My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Picture This

I read something scary today. The Hewlett-Packard company is developing a “wearable, always-on” camera. This is a camera, the article said, that promises to “store your life in images.” I don’t need this, because I have Ed. Ed is not wearable—except for rare occasions such as heavy air turbulence, wherein he will fasten himself to your arm like a large, distraught handbag—but he is doing a bang-up job of storing our lives in images. At last count, we have 124 photo albums. “Yup,” he’ll say, “I’m a tourist in my own home.”

Ed takes the pictures, and my job is to put them in albums. This enables me to secretly throw away all unflattering shots of myself, leaving the three or so per year in which my mouth is shut and my eyes are open, a combination that still eludes me after years of practice. So it worked out pretty well. Until last month.

Last month Ed bought a camera that takes photos in various sizes, including panoramic. The word panoramic, as you know, comes from the Latin panor, meaning “impossible to fit into an album.” Ed’s camera has an irritating habit of throwing itself, unbeknownst to us, into panoramic mode, forcing me to scissor each picture down to size.

Consequently, about six months ago, I quit doing my job. Ed hasn’t noticed yet, because Ed—like 99 percent of the population—has never actually opened an album to revisit a set of photos. Our photos function as a sort of archival record, should the authorities one day call into question, say, our presence at the Half Moon Bay pumpkin patch on October 17, 1993. Your Honor, let the record show that at 11:34 a.m., Ed held two pumpkins up to his chest in an amusing, ribald manner.

The photos are piling up rather alarmingly. One day I will be forced to follow the example of the Nepalese postal service, which, I’ve heard, can get so far behind that it simply throws away whole sacks of undelivered mail. One day someone in the Nepalese postal service is going to show up to work with a wearable, always-on camera, and someone else is going to be in big, big trouble.

Imagine if we all had the Hewlett-Packard system. The article says your wearable camera will be able to capture 5 frames per second. That is 300 photos per minute, 18,000 per hour, 27,000 per annual visit to the Half Moon Bay pumpkin patch. Handy for those times when loved ones are involved in a disputed finish at the Preakness, but really, logically speaking, who wants this?

I’ll tell you who. Those people who make you watch slide shows of their vacation trips, trips apparently funded by the U.S. Geological Survey office, in an effort to document every peak, reservoir, and piney ridge in the region. Our friend Larry does this to us, and you just know he’s going to be first in line for the wearable, always-on camera. I’m not having any of it. “Larry,” I’m going to say. “I would love to come over and see your photos, but the Petersons are showing security camera footage of their lobby tonight. Apparently there’s this moment when the doorman adjusts his jacket that is just riveting.”

Not that the “wearable” camera is without merit. It would be mounted on the bridge of your glasses so that it’s shooting whatever you’re looking at. This way, you don’t have to dig it out of your bag and push the proper buttons and compose the shot. Because we all know it takes time to forget to turn on the flash and position your finger just so over the lens. And by then, the moment has passed. Whereas, if you have a constantly snapping digital camera built into your glasses, you will never miss one of life’s special moments, though regrettably, most of those moments will now consist of friends and strangers heartlessly mocking your eyewear.

And, since the system is digital, I won’t have to worry about putting the trillions of snapshots in albums. I can upload them to “data centers,” where they will accumulate to the point that they crash the Internet and world chaos—Finally! Something worth documenting!—ensues.