One of the things I find interesting on the Internet is how often people’s first reaction to a thing is to take a photo and post it. It provides good content sometimes (like this one is funny) but I’ve just never thought like that
Seems like you’re someone that enjoys living your life, not recording your life.
I have friends who get upset that i don’t take enough photos while hiking, camping or paddling. I always tell them they are welcome to come and experience it themselves instead.
One of the most amazing experiences as an adult is going back through pictures of people doing things. My friends, my family. I sit with my wife and kids and we tell stories to them about our youth, they ask questions about them. The most amazing experience is showing them those pictures and seeing their amazement that their old parents were once young men and women.
There is nothing wrong with not posting those for other people, but pictures of people have a way helping you visceraly remember the emotions of that event.
You’re not wrong at all, that’s just a different perspective on pictures.
It turns out that habit is quite a life hack.
I rarely (every 1-2 yrs) post personal content on any social media platform, otherwise just direct album shares with specific people. HOWEVER getting into the habit of just snapping pictures of stuff that might be useful later (or interesting, important, etc) has become an extremely flexible and low-effort form of documentation, journaling, note-taking, and CYA.
Examples:
- Need documentation for a purchase? You have the receipt.
- Rental company (car/hotel/landlord/hw-store/bike/scooter) scamming you for damage at exorbitant rates? Pics prove you returned item in same condition.
- Insurance needs serial number for the gadget you lost on the train? Good thing you took a picture of the sticker on the bottom.
- Can’t remember what day it was you visited that person/place a few years ago? Search by location/time of day/contact.
- Need to prove a product arrived damaged or dead? Easy, took pictures at delivery and during unboxing.
- Can’t remember how box was packed? Check unboxing photos.
- Manufacturer demands video of non-working item for warranty? Already have it.
- Need to remember how something was wired/assembled before taking apart? Done.
- Support can’t help with intermittent technical problem until you can reproduce. Good thing your instinct was to screenshot the error message.
It has just been an endlessly useful habit.
Also handy for things like “where was this plugged in?” And "what’s that sticker I can’t quite read on the back of this bulky thing I can’t/don’t want to move
Yeah you’re totally right about pictures as documentation. I do it a lot but you seem to be even better than I am. Curious – do you have a good system for keeping pictures like that searchable or organized? That’s my only issue with it, is that sometimes those can be hard to dig back through
I usually just lean on the local auto-tagging and OCR of the photo app, but sometimes if I take a pic that I suspect I’ll reference a lot, or just want it to be easy to find quickly even if I’m high or concussed or whatever, I’ll add a handful of likely keywords as custom tags.
My recommendation, however, is to favor delayed organization. While you may spend more time later digging to find the thing, it’s a good bet that (1) most things won’t need to be found i.e. most front-loaded effort would be wasted, (2) everything can actually still be found even if it occasionally takes a little longer, and (3) on-device image recognition and automatic cataloging tends to improve over time making everything more searchable retroactively.
No joke, when I did eBay with the bike shop stuff, the main shop I worked out of was at the end of a residential ally at the bottom of a hill (behind the shop). Homeless people would drag couches down the hill and sleep behind the shop around once a month. We had to pay to remove them.
So the thing that actually gets dirty and disgusting with an old couch is just the fabric. The foam for the cushions is still fine. After letting it air out for a day or so, it doesn’t stink or anything. That became my packing material, especially for international shipping with high end bikes.
Taking a sawzall to the couch’s frame yields useful scrap wood. The fabric that makes the back of a couch is usually in near perfect condition and is a medium weight upholstery that is huge and usually seam free. If you remove this upholstery and build a canvas frame, you can paint it white and make an enormous art canvas… I should make this a YSK …
I used old couches to make photo studio backgrounds and reflectors. The remaining waste fit into the shop dumpster, so a win win.
So, just to be clear. You took a homeless person’s bed and used it as scrap to send to paying customers?
Yup, kicked them out and cleaned up their mess. It was really this one schizophrenic man Joe. He would beat off to any girls in the parking lot. He was a funny guy. I bought him lunch often, but had to kick him off the property during business hours. The poor guy smelled terrible.
To be more clear the neighborhood skater kids were the ones that usually dragged the couches down and then Joe would sleep on it if it was there. He had bedding and stuff. I usually left a couple of old bike boxes out for some extra padding. He slept under the overhang that was beside the parking garage.
I’m smart enough to have both empathy and business sense enough to know how to run one. Bike shops have untenable low profit margins and are mostly a hobby business at best breaking even. No one on that kind of pay and budget can save or house the world.
“These are not the billionaires you’re looking for. Move along.” 👌
That’s a legit reuse move. No new materials produced to be discarded, and if the recipient doesn’t want the DVD, they can donate it rather than sending it to a landfill.
I believe you only because that absolutely would happen
I’m not even sure I’ve seen the movie. I mean, by all logical reasoning I’m sure I have, but I cannot recall it.
It has one of the all-time cringiest scenes in film:
