My phone beeps with a new e-mail.
REMOVE FILM FROM CEILING CAMERA, REPLACE AND EDIT CONTENT, OLD NAVY, BY END OF BUSINESS DAY
One of our workers was industrious enough to bore a hole in the ceiling of a dressing room at a fashionable clothing boutique. It was done inconspicuously enough that no one would ever detect it. Setups like this one record a series of visual images for hours, until all the memory is used up. I’m supposed to remove the memory card and replace it with a fresh one. The real effort is not in locating the camera, but in finding out how this guy installed it in the first place. Once I figure it out, it’s fifteen seconds of effort to make the swap.
Here, workers don’t have to constantly fear being detected, because what proceeds can be very tedious. Women file in and out. The camera is stationary, meaning that some visitors to the dressing room are more visible than others, depending on where they stand, bend over, or crouch. We try to use everything we can, within reason, but probably only get three or four usable video clips from hours of footage. I find I fast forward for whole minutes at a time, which is the key limitation of this sort of approach.
Three hours later, back at the apartment, I’ve managed to isolate a few clips, and send them along. This makes everyone happy. Rarely do I ever receive effusive praise, but scanning through the comment section is strangely uplifting this evening. I never really know what’s going to go over well. If I were a writer of books, I know I’d probably find that my favorite work differed considerably from the tastes of the buying public.
I wonder sometimes whether it’s worth my while doing dressing rooms, retrieving video footage, and editing. As I alluded to earlier, there are always other assignments. Some look up skirts, but to me that’s boring work, and even riskier. I have no desire to chase women around stores. That’s all Mickey Mouse stuff to me.
It takes more patience than I’ll ever have and those workers are usually the first to get caught. Strict photography, another option, is lots of effort for a minimum return. Capturing the faintest peek of underwear is the work of many, but those assignments are usually all-day and much one captures is not terribly compelling.
I’m a mercenary and I always will be. I’m a hired gun. One must admit that, for most of us men who go for women, there is something excessively arousing in the stark and barely clothed female form. Often, the most appealing thoughts and foremost fantasies involve desires and visuals which we would ordinarily never see. An older former friend of mine, a man I haven’t spoken to in years, always complained about the prevalence of nudity in film these days. Nudity used to mean something, he griped.
I see what he means. A tease can be more stimulating than full nakedness. Reality is sexier than any choreographed floor routine. Not only that, public displays like these in any context hold shock value, which can also be stimulating. This is what makes our wares appealing to the customer base. It’s one of the last, if not the last truly shocking genre left. It eviscerates any distinction between private and public.
I’m never privy to the discussions farther up the food chain. I wonder what would happen if we were ever found out. An expose in the local news, relying upon the firsthand account of a victim, might become a total shitstorm if it took off nationally. Everyone we record is a complete unknown. Only idiots take on larger targets like celebrities. Most women are too ashamed to report us. Instead, the most seemingly banal and yet highly personal experience is our statement of purpose.
I’ve been told the effect is enough to freeze most of our so-called “non-professional” models dead in their tracks. Drying oneself with a towel after showering isn’t all that substantial on its face. Yet, to some men, nothing could be more charged. It’s an ordinary routine, but at the same time an amazingly powerful form of sensuousness.
Hyperbole aside, none of us wants to think about the end. The website would go dead immediately, servers would be purposely destroyed, and everyone’s computer equipment would immediately be headed onto the scrap heap or resting at the bottom of rivers. I don’t own this laptop, the software, or this camera. Like I said, I paid for it out of my first paycheck, but it’s all licensed and paid for by the front company, and these things would be the first to go.
Should we need to go slash and burn, we can be fairly certain that only a handful of pictures or videos, no doubt downloaded as evidence to make a case, even exist. It wouldn’t be good press to reveal our subscriber list. As noted above, we’d seek to pay off an offended party to prevent a lawsuit or to stop them from going to the media.
I, however, would have no soft place to land but would probably escape with my relative anonymity intact. I’ve been socking away a few dollars here and there to subsist on, should the end be nigh.
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