Annoyance, part one

To my drugstore photo finishers:

I admit, I'm not paying you a lot. $2.39 for running a roll of 35mm color negative film through your mini-lab is a fine, fine price. However, I have a couple of gripes.
One, hire employees who give a damn. A certain drugstore at the corner of U.S. 301 and Progress has totally failed in coming through with my film not once, but TWICE. Like, showing up an hour later and it not even being touched. You promised sixty minutes, and I know that running a roll through your mini-lab, plus the cutting and sleeving, is a ten-minute process, tops! Someone just didn't feel up to doing it, TWICE. And that is frustrating.

And secondly, also on the subject of hiring employees who give a damn, also give your film specialists two important lessons about the handling of film:
1. "Those white gloves that we give you serve a purpose" - don't cut and sleeve my negatives with bare hands. And, almost every time, the same people who handle my negatives without gloves are the same people who leave fingerprints all over them. *I* have to clean those off, damnit.
2. "The drying of the negatives is still an important process of film developing." Take for instance the time before last that I got film developed, and the lady who took my film left it on the counter before she left. Just left it there, uncut and unprotected. The manager had to cut and sleeve my film, and of course, it came out looking like a pig's tail in a 1930s cartoon.



You guys have the knack for making my film curly as hell, for some reason. Whenever I get my film developed at the corner of Howard and Swann, in Tampa (nudge nudge), it's never curly like this. The people there know what they're doing. Yet, here in Riverview, this is the result. Different minilabs? Or people who just don't give a damn?

I'm not asking you to mess with the chemicals, or make me prints, or scan the damn things. I just want my negatives. And it's not hard to do.

Thank you -

-Shane.