So I Just Took This New Job

I just got out of graduate school for photography and I'm flat-broke.  My impending student loan schedule has forced me to pick up another part-time job.  I'd like to teach and get a photo book published, but since this isn't happening at the moment, I answered an ad Friday that called for a photo retoucher.  Since pre-grad school I  had worked for many freelance photographers in various guises, , I felt well qualified. 

I'm really not here to be egotistical, but I might have overestimated these people. 
    
Upon entering the storefront office for the interview, I noticed how small and cramped the reception area was. The walls were outfitted in a floral wallpaper pattern that, incidentally, my aunt had also applied to her home in 1988.  Dominating the room were two large, white leather sofas whose overstuffed cushions had been flattened with age long ago. Worn, green shag carpeting provided a pathway from the front entrance to the back studio area. Every inch of available wall space was crammed with enlarged samples of the owner’s craft.  There was no rhyme or reason to the display of these purported visual enticements; No two frames were alike and all were hung comically crooked. In them, I saw examples of people with their necks craned at strange angles, faces with blank eyes and grimaced smiles, all the while holding hands with their partners beneath cliched local monuments. Some had even donned festive sports team merchandise to mark the occasion.
As I proceed to show her samples from portfolios, she glossed over every image while saying to me, "Some of these old Midwestern landscapes are ok I guess, but really, you’d do better to pick a better book cover picture." She pointed to a particular image.  “Hey, I like that one. What is that?” she wanted to know. I told her that it was an old outhouse.  “I didn’t know they still made those!” She exclaimed.  My interviewer then told me that if I showed up the next day, I could "color-correct" some practice images and then we could compare them to her versions to see where I had gone wrong.

I am so looking forward to it.