Do You Recognize These People?

So, as I stated before, I'm completing my migration from analog to digital photography by working through my backlog of film rolls.

Some of them are exposed film rolls I've never processed.

Some of them are unexposed rolls of film that I am running through my legacy workhorse Nikon N80 on various creative projects.

My "serious" projects were always shot in B&W.

Shit I didn't care about I shot in color.

The B&W stuff I take to Crick Camera because my darkroom equipment is in storage and the folks at Crick are professionals who know how to do things right.

My color stuff I'll take to Walmart or whatever is convenient because I don't give a shit.

Which was the case the other day when I dropped off my last exposed roll of color film at the CVS Pharmacy near my office. It was an old roll, I had no idea what was on it so I had no emotional investment in the content. It was a fucking crap shoot.

I had them process the film straight to CD with no prints.

My first hint that something was amiss was when I pulled the contact sheet. I had absolutely no recollection of the people in the pics. But it's hard to tell from a contact sheet so I figured I'd wait until I got home and could pop in the CD and to take a closer look.

When I put in the CD, It said "...There Are No Viewable Pictures On This Disk..." and it gave me 2 options..."Install" or "Exit".

When I clicked on "Install", it locked up my PC and I had to do a hard, "power-off" reboot.

I finally pulled out the negatives and found that they didn't match the contact sheet. They appeared to be pictures of little girls and Barbie dolls, so I thought maybe they were old pictures of my daughter and her friends.

So basically, some downtown CVS photo employee grabbed a bunch of shit, threw it into an envelope, slapped a reciept on it and called it done.

I took this whole hot mess back to CVS today, explained things to the Manager, who re-explained things to the "CVS Pharmacy Photography Professional" I had dropped my film off with who promised to fix it!

She fed the negatives into her machine, stabbed at some spots on the touch-screen monitor like she'd never seen it before, exclaimed frustration many times, over and over (while muttering about another co-worker who had fucked things up and called her for advice while she was on break), and finally managed to pull up some images.

There were indeed pictures of little girls and Barbie dolls, but they weren't my daughter or any of her friends in any house I've ever lived in. This is not my film.

So let's recap.

I drop off a roll of my film for processing and I get back:

1: A contact sheet from someone else's roll of film
2: Negatives from someone else's roll of film
3: A CD that has NO PICTURES on it and locks up my computer.

COST: About 6 bucks, 2 hours of my time, and a roll of film that may or may not have been priceless.

As a result of all of this, here are a bunch of pictures I didn't take of people I don't know that I paid 6 bucks to get.

Enjoy!