I thought of taking my own passport photo but realized that the passport inspector wouldn’t appreciate the dramatic short depth-of-field and would have ruled out the artistic bokeh effect as distracting. CVS offered passport photos for $8.00 so I went, asked for the service, got shot with a 2 MP camera that still haunts my dreams and then I waited….

An attendant found the printer had jammed and called up the photo manager to fix it.  This little woman in her mid-20s that topped out at 5’2″ emerged and gently removed the kegerator-sized photo cartridge from the printer, placed it in a black box with glove holes used to prevent light from hitting the film, put her hands in it and, based on the movements her arms in the glove holes into the black box, quickly executed a series of deft hand movements analogous to performing open heart surgery while solving a rubix cube without looking.  Midway through there was a “boing” noise and another series of “cut blowfish in the dark while juggling” hand motions were performed when she let our a soft “darn”.  She then inhaled, picked up the occluded device in the black box and repeatedly lifted and slammed it against the countertop with sufficient force to shake the Whitman’s Sampler display.  She displayed a miffed smirk and grabbed a screw driver and again, inside the black box, appeared to have gone at the cartridge in such as manner that noises I can only represent as the following onomatopoeias were caused: squionk, shuwoont, and heerchink.

The little woman walked up to me and with the calm delivery of a coroner simply stated, “I’m having some technical problems beyond my ability to repair.  Please return tomorrow.”  After seeing what she did to the print cartridge, I was included to agree.