There is no job that is a true “glory job”, and for that matter, there is no hobby that is completely glory, either. A prime example is this Web site, and the recent Photo Essay Blitz that I did over Spring Break 2002. The glory of doing the Photo Essay Blitz comes in shooting the material (I actually took a total of 2,408 photos in five major Virginia cities), and then the glory also comes in the end result. However, what people don’t often see is the grunt work that goes along with it. In the case of The Schumin Web Photo Essay Blitz, I had to take all 2,408 photos saved on countless floppies, move them into designated directories, and then begin processing them. This entails checking each picture individually for quality control (eliminating blurry photos, rotating photos taken vertically, etc.), and then numbering the photo for the set it belongs with. Usually, these kinds of tasks are done in a smaller scale than this case, thus it’s more bearable. Still, to get that many photos ready simply for organizational purposes, let alone even considering putting them on the Web site, is tedious! Kind of like the Zamboni guy pictured above. There’s the glory in the job, all right. You get to drive the Zamboni around on the ice, resurfacing the entire rink, making the ice smooth once again. However, after you’ve finished driving the Zamboni around, you have to clean up what it leaves behind, something I call “Zamboni poop”, as you see above. It’s all the ice that was shaved off the top of the rink to smooth the ice over. That just looks like a pain in the butt right there. Me and the Web site, there’s a lot of tedious behind-the-scenes work that goes into everything you see on-screen. It’s a pain when you’re doing it, all right, but worth it in the end.
