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I have a printer that is capable of printing photos, though I have never worked out how to do it. My wife wanted to print up a photo and as we were going to the shops we thought it would be easier just to pop into a shop to do it (and given the price of printer ink it might even be more economical (certainly than me fucking up the printing five times). Our local print shop has closed, presumably because most people are more capable of operating their peripherals than I am, so we went to Boots. They had a bank of computers with loads of different ways to load up photos from your phone or a memory stick or disc, so that should make the job pretty easy.
But given this is literally the future and that Boots is a massive chain store that should be at the forefront of technology, their system was ridiculously convoluted and useless. It might be OK for someone who wants to print up every photo on their phone (i.e. no one), but if you just want one photo and it isn’t the last photo that you took then you’re in trouble. If it’s in the last 50 photos you took then you’re a little better off, because the easiest option you have is to load up those last half a hundred images and then say you want to print them all and then on the final screen, work through them all, unclicking the ones that you don’t want and then printing the one you do. Your other options are to load up your last 500 photos and then unclick 499 of them or load up all your photos and unclick everything. What insanity is this?
As it turned out the photo my wife wanted wasn’t in the last 50 on her phone (as she found out when we went through unclicking them all) so we asked the assistant if there was an easier way to do this and she said there wasn’t, but suggested saving the shot again so it would be at the front of the list of shots and then unclick the other 49. We’d already wasted more time than we would have done if I’d learned how to print this up myself and frustrated by our disappearing late afternoon and aware we had to get home to feed and bathe our child we left, but then relented, decided to take her advice, only to find out that even with the photo saved in first position the computer clearly works in chronological order and it still wasn’t on the system. It was almost laughably archaic, but it’s not like Boots is a big business and should invest in something a bit more user friendly.
We gave up and Boots lost a valuable 38p of our business (so if the shares plummet then you’ll know why), but we passed a Snappy Snaps on the way home, which was still open after 6pm and their system (whilst mildly fiddly) allowed you to print one picture (because who wants to print up everything these days?) and a nice member of staff helped us get the job done. It cost 78p, but it was worth the extra pence because, you know, we actually got what we wanted in a reasonable amount of time.
It had taken us about an hour to get a specific photo printed up, which would have blown the tiny mind of the 15 year old me, but I am not 15, I am 48 and I expect better from the world. Even though this whole incident was actually down to my own incompetence.
