in which your humble author conducts a series of wild and dangerous experiments to test the fragility [or otherwise] of his originally submitted passport snaps…
having been told by the irish embassy, that the passport snaps i had originally submitted had been ruined by their laminating machine – with the suggestion that this had somehow been due to my printing them digitally instead of using a photobooth – i resolved to try out a series of experiments to find out just how resilient my inkjet printed snaps were, compared to ones taken in a photobooth.
but first i needed to score some more inkjet printer photo paper and a better set [could i get worse if it tried?] of snaps from a photobooth. so off to the local asda, which i knew also possessed a photobooth, to try and improve on the previous day’s horrendous offerings.
as luck would have it, i managed to get there just at ‘giant-head [ie. [school]children] lunchtime’, so the asda foyer was crawling with screeching brats, the majority of whom seemed to be congregating round the photobooth. now i hate kids and try to avoid any contact with them at the best of times, so the thought of trying to compose myself for a set of photos i’d have to carry round for the next ten years, while a load of skriking fuckwitts careered round in my immediate vicinity, filled me with horror. i beat a hasty retreat and decided to try elsewhere.
there’s another asda near trafford park, next door to costco, so i decided to try there in the hope that either, costco would have a photobooth or that branch of asda, being further away from any schools than my local one, might be bereft of giant heads.
i drove down to trafford park and tried costco first. they didnae have a photobooth, so i went over to the nearby asda. the foyer was empty, apart from the odd shopper entering and leaving and there in the quietest corner sat a photobooth. i walked towards it counting out my change, sneaked a quick peek under the curtain to make sure no-one was already in there and settled myself into the seat…
… to see a notice cellotaped to the glass which said “out of order. please do not use”
i decided to abandon the photobooth part of my mission for now and get on with tracking down some more ‘hardcore’ photographic paper. so, off to pcworld, where i bought a packet of the heaviest weight inkjet photographic paper they had.
on the way home i nipped back to my local asda, where i found to my relief that the lunchtime gianthead invasion had retreated and i was able to use the photobooth there to secure a new set of snaps.
once again the results were pretty atrocious. i still looked like a dodgy bald bloke with a case of the mumps, but at least my head was roughly the same shape as it looks when i gaze in the mirror of a morning, so i decided to quit while i was ahead and resign myself to the inevitable.
once back home, i decided to carry out a few experiments to try and find out what exactly was wrong with the prints i had originally sent, which had caused them to be unusable:
i got the iron out and turned it to it’s highest setting and stuck one of the original inkjet photos that i’d sent with my passport application onto it and awaited the conflagration…. and waited…. and waited…
nothing happened! the paper didn’t curl up, the ink didn’t fade away. there were no flames or smoke. the crappy cheapo inkjet photo just sat there on the iron for about five minutes and eventually yellowed very slightly.
i dropped one of the photobooth snaps onto the iron: immediately it curled up and the surface bubbled and blistered as its plastic coating melted.
next i tried some of my new heavyweight inkjet photo paper: that too bubbled and wrinkled and melted onto the iron.
“OK” i thought “it’s obviously not a problem with the heat resistance. maybe the inkjet ink is just not stable enough?…”
i licked a finger and tried rubbing it on my three guineapigs. as expected the photobooth snap didnae suffer any ill-effects, besides a roughening of the surface. with the heavyweight photographic paper, the ink smudged and smeared straight away. “aha” i thought, “so that’s it. the ink must smudge somehow when it goes through the machine!…” so i tried rubbing a wet finger on the cheapo inkjet print…
again, nothing! not the slightest bit of smudging!
determined to break the wee bugger, i left the stubborn snap dunked in a glass of red wine for about half an hour. at the end of that time the photopaper was dyed a nice pink colour, but the photo itself was still as good as ever! so my experiments showed that the cheap’n'nasty prints i’d already sent off with my original application were the most durable of the lot. what the fuck had they done at the embassy to ruin them? and furthermore, why were they insisting on me sending a crappy photobooth set instead, when my tests had shown that the paper they’re printed on is the least resistant to heat of the lot?
i packaged up the snaps [un-experimented-on versions, of course]; one further set of the original ones and a set of the ‘slightly-but-only-slightly-less-repulsive’ photobooth ones and sent them back to the girl at the embassy, asking her nicely if she’d try the digital ones again first and only use the photobooth ones as a last resort.
i now await the next thrilling installment!
