Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Two hundred ninety-six and counting....

No, it is not my age nor is it anywhere close to my weight.  This is day 296 of me surviving without Mr. Monkeygirl's DSLR.  Last year we took a great trip to Las Vegas with some friends and when we got home and tried to clean off the memory card, our Nikon D70 would no longer read any card we put in the camera.  No matter what we tried, nothing worked.

Being that I happen to be one of the world's best procrastinators (and I work much better when I am totally up against a deadline), I didn't do anything with the camera for months.  Finally, it dawned on me that my stepson - SkaterBoy - was getting dangerously close to making a commitment to attend his senior prom.  Oh no, I have earned a reputation among his friends as the official event photographer and I don't have a camera to use!  I finally got my brain cells together enough to remember to put the camera in the car so I could run it up to the local camera shop for repair.

To make a long story short, Camera Store #1 told me that my camera was unrepairable.  What? Broken thing-y in the whatchamacallit (no one could explain the description on the repair form).  So broken that it was "uneconomical" - no wait - it just plain could not be repaired at any cost.  Discouraged, I went home with the poor broken, mangled camera body cradled safely in my front seat.  In an effort to provide full disclosure, I did drop my camera earlier in the year but it worked fine for months without any issues.  The only tragedy from hitting the pavement was a small nick on the corner of the camera body.

Mr. Monkeygirl didn't like the answers we got from CS #1 (uh, hello, do you think I liked that answer?) so we called them back to quiz them further on our options.  We were told we had no other options for repair and that there was absolutely no one in the metro area that did repair work on these cameras.  Defeated, we started to look at our options.  Buy the "really nice" used D70 that CS #1 happened to find for us?  Suck it up and buy a new D80 (yikes!)?  Give up and vow to never take another picture again?

On a whim, Mr. Monkeygirl took our poor broken baby to Camera Store #2 just to see what they had to say.  Well, they have good news and bad news for us.  The Bad News? The camera is broken but it is only a bent pin in the card reader.  The Good News?  They had really good luck fixing these in the store.  A few minutes later, they were back with - uhm - good news and bad news.  The Bad News?  They couldn't fix the bent pin in the store.  The Good News? They didn't break it completely off and they had the name of a local repair shop that could take care of the problem.

Mr. Monkeygirl was now on a mission.  Thankfully, his employer likes to mess around with his schedule weekly so he has a little bit of free time in the mornings.  He makes the supreme sacrifice to get up early and heads off to what will probably become my favorite repair shop in the whole world.  They took one look at the camera and declare - it is fixable and for a relatively small fee! Yipeeeeee!!  

So, today is day 296 without what I affectionately call my "big girl camera".  We should be getting our baby (sorry SkaterBoy - we really do love you too!) back soon and I can't wait to take a picture to send to CS#1 letting them know that they are "number one" in my book!

1 comment:

Ty'sMommy said...

LOL Oh yes, I am a particularyl vindictive person, so I think yuo should absolutely let them know that you think they are number 1! You go, girl! That's what they get for using such a foul 4-letter word. "can't"