charlotte harris

We’d been playing this game, my friend and me, where we’d send each other cameraphone pics of ourselves, alone, doing everyday boring tasks.  Reading textbooks, driving to work, staring at a computer screen.  The more mundane the funnier. 

So of course when I found myself driving past his office building at lunchtime the other day, I started snapping pics.  I took like 5 blurry photos before I got a decent one.  And then I texted it to his work email from my phone. 

A picture tells a thousand words, and my picture was intended to say “I am driving past your office at noon on Thursday, which is highly unusual, and oh wouldn’t it be funny if this ends up being a photo of the very window where you sit and work all day?”  That’s all.  Just being silly and letting him know I thought of him when I drove by.

So I got a call later, “Charlotte.  I need to ask you a favor.  Please do not take pictures of my building and then send them to my work email.”

“Huh?  Why?  I was just bring funny.”

“I know you were just being funny but nobody else knows that.”  Seems he works in the kind of building one simply does not photograph.   I am now betting that if anyone had seen me taking cameraphone pics and captured my tag number, some men in dark suits might come a-knocking on my door.  And if his email is being monitored at all, my friend will get called down “to the principal’s office,” as he put it.

I actually used to work down the street from there, so I have seen the armed guards and the barriers that pop out of the ground.  I know it’s a government building of some sort (and that’s truly all I know).  I just didn’t think about all that when I was goofing off with my phone.  Obviously I have no hidden agenda and I was just having fun.  But I feel awful that I could get my friend in trouble.  So I deleted the pics and promised never to do it again. 

The upside is, I like to think that perhaps our government has finally begun compiling a dossier on me and my little cameraphone capers.   Awesome.