Frustrations

I went to a photo place to have some pics developed today, and left the place totally frustrated. I had the photos on a CD I burned with iPhoto, which uses this inane and complicated filing system. If you are opening the CD with iPhoto, it works fine, but developers use PCs, of course. When the guy popped the disc in, we saw that it had not one, not two, but THREE files for each photo I wanted. The last time I developed at this place, we had the same problem. The man who had been helping me simply created a file on the desktop and let me drag and drop one copy of each photo into it. Took 5 minutes, worked just fine.

But today I had another man helping me, who was older than the other employee, and probably the owner of the place. He did not realize the same solution that the other guy did, but sat for 10 minutes browsing through files and coming up with various ideas as to how to get the right photos to print. None of his ideas were working, and his English was not good enough for me to be able to explain what we did before.

So this whole time, the employee who figured it out for me before is standing right behind us, watching. I was trying to ask him to explain how he did it before, but his English was not that good. I knew he remembered me, and he remembered the problem, but he would NOT step in and tell the other man how to do it. Once the older man set me up doing something that also was not going to work, he walked out of the room for a bit, and the younger man promptly came over and set it up the way we did it before. Why could he not do this in the first place? Because the other man was older, and to do so would cause the older man to lose face. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Confucianism.

This is an aspect of the culture I have been fully aware of, but hadn't really witnessed in such obvious form too many times before. It's all about age relationships here, and younger people should not do anything to disrespect elders, or make them look bad. If the younger man at the photo shop had stepped in, it would be like suggesting that the older man did not know what he was doing. So he had to wait until he left. It's funny, in Western culture, a younger employee who solves a problem the boss had would be praised for it.

In the end, I walked out without getting my photos done, because time ran short and I had to go to work. Tonight I was finally able to figure out who to burn photos so that weird multiple file thing does not happen. And for what its worth, iPhoto is a useless, ass-backwards program. I have been singing the praises of Apple since the iPod and the OS came out, but the developers must have been on crack when the designed iPhoto. It is a horrible program, a blemish in what is otherwise a brilliant system. It drives me nuts.

On a totally different note, the weather has finally begun to warm up, and the humidity is just starting to rear its ugly head. Its not bad yet, but I can feel it coming.

I've have soooo many photos to post right now, but I've been to busy to post them lately. I did finally get the cherry blossom photos up -- they are after the Easter posting that follows this one.

So I was going to post some new random photos that I like, but Blogger doesn't seem to want to let me. Today is just not my day for photos....