DUNWOODY, Ga. – I stood at the photo counter, clutching the blue cardboard envelope.
Handing it to the technician, I asked, “How long will that be?”
“About an hour,” he responded. After all, it was a one-hour photo establishment.
In hindsight, this might have seemed like a dumb question. Ironically, it isn’t. I’ve lost count of the number of places I’ve been where one-hour photo really means two to three hours. Now, that makes perfect sense.
I like to take pictures. Every trip I take, I bring my camera, snapping dozens of pictures of the scenery and local sights. But, in recent months, I haven’t been using film, opting instead for my new digital camera.
So, needless to say, I haven’t taken too many trips to the local one-hour photo joint.
Where the digital camera succeeds, at least for me, is in its instant gratification. I’m impatient when it comes to my photography. Once upon a time, overnight photo development was adequate. After a while, one-hour photo developing became my mainstay. Now, I only have to wait a matter of minutes – or however long it takes to download my images to my laptop – to view my pictures.
Like so many other things in life, instant gratification is key. Don’t believe me? Then why are drive-thru windows so prominent in nearly every fast food establishment in the country. Similarly, cell phones have given us a way to reach people instantaneously. We don’t need pagers to tell someone to call us back at his or her convenience. And surely we don’t need to wait for that person to go home and listen to his or her voice mail to learn that we want to talk with him or her.
So, for places advertising one-hour photo development, on the rare occasion I drop off a roll of film, I expect to be leafing through my pictures in an hour – not six hours from now and definitely not tomorrow. Hence the phrase: “One-Hour Photo.”
