lost pictures

Many years ago I worked in logistics loading and unloading trucks with a forklift.  Too often we would get loads that weren't secured properly, resulting in 53' of overturned pallets full of boxes that would take hours to unload instead of minutes.  To account for our lack of progress, I would record these overturned loads on my digital cam, put them on a floppy disk, and present them to my boss so he can send them to corporate in a vain attempt to convince them to use airbags to stabilize future loads.

The typical dumbass corporate response was sending us a box full of disposable cameras.

For those of you who don't know what a disposable camera is, it's a cardboard or plastic camera with a roll of 35mm photographic film sealed inside.  They were manual cams with a flash and battery that were designed to end up in landfills after the film was processed onto 5" x 7" sheets of photographic paper.  Processing would take anywhere from an hour at a One Hour Photo place to a week if you send it out.

I know...  going from digital to film is like going from flash drive to 8-track but that's the corporate way of fixing a problem.  See Business for an explanation of this phenomenon.   


That was then, this is now and I finally decided to develop the pictures in a couple of those disposable cameras I liberated many years ago.

Walmart sends out film to get developed so I went there.  As soon as I got the pics back I immediately regretted it.

Take a look at some of these pictures that didn't come out quite right.

 At first glance it looks like a bunch of crap pictures, which they are, but to have that many messed up pics from the simplest camera in the world is stretching the bounds of reality.

 You can see by the overhead lights this pic was taken inside a warehouse.  How did the lights show up but nothing else?

   I've been taking pictures since I was nine so I can rule out poor photography on my part.

 When these pics are shown full screen it's just a bunch of unrelated pixels.

 Made smaller you can see an image.  Looks like a torso.

 Since these cams were for work, I know better than to fill them with erotica but damn!

 Clearly, Walmart messed up these pictures on purpose and the only reason I can think of is their puritanical need to censor naughty bits.

 The question is, who took these pictures?

 I'm dying to know what these pics are and who took them.  I guess I'll never know.

 These cams sat around the house for years.  I also partied a lot back in those days.

 If I had to guess, I'd say someone picked up a cam and took some pictures as a goof and Walmart distorted them for my own good.

 Does that red part look like a naked girl to you?  Sure looks like it from here.

 Now, don't tell me you don't recognize this one.

Hindsight is always 20/20 and if I had any idea what was in this cam I never would've let Walmart touch it.  Walmart's policy is to destroy the negatives so retrieving anything close to the original is next to impossible.

There are other pictures that came out fine that Walmart deemed fit to print.  The distorted ones they left on the free CD.  Thanks, assholes.

What pisses me off the most is these disposable cameras are time capsules from 19 years ago with images never seen that can never be replaced and Walmart took it upon themselves to edit my property, following rules they made up long before the concept of digital photography, with all it's instant gratification, became a central core of the 21st century.

A word to the wise.  If you have some old film that needs developing, take it somewhere else and avoid Walmart like the plague.

At this point, all I can say is,

Fuck you Walmart.