The State Of Stock and Other Chatty Chats

This morning I got an email from an old friend. She is an IT manager for a large graphics & packaging manufacturer based on the east coast. Here's the gist of her note:

"I've been assigned to a project at work redesigning our portal - our

intra-company website, or intranet. The higher-ups want it to be more

sophisticated looking, easier to navigate, cleaner, less "microsoft"

looking. Anyway, one of my jobs is to find pictures to go on some of the

pages. I've been on a site called www.inmagine.com which has TONS of

pics regarding business, but they're $50/pic. Do you know of any

websites that would have web page-ready pics (good resolution, etc),

that are free (and have business pics, or pics of industry,

manufacturing, etc)?"

She followed up a short time later with this:

"I just found [www.] photostogo[.com} - they have thousands."

To be fair... after I responded to her note about what a wretched request it was to make of someone, a friend no less, that derives a substantial part of his income from licensing stock images, she again followed up to report that her quest for images was simply to work towards an overall design that would meet with approval from the corporate higher-ups. The images, she explained, would only be used for FPO purposes and that the company had in the past licensed less generic imagery to fit their needs and may continue with that policy once the layout design is approved. 

Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!