Happy holiday

I’ve just wasted an entire afternoon of my precious holidays, in which all I learnt was that my daughter can pull side-splittingly funny faces at the drop of a hat.

The serious intent was to get an ‘informal’ photo of me in my workaday suit. This at the behest of some marketing consultants who decided that, in order to emphasise we work for a ‘people company’, my fellow employees and I should provide mug shots for the corporate website. Naturally, we had to arrange these in our own time, with our own resources, because the ‘creatives’ who thought the whole imbecilic scheme up had other worries - getting dressed in the morning without professional help, for example.

In addition, said ‘creatives’ also provided a shopping list of ‘wants’, from format to maximum file size, resolution, etc. etc., from which I suspect they also can’t use a camera and definitely can’t use Photoshop, which might also explain why they haven’t arranged to take the piccies themselves. Alternatively, it might just be that being such clueless numpties they never thought of it.

As I don’t own a digital camera, I decided the safest bet was to ask the nearest acquaintance with the most expensive digital camera apparatus. Bish, Bash, Bosh. Done in about two minutes, e-mail to my office, change back into a human being and head off for an ice-cream with the light of my life – or so I thought.

 It quickly became obvious that the reason those with more money than sense buy expensive designer techno toys for art ‘projects’ is that they cannot use the cheap and cheerful stuff with which amateurs (who know and love what they do) create art that brightens up your life if they give you it (rather than wondering how quickly you can bung it in a dustbin without upsetting the creator).

A few minutes in and I was already a nervous wreck, which was when I had the bright idea of asking my girl to pull faces behind the photographer, so I’d smile to order instead of steaming at the ears. It worked a treat, shot after wasted shot after shot as we fell about laughing until we had one to provide the required impression of a suited chimp on Prozac the management and their pet airheads ordered.

At which point it was time to fire up the equally expensive computer gizmos on which the mug shot would be processed and e-mailed to me. It then became obvious that we could have produced it with a pinhole camera, developed it and sent it by pony faster than just finding the right file type and folder to save the first shot to computer –never mind the tricky stuff.

To cut a long story short, the results took hours and are not useable, so tomorrow we try again. This time at my wife’s lower-tec workplace, where they may have no branding team but have offered to snap me with any cheap camera handy, transfer it to a computer and e-mail it to me all within a tea-break.

The drag is I have to don the straitjacket again and waste more time when my daughter and I should just be enjoying our respective holidays from duller places. The brighter side is a whole new audience gets to see her amazing and spontaneous face-pulling, as do my wife and I.

And if, by chance, she ever runs out of new and startling faces, I can always get the required smile imagining an entire marketing team falling under a bus instead.