family pictures time

The church we go to is assembling a family directory. The deal is, if you go get your pictures taken, you get a free directory and one free picture of the family. The people taking the pictures hope you will then buy a package from them, which more than makes up for the cost of the venture. Doing this right before the holidays, when you might want to...oh...do Christmas cards that are pictures of the family, or send pictures out with other kinds of cards, or whatever...helps their cause.

We hadn't done a family picture like that in about 5 or 6 years, so we bought into the whole package thing, but what caught me is when the girl asked if we wanted our pictures retouched, because if we did, there was some fee. I declined. I asked her..."Well, if you touch them once and that doesn't do the trick, why would I want you to re-touch them?"

Blank stare....nobody gets me (except the youngster, who rolled his eyes and said under his breath, "Dad please stop. It's embarassing.") You'd think they'd have heard some variation of that a thousand times, so maybe she was patronizing me. Then again, if it works on the same theory as twice baked potatoes, maybe there's something to it. Those things are tasty.

Then I got a monologue on what retouching is, because, I guess, she didn't know what else to do. Sometimes being a smart ass backfires.