Wednesday 1 July 2009

Whuh!?

The scenario:
Meeting a couple of friends over lunch. Harsh and I decide to give her a framed photo of the three of us, (taken before lunch) after lunch. The plan is laid out, Harsh makes the tricky part of getting her to pose with us for a pic before lunch rather easy. We gave the camera to one of the dudes at the restaurant. He took a decent pic, except for the fact that the three of us didn't really fill up the frame. Then, part 2. I faked a phone call and walked out of the restaurant with the camera in my hand (she didn't notice, yay!). Smooth until now.
I walk unto Main street, and choose to walk into one of the Fotofasts there (there are two, don't ask me why). I spent ten minutes there, just standing, because there was some sort of miscommunication between a customer and the woman in the store and now they were arguing about it. Annoyed by this point, I walked out and walked into the other Fotofast.
I placed an order for the photo we had just taken. I asked her the cost. She told me. Wasn't much, and was appropriate for the size. Then I thought it would be nicer if the photo was cropped, so that we would fill up more of the frame. So I casually asked the woman whether she could crop it. I assumed it would be like 15-20 rupees. She tells another woman there to 'calculate' the cost of cropping an 8x10 photo. I'm already 'wtf' in my head. Cropping is cropping, on a digital image it takes a few seconds to do and is irrespective of the size of the print! After performing her lengthy calculations, she tells me, 'It'll cost you Rs. 226.'

WHAT!?

1. This is robbery because they do not add anything worth Rs. 226 while cropping a DIGITAL photo. It takes a couple of seconds to do.

2. This is robbery because they want to charge for cropping according to the size of the final print!

Meh, I could come up with a hundred reasons why this is robbery. I obviously chose not to be robbed, and asked the thief... err... woman from fotofast to print the photo as is. Result,
I was unintentionally rude (only for a couple of awkward seconds though) to a friend of the recipient (because I was annoyed).
Happily though, the recipient really liked our gift!

Next time you go to get prints, avoid fotofast, the fiends. I find that 1 Hour Photo yields good results and is very affordable too.

4 comments:

Harshvardhan Pande said...

wtf! i had no idea abt this complication, n i dont think u were rude to anyone, so chill. but it was a gr8 job done by u at such short notice to produce a memorable gift. also for the readers it was greysith's idea to begin with :)

greySith said...

Wasn't exactly rude, but those two seconds immediately after I got back were extremely awkward :P

Meha Vijay Desai said...

:D
Man, you guys made the friend's day that afternoon, I can be pretty sure of that! She was pretty wtf at your disappearance though, both times!!!

greySith said...

All 'part of the plan' :)