Wicked Fragments

Hm.

Let's consider something outside of photography for a moment... perhaps it will strike some of the emotion from the conversation.

I play trumpet and have for about... jeez, almost 30 years now. Damn, I'm old. I happen to have a fairly nice horn... a Vincent Bach Silver. Can't remember the model number, but it ran about $2500 new a good 20 years ago. Beautiful instrument.

Anyway...

(by the way the following course of events has happened to me NUMEROUS times, so I'm not making this up... I'm just condensing it into one representative example)

Imagine the scenario with me and someone who has been playing for just a few years. (or even 5-8 years, for that matter). Assume the person is playing a standard old ~$300 Brass Yamaha or King student horn. Good, solid workhorse of an instrument. Nothing wrong with it.

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"Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs. As a matter of fact nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love; and viewed in this light the incorrectness of the popular classification is readily apparent." -Alfred Stieglitz

To be honest, this should probably be captioned "I Hate Salespeople", or unfortunately just "I Hate People", but at present recruiters have risen my ire just a touch, and they tend to exemplify certain particularly bad human characteristics that I'm presently annoyed about, so today it'll be "I Hate Recruiters".  I'll hate someone else later.  I've got lots of time.

A few minutes ago I get this call from some random number I don't recognize.  I generally answer my phone by saying my name... a practice I should probably drop.

"Bob Smith," I say stiffly into the phone.

"Oh hi, is this Bob Smith?"

Now the tone of this person's voice immediately identifies him to me as someone I probably have never spoken to in my life, so the warning flag is thrown and I am on my guard.

"Yes, this is Bob Smith."

"Oh hi, Bob.  How are you?  Am I catching you at a good time?"

"I guess it depends on why you are calling," I say with a somewhat chilly tone.

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A lot of people are slackers... well, let me amend that:  Most people will invariably wind up being too busy, distracted, overwhelmed or disorganized to consistently follow through on all things.  Since they will eventually wind up not following through on your thing, they will appear to be a slacker.

The distinction may be small, but it is a key one, because how you handle the two different types (slackers vs. person who just happens to be slacking relative to you) is very different.

Since this comes up a lot for me, I figured it would be valuable to share the information.  Here are the steps:

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