Hi All,
I’m emailing because, quite frankly, I’m very disappointed with some of the messages I’ve seen going around the office.
First of all, I only decided to send out photos of my recent vacation because people expressed an interest in seeing them. Rather predictably (considering it was a beach vacation and I did do quite a bit of sunbathing), I appeared in many without a shirt on. So, as not to offend anyone, I cropped them so they only show me from the neck up, enlarged them for added detail – which is easy enough considering my Nikon S5100 Coolpix Digital Camera takes 12.2MP pictures – and sent those around.
How it happened, I’m not sure – maybe it was how I laid, or the angle of the sun, or where I had the umbrella – but my chin managed to tan differently than the rest of my face. In fact, there’s a pretty clear color line; I could even see it on the 2.7” LCD right after they were taken thanks to the TFT LCD with anti-reflection coating and 5-level brightness adjustment.
Now, to take something like that – something that could happen to anyone – and infer that I had, while in St. Lucia, gotten a “black market chin implant” (or “chinplant,” as I’ve heard it called) is ridiculous enough. But what really bugs me are all the images going around. Some I don’t mind because they’re meant to be motivational – like the “hang in there” kitty with my chin Photoshopped onto it, saying “Keep your chin up.” But others – like the one where my chin has been superimposed onto a flower that’s being picked by a monkey, with the caption “Chin-Pansy” – are just rude (not to mention, a bit of a stretch, pun-wise).
For the record, I won’t be going on a witch hunt here to find who made each and every graphic in order to report them to HR. I just want to stress that we should all be sensitive when discussing someone’s personal appearance. You never know how it will affect him.
Thanks,
Terry Rickman
P.s. Just to be clear, I updated my profile picture on the intranet simply because the other was outdated, not because I was afraid of “chin-to-chin comparisons” as I’ve heard has been suggested.
