But, while my order had shown
me what the cost would be, on their computer, the claim slip didn’t show the
price, and he didn’t know how to find out what it was. I’m thinking a bar code
would do, but he seemed to think he could only get that done at the photo
center till, which was closed down for the night.
So I pulled a calculator out of my purse and did the math. I
had about 230 photos at $.13 each, minus the 7 photos (so subtract $.91), and
then add in a few 5x7s. He didn’t know how much a 5x7 cost; it didn’t happen to
be written on one of the signs behind him, and I couldn’t remember. But I knew
it showed me on the computer, so I pulled out my SD card to start a new order,
just to find out what a 5x7 would cost. Fortunately I was able to abbreviate
that process when I noticed the price of a 5x7 written on a note on the
computer. So I wrote out the math on the claim ticket and showed him what I
owed, before tax.
“I don’t know how to charge you for that.” Seriously? He
works in electronics. He doesn’t know how to use a cash register? Any cash
register in the store? At about this time, the female worker from electronics,
that he had spoken to when I first asked for help, came over and offered to
help me. She took the claim ticket to her register in electronics, charged me
the 30-something dollars, and I left with my photos (minus the 7 I couldn’t
take). Mission impossible accomplished.
The young man getting paid to do work in electronics at
Wal-Mart (where I assume there is a need for some knowledge of how to use
equipment, probably beyond my knowledge of such things) couldn’t read my name
or find it alphabetically in a drawer. He couldn’t do simple math. He couldn’t
solve a simple problem. And he couldn’t figure out how to have a customer pay a
known amount at a cash register. I had to do all of the thinking necessary to
get what I wanted, pay for it, and leave with what was mine.
I related this tale of woe to Mr. Spherical Model when I got
home, and he made me feel worse by saying, “And the sad thing is, this guy probably votes.”
Whether he is in the portion of the population we call
low-information voters, or whether he’s even below that in the half of the
population that is so little engaged that they don’t even bother to vote, the
trouble is, those of us with understanding, who are making efforts to do our
best to be civic minded and make wise voting decisions, are at the mercy of the
uninformed.
The president doesn’t even bother to talk to people like me;
he only talks to those who are so little aware that they will believe him when
he says outright lies. Just minor ones this week: “I didn’t have anything to do with the sequester;
that was Congress,” and “If these disastrous cuts go through, you’ll lose
police protection and fire protection,” knowing full well that those services
are paid for locally, and even a total end of all the federal budget would not
take a single police officer off our local streets.
Education, of course, is something we’d like to see working
better, but I don’t see that happening with government doing all it can to
indoctrinate rather than allow the teaching of thinking skills. The power-mongers see it as an advantage to have an uninformed populous reliant on them. And, seriously,
I don’t know what to do about stupid. It may not be possible to fix stupid.
This made me laugh :)
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