Me ‘n’ Bruce.
A couple of weeks back I posted an old childhood pic of my brother and I, spurred on by a Flashback Friday segment my friend Keith, the Nostalgic Italian runs. It seemed to be of interest to some of you, so I give it another go today.
This shot would’ve been around 1992 or so, give or take a year. I was the Assistant Manager of a camera store/one hour photo place in the city’s biggest mall…and big it was. It ran straight north-south for over a quarter mile and had something like 200 stores and services back then, anchored by three department stores – Canada’s trifecta back then, Eaton’s, Sears and The Bay – and a grocery store. It had a big food court, a multi-plex movie theatre with, if I remember correctly, 8 screens, you name it.
I was in my mid-20s at the time, and with it being only a couple of blocks from my apartment, it was like a second home to me. This was back when people still went to the mall! I shopped there, I worked there, sometimes I’d be a typical ’80s youth and just hang out there. That wasn’t as utterly futile as it sounds; working there for a long time I got to know a lot of people that worked in the 199 or so other stores, most of them it would seem around my age. It was a bit of a social magnet back then for young singles (young married types too, but I wasn’t that). I could therefore be just about guaranteed to run into a number of friends whenever I went by, day or night.
Now to the store itself. It was back in something of the Golden Age for not only malls but for photographic retail. Film was still king – the few digital cameras around were obnoxiously bulky, overly expensive and stunningly low resolution. Every picture looked like a Minecraft creation. (Hence I and many others in the industry didn’t think they’d ever really take off. Little did we know!) But the advent of 35mm point-and-shoot cameras at reasonable prices in the ’80s meant suddenly almost anyone could afford to have a halfway decent camera… and they did. We were always busy, more or less (some days and times more so than others, obviously) and sold a ton of film and good numbers of the little cameras. Oddly, we made most of the profits on the photo-printing and on accessories like frames and albums, when people still bought them. We only pulled in a couple of dollars per camera typically, so tight was the competition and low the markup on them. We had a few SLR cameras as well, the more expensive, more professional sorts which I preferred playing with and selling, but the market was for the beginner cams with a little zoom and tiny built-in flash that worked to about six feet away… and when it worked gave people devilish red eyes.
The store developed film and had a printer which spat prints out on a sort of conveyor belt They popped out right by the big front glass windows; when photo labs like it were new it was quite a novelty for people to see photos coming out of the machine and up onto a sorter. This was great if it was cute pet photos, or nice wedding shots, or family picnics but should have been a red flag to people who had taken, shall we say “naughty” shots. If you didn’t want pretty much anyone you knew or didn’t know happening by and seeing your little foray into the fine art of pornography, this was probably not the lab to come to! Never stopped some people though, and our staff were about divided down the middle as to whether or not this was a good thing! Of course, there were guidelines about what we would or wouldn’t touch, but for the most part if it was legal, we printed. I figure savvy home-made X-rated enthusiasts probably therefore represented a good chunk of our customer base for Polaroid instant cams!
I could run the film processors and printer, trouble-shoot them, mix the smelly chemicals for them but the bosses seemed to prefer me out front, dealing with customers. This didn’t make a lot of sense to me, I didn’t think I was that personable or outgoing. But somehow people seemed to ask for me by name and I sold more cameras than most other employees…probably because of my low-pressure, laissez faire approach. I was anything but high pressure and I wasn’t going to sell someone a $400 fancy camera with all sorts of buttons for slow-sync flash and multiple self-timers and white balance if they just wanted a couple of photos on the beach come vacation time and previously had used nothing more complicated than an Instamatic. They’d be happy with the $89 special and that camera would get used; the other one would probably be in the closet after one trying roll of film with poor pictures caused by buttons being pushed randomly and they’d be cursing us to everyone they could tell.
So onto this actual photo. You see me in the front area of that store, crowded camera showcase behind me. I’m the one on the right, by the way! And with me…”Bruce”. Crikey, he’s a kangaroo, mate! Someone in the store had a sense of humor and a knowledge of Monty Python I guess (for those unfamiliar, a classic skit of theirs involves a university where all the faculty except one are called “Bruce” …) so we nicknamed him that. As you can see, there was some sort of promotion going on co-sponsored by Konica (before they merged with Minolta, they were a mid-level camera company and maker of our house brand of film) where if you bought some of their product, you could enter to win a trip to Australia.
Looking at it now, I figure this was a good evening. We males were supposed to wear ties in there at all times (unless we had permission to wear a branded polo shirt) but it wasn’t enforced that rigorously unless we were expecting head office to drop by. My hair was longer than I remembered back then! And it’s odd, I have a few remaining photos from that era and I’m not in regular glasses in them. I found out when I was 16 and went for my driver’s license test that I was basically blind as a bat. This came as a shock to me since I was used to thinking anything more than about five feet away was blurry by nature! But I did have a brief spell where I wore contacts. Those I found hard to get used to and gave up on before long as they kept ripping and in winter when it was dry, made my eyes itch and water. But I guess this was still in that timespan; most of my adult life I don’t go anywhere without goggles so to speak!
Bruce was a good mate who got along well with everyone. People figured he’d be good to throw a shrimp on the barby with and have a cold Fosters, and he liked to meet people. Especially young ladies. A couple of us young guys working there would accompany him around the mall and go meet the lovely ladies working in other stores around us. He made friends with them quickly and most of them loved to have their picture taken with good ol’ Bruce. I wish I still had those photos! No one from higher up really questioned it and we were ready to argue “he” was helping promote our store far and wide anyway.
There were a lot of busy, hectic days there in the seven years I was there; a lot of long hours, frequent colds caused by it being so busy with sneezy customers at Christmas time. Our boss, who showed up rather erratically, wasn’t always the easiest to get along with though looking back, I was probably more quarrelsome than I might now have chosen to be. But I made some good friends there and every once in awhile we had some really good times. When all is said and done, can’t ask for a whole lot more out of a job than that.
Everydave Life 