After asking a stranger at the bar to take a picture of them, one Austin-based couple has confirmed rumors that she had only taken one photo.
“Everyone knows you’re supposed to take two, minimum,” said one of the victims of the incident, Tara Chambers, while hand-in-hand with her distraught boyfriend, Ben Morey. “It’s just common courtesy.”
While it may outwardly appear to be a only minor infraction in the grand scheme of things, experts in human behavior assert that it’s actually much bigger than that.
“In our society, when you’re asked to take someone’s photo, it’s basic etiquette to take several identical ones, so the person can scroll through them and decide which one they like best,” explained Professor Mary Billups, an expert in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Despite there being literally zero discernable differences between each photo, it’s a ritual that people rely on, and one that is essential in holding the fabric of our society together.”
“If we abandon these basic niceties,” she added, “it won’t be long before the entire foundation of our civilization as we know it begins to crumble.”
Tara and Ben, at least, seem to have experienced the direct effects of such a variation in what would be an otherwise predictable interaction.
“It just completely threw us off,” said Ben, after regaining some semblance of composure. “After she handed my phone back to me, I had no idea what to do. I just stood there, trying to scroll to the second nonexistent picture for the better part of the next hour. It was like my brain malfunctioned.”
Tara agreed, claiming the uncertainty that came with not having several of the same picture to choose between was a “maddening” experience.
At press time, Tara and Ben were seen manually duplicating the picture on their phone, in a last-ditch effort to preserve the invisible trappings of modern society to which we all so desperately cling.
