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Telephone camera stupidity

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As I was waiting to be served in a Cafe Nero coffee shop earlier the woman in front of me took a photo of the store’s selection of packaged wafers (vanilla, chocolate, hazelnut). I was on the verge of saying to her, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen’. But it was none of my business. So I’m saying it here instead. Can anyone beat that?

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    • Yes, isn’t that one of the good things about phones, you can take a picture of anything so you don’t have to remember detail later. I’ve taken pictures in shops a lot, mainly of the product descriptions so I can look things up. Not sure why anyone would need a picture of some wafers but someone else might wonder why I have a picture (actually several pictures! ) of the doors on offer in Wickes one weekend!

      • Yeah me too. I’ve got photos of work memos, products on shelves, little funny details that I’ve seen and want to show someone later. All kinds of crap. Periodically I’ll clear them off my phone but I reckon there’s a hundred or so random photos from daily life of what you might call “to-do-list stuff” on my camera roll right now.

  2. Some years back I was on my bike (at the junction of Brownswood Road / Green Lanes for those who know the area). I want to turn right from Brownswood into Green Lanes.
    The light changed in my favour and I moved forward. Meanwhile a woman heading south down Green Lanes sailed blithely through the red light. Fortunately for her the driver coming through was awake because he slammed on his brakes and avoided hitting her.
    I waited for traffic to pass, made my right turn, then set off.
    The female cyclist had turned into Clissold Park, which was my route too and as I passed her I said those words: “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen”.

    • Yep, I think you’ve beaten me there, Carl!

      I should point out that I’m not a mobiile telephone owner/user, so maybe there’s a whole anthropological development (people taking photos of banal objects and products in stores) that has wholly passed me by and about which I have no comprehension.

      Look at it this way: before the mobile telephone era, if any of use had seen someone in a confectioner’s with a camera taking a flash photograph of a few Mars Bars, would we not have thought, ‘nutter’?

      What has changed, bar the technology?

      • Before camera phones you might go to a shop and wrote down sizes and specs of things and you’d never quite write down enough. Since the camera phone, I just take loads of pictures, it’s just a different (better and easier) way of taking information away.

      • “What has changed, bar the technology?”

        Well, how long have you got? Your question isn’t a million miles from “Before the internal combustion engine, people mostly got around on their legs. What’s changed apart from the technology?”

        I think you misunderstand / vastly underestimate the extent to which, as a technological species, our development of new tools changes us and our society. Mobile phones aren’t a faddy add-on – they are central to most people’s lives.

        In this particular example, the difference is that film used to cost money. Photos had to be printed. Now they’re utterly disposable and costless, and taking a photo is purely a different way of making a note of something. The camera in this usage doesn’t mean what “camera” means in your cultural frame of reference. It means “notebook and pencil”.

        So reframe – if you’d seen someone jotting something down in a queue 30 years ago, you wouldn’t have looked twice.

        • You have a point, Friar, about the notebook aspect. Though I still wonder why anyone would take pics of Cafe Nero wafers – ALL Cafe Nero branches stock the same selection. What was she going to do? Post on Facebook and say, ‘Wow! Ballyhackamore Cafe Nero have ALL FOUR wafer varieties!!!!’

          • Who knows? But there’s probably a perfectly mundane reason and taking photos of things in this way isn’t particularly stupid or weird, is all I’m saying.

            • I’m afraid you’ll not convince me in a general sense, Friar. People who take pictures of their lunch and stick it on Facebook are, to my mind, berks, and always will be.

              • To be fair, without knowing the motivation for the picture we can really condemn her, but I agree in as much I struggle with the way that people record such trivial, routine aspects of their lives in this fashion.

                I have a smartphone and it stays with me almost all the time, night and day so I’m on board with the whole phone thing but people continually posting stuff that’s really of no consequence baffles me.

                I suspect it’s one of those things that feels good at the time but the truth is that those ‘memories’ will never actually be relived.

                On the other hand I’m equally baffled by someone choosing not to have any sort of mobile phone.

                  • I can’t explain it. It just something at the time I thought – instinctively, and not in a malicious way – was just was totally daft. I now see that it’s a kind of normal lifestyle to some people, to an extent that I obviously quite honestly hadn’t appreciated.

                    Iif I see people taking photos of paving stones, litter, cups of coffee, newspapers, or any other banal objects I will now keep my thoughts to myself.

                    • Sorry I didn’t mean to be aggressive, if that’s how it came across. I just tend to like people and all that stuff we sometimes get on here about “civilians” very slightly raises my hackles. I guess your OP made me feel a similar way. No offence intended.

                    • Ha! I guess you’re right Ainsley – I literally *was* musing on the byways of popular culture! And no worries Friar – I’ve genuinely learnt something. I hadn’t thought about the aide memoir aspect of taking a camera phone pic – I suppose I assumed the woman was going to post a display of wafers on Facebook, and I couldn’t understand why it would possibly be of interest to anyone under any circumstances.

                      Mrs H is in a book club. Often the members are on Facebook talking about the club meeting while at the club meeting instead of actually talking to people at the club meeting – about the book or otherwise. She is far more tolerant than I would be.

                    • @colin-h – she was probably putting together a wafer-based TMFTL post.

                      Yesterday morning you might have seen me doing something similar (let’s be honest: exactly the same) in Ikea for a menu-based TMFTL Afterworders on Facebook post. Thank goodness you weren’t in Brisbane! 😉

              • With a General Election coming up, people taking such photos should not be allowed to vote.
                The smart phone is not a step forward for mankind it is leading us down a very dangerous and dumbed down path.

    • My ex-employers insisted that if we were involved in any traffic accidents we had to take photos of the location of the incident, the other vehicle/s and if possible the occupants of it/them and any damage to all vehicles involved.

      Sensible precautions in these days of crooked Claim Management companies. I always make sure I carry my phone when I’m driving.
      You can even get Traffic Cam apps for your smartphone.

    • Random factlet; i worked in the boozer at that corner, Carl – the Brownswood Park Tavern, summers of ’92 and ’93. How’s that pub looking now? Back in the day, we’d serve up cheese and crackers for the cribbage gang on a Sunday morning, shutting from 3 until 7.

      It’s a gastropub, no doubt by now, is it?

      • I haven’t been down that way since 2008, so can’t say for sure what it is like now, but it hadn’t felt the gentle touch of gentrification leading to the serving of salt marsh lamb served with a quinoa and rocket salad with a pomegranate jus in favour of Walker’s prawn cocktail crisps the last time I went past.

  4. I’m a new user of a smartphone. I’ve had it about two weeks. Prior to that, I was, like, SO scathing about virtually every aspect of (everybody else’s) smartphone use: their ubiquity, people’s absorption in them, the general intrusiveness.

    Now I’ve got one, I am, of course, an utter, hypocritical convert. And yes, I take lots of pictures.

  5. I used to think Japanese tourists were mad because they would seemingly take photos of all sorts of everyday items that have no discernible photographic attraction.
    Then I went to Japan and found myself taking photos of vending machines, shop windows all sorts of stuff.
    It takes all sorts I guess. With the wafer girl in your coffee shop would have been okay with it as long as it wasn’t delaying me getting my coffee.
    Lost count of number of times I have been at a supermarket checkout when the person in front stops packing their shopping to conduct a telephone call.

    • It was a borderline case of delaying me, Steve. She actually arranged some wafers before taking the pic but I think I was more bemused with the very fact that she was photographing a standard selection of Cafe Nero wafers than thinking, ‘Hang on, this twit is wasting my time…’

      But it was my first coffee of the day. Any longer in taking that pic and I might have gone berserk!

      • In the shop where I work employees of the Pick’n Mix company we use for candy and nuts etc always take before-and-after photos on their phones and send to their supervisor. I guess it’s both to prove to their boss that they’ve completed their tasks of cleaning and stocking the containers holding the snacks, and also to have proof in case some shop owner unfairly accuses them of not doing the job properly.
        Maybe she had stocked the biscuit shelf and took a picture to prove it?

    • Take it from one who worked with Japanese tourists, they are mad but generally very sweet about it, although the residents of a well known health farm weren’t too happy when group of visitors I had arranged to visit were not only taking photos of the well fed residents, but laughing and pointing at them.

  6. I still don’t get the notion of taking a picture of your meal in a restaurant.
    Mrs D tells me that it is helpful if you’re going to write a review or something on line, but she’s never written a review yet.

    I’ve started to take pictures of my beer in pubs just be be awkward

    • The way food is presented on a plate in a restaurant and can be extremely artistic. Also if it is a special meal why not take a quick snap, just don’t do it for all meals which a friend of mine does. People recording whole gigs on their cell phone from row Z is just crazy though and annoying.

      • A friend, not so long ago, was on a month-long sponsored diet of some sort and part of the deal was that he had to take photos of everything he ate and post the pix for the sponsors to view. Also had to weigh himself every evening and take a photo of the reading on the scales and post it.

        My last job involved going to various properties to carry out electrical repairs. I had to take before and after photos of all work that I did and send them back to the office before leaving. Also had to email details of what I’d done and the materials I’d used. If I arrived at a client’s house and nobody was home, I had to call the office and inform them, wait while they phoned the client to verify they weren’t there and then take a photo of the front door to prove I’d been there and send that before going on to my next job.

        • Social media and the smartphone have definitely made eateries up their game in terms of food presentation. But they’ve also led to atrocities like bread served in a flat cap, bacon on a mini washing line etc. Not to mention the plague of wooden boards and mini chip buckets/fryer baskets. Horrific.

        • I agree if we’re talking about a pub somewhere. But if I’m paying for haute cuisine, which once in a blue moon I like to do, it’s different. That’s food as art, and the presentation is as integral and satisfying as a great gatefold sleeve is to a great album.

          Saying that, the @wewantplates account on Twitter is ace and if I get one more meal served on a sodding breadboard in a MOR gastropub, I swear I’ll do time. Plates work. That’s why we’ve used them for centuries.

      • I use Dropbox, Shazam, Trainline (for rail tickets and times), The AA, Mobi Calculator (better than the standard Android one), Media Monkey, Google Maps, Facebook and JazzLondonLive (London area jazz gig information) apps.
        I used to use an ad-supported flashlight app on my old Samsung smartphone but my current phone has an ad-free one built-in. I used to use the Tweetdeck app for Twitter, but I’ve given up on Twitter entirely now.

        • I’ve cut Twitter down to just news stuff from proper comentators and agencies and I’m much happier with it. Real people shouldn’t be allowed on Twitter.

    • I think it’s horses for courses, give it a while and you’ll soon find yourself moving certain apps to your home screen. A file manager and dropbox are pretty essential to me, as is the Wikipedia app (I do like to take an offline copy of Wikipedia with me all the time too for use with the FastWiki app but that’s grown to 13G now!). I’ve got DoggCatcher (for podcasts) and twicca (for twitter) on my home screen too. The icon to actually make a phone call is on my 3rd screen as I scroll through as it’s one of my least used!

    • I’ve got a Windows Phone, so Apps are sort of a foreign language.
      BBC Sport app is wonderfully slow, and most other Apps like BBC News or Wikipedia are third-party written Apps.
      There are a fair few Free Apps available, just not that many interesting ones (can’t find the Fart App for example).

      I have got a Kindle App, but to be honest I forget I’ve even got a phone that can do “stuff” and just use it for calls and texts
      (and a little bit of searching the Windows Store reveals I can get a version of Snake – that’s me sorted …)

    • Text-to-voice apps can be not only very useful but an absolute hoot, as a current bout of tonsilitis has revealed. Making the American robot lady say rude things has caused much cough-inducing mirth.

  8. I’m actually with Colin, Friar and Leicester on this one. I too am new to smart phones, just last week my Samsung arrived. I used to think people snapping away were crazy. I am now one of them. I had a hysterical picture of a pint and a pub order pot with the number 60 on. I sms’d it to my other half as it is her mums 60th birthday tomorrow. Anyone watching would have thought “what is that man doing?” I did try to upload it here from my phone but couldn’t get Imgur to work, I managed to let my burger go cold and my pint get warm……..

    So, I am learning to love my smartphone, now home I still don’t know how Imgur works on my phone nor how to transfer said pint and pot picture from my phone to my lap top which is irrelevant because it wouldn’t mean anything to you lot anyway. I have downloaded Flikr to my phone but I’m not sure if we can go Flikr to blog.

    Colin, you should join us, Friar you are right they are as essential now as a pen and paper and Leicester I hope you’re learning quicker than me…..

    • Thank You, Davemeister, but I have no need of one! My work is solitary, generally PC-based, I rarely travel, I have no direct colleagues, no dependents, friends can contact me on landline or by email, remote work associates/clients can add Google hangouts to that list, and I can go to coffee shops once in a while for the simple pleasure of reading a paper with a large Americano and maybe even a wafer – without feeling an excruciating urge to take a photo of that wafer or, worse, to then use a portable telecommunications gadget to send that photo to somehow who will almost certainly have absolutely no interest in it! Think of time I am saving for all my friends!

    • It’s an education but I do find it pretty intuitive. The transferring pics things seems to happen automatically. Haven’t come across imgur, though, apart from seeing it watermarked on online pics.

      To be honest, I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to cotton on to smartphones. It’s a laptop, iPod and Kindle in one!

      • As far as I know Imgur is the only way to post photos on here although I could be wrong. You’re not wrong it is an astonishing piece of kit that I want to use to it’s fullest I’m just thrashing around in the dark discovering stuff more by accident than design at the moment.

  10. Did she buy a wafer? Because she might, for example, use MyFitnessPal and wanted to remember the item to input the calorie count into the app later. Which isn’t in anyway strange. *coughs*

    I once took a picture of a ‘duffin’ in Starbucks (a cross between a muffin and a donut), because at the time THAT was the stupidest thing ever.

  11. After the bombings in 2005 — i.e well before smartphones — I made a photographic diary of my day and was thrown out of Tesco on Portobello Road for taking pictures. Maybe she was doing something similar.

  12. It used to be much more difficult to actually Make A Phone Call on a smartphone than it was on the old stupidphones. Thankfully the manufacturers have mostly corrected this ridiculous state of affairs.

  13. I took this picture in Liverpool recently just so I could post it on Facebook with the caption

    Morrissey voice – ‘Abandoned tricycle on a roadside desolate’

    for my literally tens of followers

    If that makes me some kind of weirdo I intend to be a freak for the rest of my life, and I shall baffle you with cabbages and rhinoceroses in the kitchen incessant quotations from “Now We Are Six” through the mouthpiece of Lord Snooty’s giant poisoned electric head. So there

    View post on imgur.com

  14. if you own a flashed amazon firestick, a phone camera is the perfect way to take pics of dvd cases in (for example) hmv.
    that way one can be reminded of good films to watch for free and not have to wade through file after file of drek……I imagine.

  15. This made me look at my photos and I have a picture of a weatherbeaten poster for B*Witched!, Atomic Kitten and S Club 3 (sic).

    I also have a picture of a shop window displaying front pages of recent magazines. One of them has the headline “Making Plans With Nigel” – next to a picture of a TV personality here in NZ called Nigel. Made me wonder how many Brits would pick up on that song reference, let alone kiwis.

  16. I’m definitely a person who uses the phone as I would have used a pad and a pen previously. If I’m in town and see a poster for a gig that interests me, I take a photo and then check for more information on line later on. Posters are constantly removed or covered over, so one has to strike while the Iphone is hot.

    The IMDB app is very handy if I am browsing through DVDs in a chazza or the like. If I see a film that looks potentially interesting, I can rapidly find out more. Their rating have to be taken with a slight pinch of salt but if it’s 5 or under the film is probably a stinker.

    Newspaper apps like the Guardian are perfect if you have a few minutes waiting for a train or on the train.

    If you are a Facebook abuser, their app is a must. Adding a photo of the packets of wafers you’ve just seen is a piece of cake.

    And last but not least, The Afterword App of course.

    What? There isn’t one?

    One fine day, I hope there will be.

  17. The last years of my working life were totally dominated by my company Blackberry and then iPhone. It never left my side as me and all my colleagues, especially those bastards in the US who never seemed to sleep, mailed, texted, skyped etc all the day long.
    I retired three years ago and have so far resisted the temptation to get a phone that is in any way smart. I sit in a bar or on the train and smugly watch the rest of the world bow their heads to the small device which never seems to leave their hand. Occasionally I would like to take a photo or consult Wiki but the freedom, the freedom!

    • This post reminds me of when I first was given a mobile phone, which was the sort you had to pluck out the aerial to use. I thought I was Billy Big Bananas but it didn’t alter my behaviour. I still listened to my CD Walkman on my morning commute, which was a beautiful walk the entire length of Upper Street in Islington.

      On the second morning I arrived at work to find my boss fuming. ‘What’s the problem?’ ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’ ‘Well, I’ve been on my way to work.’ ‘The reason you’ve got a mobile phone is so I can get hold of you.’

      This was the trade-off: they give me a mobile phone; I give them time that had previously belonged exclusively to me. Saying this in 2017 is like duh (*waves to people who deliberately send round-robin emails at 2am*) but at the time — to me, at least — it felt like being through the looking glass. And not in a good way. Have this shiny, new mobile phone, your girlfriend will be impressed. (Heh, it means we now own you 24/7.)

      That moment pretty much informed my view of mobile phones from then on, and is at least part of the reason it’s taken me so long to get a smartphone.

      • I recall a friend saying to me, right back in the very early days of cellphones “Mobiles are a great idea, as long as your boss and your missus don’t know your number.”

    • You know Lodes, you don’t have to be a heads-down-look-at-the-phone person just because you have one. I need one for – yes!- phone calls, and WhatsApp mostly but most of my commute time is spent looking out the window listening to music

        • It’s a text messaging app: it uses a way of texting that just uses the data network (ie the same 4G your phone’s web browser uses) instead of the phone network (standard texts use a protocol called SMS). Whatsapp was originally developed when people’s phone contracts restricted the number of texts you could send in a month. It circumvented that restriction by just using the data network instead (and using a minuscule amount of data while doing so).

          It’s also encrypted to make it unhackable. Only the sender and recipient can read the messages. Anyone peeking at the signal as it travels from A to B would just see scrambled data.

          Apparently it helps terrorists because of this encryption: it’s unsnoopable-on. Governments hate privacy. People want it but it’s terribly inconvenient.

          Although I’m not sure how seeing Adrian Elms’s texts would’ve stopped him driving a car or buying a kitchen knife, despite what Amber Rudd or the Mail claim.

          • i like whatsApp because I travel overseas quite a bit and most hotels and locations I visit have free wifi, so I can keep in touch with home, send pics of funny local wafer biscuits in cafes, and do Family Group chats for nowt.

          • I see. I thought it might be used to trigger an explosion but the government want access to find who terrorists are/were talking to. Probably a valid reason to breech the encryption, though, even if Adrian Elms may have just sent a last message to his girlfriend/mother/daughter.

            • Realistically what they actually want, because law enforcement always does, is to find out what we’re all saying, and to whom. I understand why they want to but we shouldn’t let ’em.

              • Rudd’s interview earlier today showed her to be as utterly out of her depth with the interweb, as with most things in her brief. She might not like encryption in Whatsapp, but depends on it for any https transaction she makes. What a splendid idea Amber, let’s have government approved backdoors into everything, breakable encryption – only breakable by the good guys, of course. What could possibly go wrong?

                • It’s ok. She’s going to hire people who know all the “relevant hashtags”.

                  She really said that. I’ve only recently unrolled from my spine having sprung me suddenly into a tightly-coiled backwards shame-pretzel.

                  • It’s pathetic isn’t it? Why not pass a law that makes sure that the spooks can access all the Whatsapp communications. I’m sure that will also stop criminals from communicating, phone to phone using end to end encryption with an app downloaded from a server… well somewhere! I believe that it being illegal to own a gun has meant criminals don’t own guns.
                    I’m not convinced that MPs should ever be allowed to talk about technology in public!

                    • I feel quite uncomfortable. I think it is potentially extremely important to know what Adrian Wells’s last communication was about. I find it inexplicable that the police can find out what texts were sent and to whom phone calls were made but WhatsApp is exempt. In a case like this, an exceptional one, the kind of which could easily be defined by law, it’s hard to see why not. Law enforcement resources are stretched enough as it is without putting a detail on Friar’s activities.

                    • Well I’m extremely uncomfortable with your suggestion on general civil liberties grounds.
                      Plus as said above, if you coerce WhatsApp to allow a back door decryption then bad guys will just move to another sytem… then another one… you get the picture.

  18. Who would have thought that a post on cultural differences around people taking photos of coffee shop wafers would become a discussion on balancing privacy against counter-terrorism?

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