Its the big office move for us tomorrow.  We pack up all our stuff in crates and then on Monday we turn up at the new building to find the crates next to our new desks.  The new buildings have a different door access system so we have to have new security passes to get in, and today we all picked up our new passes and got a terrible shock when we did.

We had been looking forward to new passes, if only for the chance to ditch the old photos which were generally taken with a cheap point & shoot digital camera while we were standing in front of a filing cabinet.  The new ones were all taken by a professional photographer who turned up with thousands of pounds worth of cameras, lights, deflectors, backdrops and computers.  Not only that but we were able to see the results on his laptop and had the chance for a re-shoot if they were bad.

The trouble is that it turns out that the aspect ratio of the bit of the pass where the pictures go is different to the photos that were taken so they have all been stretched to fit. Stretched sideways…  My boss now has a perfectly square head on his pass.  He looks like a Lego man. I look like Senator John McCain, and I guess we are stuck with these photos now for a good many years.

This sort of thing happens a lot on web pages as well, especially on corporate intranets.  I do hope they cover some of this in schools’ IT classes now so that future generations of workers don’t have to go through their careers being represented like a visitor to the hall of mirrors.