In a well-practiced rou­tine, I strode into Boston Photo Imag­ing this morn­ing, exchanged greet­ings, plunked a roll of 35mm film onto the counter and announced, “one roll of E-6, process and mount, please.”

The two work­ers behind the counter eyed me war­ily. One of them slipped word­lessly through the door into the back room. I began to won­der if this were actu­ally a dream in which every­thing I speak comes out as nonsense.

“Umm…” she began slowly. “We shut down our E-6 line—”

“WHAT?!?!” I shouted unin­ten­tion­ally. “When?!”

“Three or four weeks ago.”

“Done?”

“Done.”

“Why?!”

“We were doing only four or five rolls a day.”

“And you can’t keep the chem­istry replen­ished at that rate.”

“Exactly.”

“The machine?”

“Gone.”

“I want it.”

“We had some guys come in and cut it up and take it to the dump.”

“You threw away a state-of-the-art, $100,000, Swiss-made, com­put­er­ized, pre­ci­sion robotic film pro­cess­ing machine.”

“Actu­ally it was more like $125,000. But nobody wanted it. I said to the guy who main­tained it, ‘Don’t you at least want to take the com­puter for parts?’ There’s no mar­ket. So we threw it away. It was in per­fect con­di­tion, too.”

“I wanted it.”

“Well, it was pretty big—”

“I HAVE A WAREHOUSE!”

“Sorry. I guess we should have called you.”

“What about your slide mount­ing machine? Your B&W equip­ment? Your large-format equip­ment? I’ll make you an offer right now.”

“We threw that away too.”

“You still do hand-processed B&W, right? And large format?”

“No film at all.”

Incred­i­ble.