For those of you that are parents, today’s post will sound familiar or perhaps it will save you from making the same mistake. Those of you that aren’t parents will just have fun laughing at me.
A friend, Karin, wanted to borrow our digital camera on Wednesday. Her son goes to The Boy’s daycare, so I was supposed to bring it with me Wednesday morning. As you may or may not know, I generally get The Boy up in the morning, feed him, dress him, and take him to daycare.
After almost forgetting the camera, I brought it out with me to the garage. The Boy needed help getting buckled into his carseat, so I set the camera on the trunk of the car. As I did this, I briefly thought that it might be a bad idea as I might forget it. I did it anyway.
As I was buckling The Boy into his seat, he asked me if we could listen to “heavy load.” He was referring to the new Red Hot Chili Peppers song, “By the Way,” of which he’s become quite enamored. The line in the song is actually “heavy glow.” I got distracted talking about the song. Then, after strapping him in, I decided to get the paper from the front lawn. I got it, began reading parts as I got into the car, started the song playing and pulled out of the garage.
I was more than halfway to The Boy’s daycare before I realized that I never got the camera off the trunk. After loudly exclaiming “Oh shit” and among the admonishments of The Boy, “You shouldn’t say ‘Oh shit’, daddy,” I headed back home to find out how badly I had managed to destroy the camera. The whole way there I kept repeating things like “that was really, really stupid” or “I can’t believe I did that” and The Boy kept agreeing with me, “Yeah, that was really stupid. You shouldn’t have done that, daddy.” After a few minutes of this, I finally had to tell him that, in this type of situation, you’re supposed to make the person feel better and tell them that everything will be ok. He responded with, “It’ll be ok, daddy,” another step in the socialization of The Boy.
I was hoping that the camera had fallen off earlier in the commute rather than later as the morning traffic gets worse as you travel from our house to The Boy’s daycare downtown. I started driving more slowly as I got closer to our house. Sure enough, I spotted it in the intersection at the end of our street, the first turn that I make after leaving the house.
Thankfully, it didn’t look like anyone else had run over it. The battery cover had popped off and the batteries were scattered all over the intersection. The memory card cover had also popped open and the memory card had shot out of the camera. The lens cap had come off, but the lens appeared to be intact. There was damage to the top of the camera body near the power switch. I collected up all of the pieces and attempted to reassemble the camera.
Everything seemed to go back together ok. The hinge on the battery cover was broken, but it would still close and stay on. I tried pushing the power button and got nothing. It felt like maybe the spring mechanism on the button was broken. Now late for work, I drove The Boy to daycare and tried calling Karin to let her know what had happened.
Luckily, Karin was having her own parent trials that morning and she was still at the daycare. I borrowed a safety pin from her and pried the power button off of the camera. I knew that it would come off as the only other time that the camera been dropped (courtesy of The Boy), the power button had popped off. The area under the power button looks something like this – o -. The two slats on the site are where the button attaches to the camera and the hole in the middle is where a plastic column on the button fits in and actually turns the camera on when pressed down. I stuck the safety pin into the round hole and, presto, the camera turned on. I tried taking a picture and it seemed to work fine, so I gave it to Karin. A co-worker suggested that I send this story to Kodak and they could use it as a testimonial to the ruggedness of their digital cameras and perhaps they’ll be so thrilled that they’ll give me a comparable replacement. Yeah, right.
The safety pin has since been replaced by a paper clip attached to the camera’s wrist strap. I suppose I can live with that until Best Buy has another “18 months, no interest” digital camera sale. I had been contemplating getting a new camera before The La is born as you can now get one twice as powerful as ours for half the price. Perhaps I was subconsciously trying to do the old one in?