Date-stamp Your Poo

At my old job where I worked as an administrative assistant / go-to gal for a general contracting company here in Los Angeles, a major client was a bank dealing with foreclosure properties. That bank's asset management team, the team managing these foreclosed houses (and there's a lot - it's California after all) well that team was located thousands of miles away in India. From India, the team contracts contractors like the company I worked for to secure and fix up the houses. We might install a lockbox, do a re-key, build a fence, repair a roof, install a water heater, paint over graffiti, spread dry wall, trim the grass, call the cops on squatters, fix a leak. As one might imagine, due to the geographical distance, photo evidence was required for payment. And we had to process hundreds of photos for any single property: we had to take photos of the front, side, and rear of the house; a street scene photo, and a shot of the house numbers; photos taken before work, during the work, and after the work has been done; photos of the bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, floors, walls, fixtures, cracks, carpet. Photos of any trash or debris or dead animals left behind by the former residents. Photos photos photos! Well, one day, as I clicked through a file full of photos of the initial walkthrough of a new foreclosed house we were to manage and secure, I clicked through our workman's journey through the house, starting at the front door, click to the kitchen, a few shots of that, click to the living room with stained carpets (noted that down on my inspection checklist), click to the broken chandelier in the dining room (noted it), click on through to a hallway, click click click to the bathroom and click - the NASTIEST TOILET ever. Ever ever ever. I'll simply leave it at saying that it was full & unflushed. I flinched and clicked at the same time and after a moment I opened my eyes to a photo of what had obviously been a kid's bedroom. Pausing at the sky blue walls covered with stickers, I crinkled my nose a few times and began to think about modern society, coming to the conclusion that THE WORLD HAS CHANGED, PEOPLE. Where a letter sent to one's beloved could, once upon a time, take months to be delivered overseas, now they are sent over the Intraweb to another country thousands of miles away in mere seconds. Date- & time-stamped photos of American toilets are pixelized and nano-sized, attached and then zipped, delivered and received, downloaded and unzipped, only to be looked at and then ordered clean. You know something, I don't need to send a photo of human excrement across the world, wait a few days for a response, only to be told "Complete a General Cleaning of the Property" to know that poo needs cleaning. Really, I don't.