Spitting It Out

I know what you're thinking. I'm supposed to be a photographer and all I come up with is this kind of amateurish blatant postcard stuff.

Remember, it was only a cover. All I had to do was to shoot pictures of dull men in suits sitting behind tables and starlets doing really awful songs. And you know what that is on the picture, right? Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world. Once. The Burj Dubai in the United Arab Emirates has overtaken it now. So maybe my next job will be there.

Anyway. I was picked for this one because my Chinese was great, they said. Five years in Okinawa translating boring commie speeches into English for the military. Intelligence work. Still, it's the Taiwan bit I want to tell you about now.

Especially that nasty cover work as a photographer. A full year of really dull work, then I got sacked for missing what could've been the most important picture of my career. The picture that would've graced the cover of Time, Newsweek, and other publications around the world. The only thing they didn't know: I didn't want to take that picture. It was my work to make the content of that picture happen. And I did, and that's all I cared about. No matter what that egotistical tyrant raged about after the fact. I knew what was going to happen, so that time I was prepared. I knew how he had pestered one of my colleagues away to replace him with his girlfriend. The international media, free and unbiased, give me a break. Luckily, their bias helped me get the information I needed to help carry out my mission.

As I'm waiting for the extraction - still a couple of days away, but I can't let on too much - I know I did a terrible thing, yet it was for the good of millions of people, even of that tyrannical madman and his girlfriend. They don't know it and they'll probably keep raging about that photographer who missed the biggest news in the history of Taiwan. Let them rage. I'm happy now I spat it all out.