Today was my second day on the new project. The new team takes a bootcamp approach to inducting new team members, with back to back intro meetings all day. Quite exhausting.

And then during my lunch hour I’m watching live-streamed meetings at tretton37, all of last week and all of this one. The company is making major organizational changes and setting out a new five-year strategy right now, and informing everyone thoroughly. My longest actual break today was 15 minutes.

Anyway, one my tasks in the new team was to set a profile picture for myself in the various communications tools we use. And the instructions were specifically that everybody’s profile pictures had to be actual pictures of themselves. My standard profile picture since many years, a close-up photo of a Chihuly glass sculpture, was not approved. I couldn’t find any suitable recent photos of myself so yesterday I took 10 minutes to take a fresh one. Too proud to use a phone selfie.

There are so many photos of people these days. Everybody has their phone with them and keeps snapping away – photos of themselves, their friends, their family. But there are so few good photos of most people. Few of us go to an actual photographer to get professional-looking portraits taken.

I notice it in the obituary pages in the daily papers. There is often a portrait at the top of the obituary, and often a bad one. Low-resolution snapshots, slightly blurry phone photos, awkward crops of larger photos. Family and friends really want to include a photo in the obit but can’t find a good one.