Officers, I Don’t Know How Those TVs Got In The Back Of My Truck, And Other Misadventures

I’ve written a lot about AI and the potential negatives thereof, but the inevitable march of technology has improved some things and eliminated other things that were downright unpleasant.

Let’s have an example that involves film canisters, shoplifting, and very poor reading comprehension! (In the spirit of new technology, the images accompanying this post were fake images generated by Adobe Firefly AI.)

Back in the 90s, I used to work in a Big Box Chain Store that will remain nameless for reasons that shall soon become apparent, and I spent a lot of time working in the Electronics Department.

Granted, I was not actually qualified to work in the Electronics Department, since you were supposed to have gone through some specialized training modules first. However, the Big Box Chain Store was the sort of place where “supposed to” had absolutely no bearing on reality. I think in the first two years I worked there in the 90s, the store went through four managers. One of them was fired for losing his temper and punching an employee. Another gifted a weekly pallet of charcoal to a nearby steak restaurant in exchange for a free dinner, a completely off-the-books arrangement that came to light when he was investigated for sexually harassing several female employees. Those were only the two most egregious reasons he was fired and prosecuted for embezzlement.

Working there was kind of like a neo-noir film, but one made by an absurdist German auteur with a penchant for low comedy.

Anyway! Even though I freely admit I was much dumber and more naïve in the 90s, I had the threefold advantages of 1.) punctuality, 2.) mostly being sane, and 3.) sobriety, which I concede probably put me in the top 15% of the employees at the time. The other employees who had those threefold advantages were most often students from the local semi-accredited Bible Baptist College. I got along well with them because they were usually the sort of sober and industrious people without whom society would screech to a halt. They tended to either get married young and remain sober and upright citizens while having lots of kids, or rebel and go off the rails in a truly spectacular fashion that ranged from tragic to frankly hilarious.

Once again that was a tangent, but Big Box Chain Store was the sort of place that had a lot of tangents, each of them stranger than the last! If the Raymond Chandler-esque mean streets of a noir city have a thousand stories, then the aisles of Big Box Chain Store have a thousand tangents, each weirder than the first.

Back to the main story. So I wound up working in the Electronics Department from time to time, and a big part of working at the Big Box Chain Store Electronics Department in the 1990s was dealing with the film dropoff.

Anyone born past 2000 probably has no idea what I’m talking about, but back then digital cameras were just beginning and hadn’t really entered the public consciousness. Like, in the 1990s, the average member of the public used analog cameras. The cameras had a canister of chemically treated light-sensitive film, and when you took a picture, the camera recorded the image on the film. How did you get the pictures from the film to printed photos? The typical way was to go to a place like Big Box Chain Store, fill out the information on a preprinted envelope, put your film canister on the envelope, and then drop it in the overnight bin. At the end of the day, a delivery guy would pick up the pictures and ship them to the processing center, and the next day the envelopes would return containing the film canisters and the printed photos.

As you can imagine, there were many, many ways this process could go wrong.

For one thing, someone had to remember to take the bin of dropped-off envelopes to the back of the store so they could get picked up by the overnight delivery guy. If someone forgot, that meant the process was delayed for a day, which it turn resulted in a lot of angry phone calls from customers. For a while, there was a nice, friendly employee who would volunteer to take the accumulated envelopes back every night. He also made sure to take a stack of twenty CDs or so back with him at the same time. When asked, he mentioned that he was going to inventory the CDs in the back of the store. Of course, by “inventory” he meant “leave them by the back door so he could pick them up in his car on his way out.” He got fired and prosecuted for shoplifting.

Granted, he was not quite as bold as the former employee who would pull his truck up to the back of the store with his brother and load it up with TVs while directly under the security camera in good lighting. Not criminal masterminds, but as I alluded to earlier, Big Box Chain Store did not exactly draw from the deep end of the talent pool.

CDs, for those of you born after 2000, were how music was distributed before streaming and MP3s but after cassette tapes. They used to be valuable, and the Electronics Department had aisle after aisle of CDs, all of them in those plastic security anti-shoplifting things. Especially country music CDs – a significant portion of Big Box Chain Store’s customer base loved country music CDs. Nowadays, the only place you can really find CDs is in thrift stores, and you can sometimes get like an entire box of them for a dollar. But back then they were worth money, and on days when I had to stock the toilet paper aisle, I would often find those broken anti-shoplifting things dropped behind the toilet paper. The toilet paper aisle was right next to the Electronics Department, so that was a favorite place for shoplifters to discard the broken anti-shoplifting things.

Another tangent! Told you there would be a lot of them.

Anyway, back to the ways photo development went wrong.

The most common problem was the numerous ways people would make mistakes filling out the form on the envelope. Like, you were supposed to specify your name, your phone number, and a few other options like how many copies of the prints you wanted and so forth. The number of people who simply popped the film canister into the envelope and dropped it in the bin without filling any information on it at all was simply baffling. Like, how were we supposed to know who the photos belonged to? Psychometric telepathy?

On occasion people would just leave their first name on the envelope and nothing else.  Just “Bob.” Nothing else, just “Bob,” with no other contact information. There wasn’t a field for an email address since email addresses hadn’t yet really entered the public consciousness.

So gradually a supply of unclaimed film envelopes built up. From time to time if a manager was feeling restless, he would have someone go through the unclaimed film bin and try to contact people, which was an exercise in futility, because the contact information was missing.

For all I know those unclaimed envelopes are still there under the counter, moldering away in the darkness.

But most of the envelopes eventually came back containing developed photos, which was where we reached the next stage of error – all the many ways the printed photographs would be wrong.

A big part of this was psychological. A common meme nowadays is that people are never as good of photographers as they think that they are. But this isn’t a big deal when you use a smartphone with 128 GB of storage. If you want to photograph something, you just need to take fifteen shots of it. Sheer probability indicates that at least one of them will be good enough, or at least adequate, and you can delete the rest. In fact, depending on your available phone storage, you might not even need to bother to delete the rest. This wasn’t an option back in the days of film, where you would get either 24 or 36 pictures per roll of film, depending on the film and the model of camera.

So, assume everything in the process actually worked. By some unprecedented miracle the customer filled out the envelope correctly, the film was developed, the pictures were printed, and the envelope came back and the customer picked it up. Sometimes there was a final hurdle where the customer would rip open their envelope and examine the photos then and there in front of the cash register. If the customer did that, it was time to brace yourself, because there was a good chance a bad conversation was going to follow.

“They screwed up my photos!” the customer would say. Or shout, or screech, or start crying, depending on the individual.

Sometimes they were right. But about 95% of the time, it was just a bad photo. Like, the flash had been off, or everyone had red eye, or the picture had been taken in bad outdoor lighting, that kind of thing. But if the customer was upset about the pictures, it wasn’t their fault, the processing place had clearly screwed up and made them take that badly lit, blurry picture. Usually, we just gave them the film back, and they left in a huff to be disappointed by a different Big Box Chain Store’s photo department. Granted, sometimes the processing place had really screwed up and sent back the wrong pictures.

One time a guy in a Mart Cart (those little electric scooters for customers with mobility challenges) came in, accompanied by his wife and grade school-aged children. He picked up his pictures, and then he also got a stack of country music CDs. Like, easily $200 worth of country music CDs. His kids asked if they could get some movies, and he said sure, and his wife and kids went to pick some VHS tapes out from the movie section, since this was still before DVDs came along. The Disney ones were always popular, and I suspect there were a lot of parents who got really sick of hearing some of the songs from THE LION KING or ALADDIN.

Anyway, I started ringing up Mart Cart Guy’s purchases, and his wife and kids wandered off to look at more stuff. While they did, he looked me in the eye and said, in a haunted voice, that he had been on disability for ages, that all his credit cards were maxed out, and he didn’t know how much longer he could maintain his lifestyle before the debt overwhelmed him.

But he still bought about $200 worth of country music CDs and almost as much in VHS children’s movies.

The memory of Mart Cart Guy’s dismayed, haunted expression as I handed him the receipt was not the only reason I’ve avoided debt as much as possible in my life, but it definitely was one of the reasons.

And that was another tangent, wasn’t it? But the point of this post was that the photo-development process at the Big Box Chain Store was an unpleasant experience for both the employees and customers.

Nowadays, if you want printed photos, Big Box Chain Store has a form on its website, and you upload your photos, select sizes and copies and whatever, put in your credit card, and that’s that. All the different Big Box Chain Stores offer it, and there are a thousand times more options available than there were back in the 1990s.  And Mandatory Fields on the website means that people can’t just type “Bob” for their name and forget their phone number and email address, since the transaction won’t complete unless the form on the website is correctly filled out. Such technology would have been a blessing from heaven back in the 90s.

No doubt the customers are still often insane and the photo printer breaks down regularly, but it’s still an infinitely better process than it was in the 90s. Granted, I got a lot of amusing and occasionally horrifying anecdotes out of the experience, but in hindsight, I probably should have quit after the first year there.

The inevitable march of technology has both good and bad qualities, but I don’t think the obsolescence of drop-off photo film development is much of a loss. 🙂

-JM