Thursday, May 17, 2007

My Childish Side Revealed

I'm terrible about remembering to have film developed. At latest count I had 6 rolls of film in my desk drawer and I couldn't even begin to tell you when they were taken or what the pictures could be. That's why the world of digital photography removed a very large, invisible weight from my shoulders. Film, filling out forms, and waiting an hour for development became history when I was able to pop a little card out of my camera and into my printer for viola! photos.

Unfortunately, our digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 5700, has been on the fritz for almost a year now. In August of last year it began taking pictures of the demonic variety with extremely blurry objects and a psychedelic rainbow of colors. And after enough fiddling in an attempt to figure out what was wrong it decided to just take the full plunge and go black, with absolutely no picture at all. Now, the smart thing to do would probably have been to call Nikon for a trouble-shooting session, or at the very least to search the internet for similar problems or a possible fix, but in my devastation I chose to call the local camera repair shop. And when they told me it would be $40 just to look at it I became skittish, and decided that I was not going to pay them to tell me a repair would cost some ghastly amount of money that I could use to a buy a new, not-so-outdated camera instead. Jon and I had entertained the idea of buying something smaller anyway, more of a point and shoot camera that would be more convenient to grab and go, but we never acted on it.

My patience in living a picture-less life grew thin last night as I nearly morphed into a 2-year-old on the verge of a tantrum in the middle of a store when Jon still wouldn't let me buy a new one. I knew it was immature, and I knew that it was enough money to put a little more research into rather than buy the first little piece of equipment that I thought would make a nice fashion accessory, but I wanted a dang camera! Not only could we not agree on the fact that we actually needed to have one, but we couldn't agree on a size, or the various doodads embedded in some and not others. I handle the financial aspect of our life, and so when the guy who could spend hours trying to find a way to afford a 50" plasma television to no avail was telling me that I couldn't have a measly little camera, I decided to stomp out of the store with him on my tail, shaking his head at my silent fit.

I apologized soon after when I was able to emerge from this very childish state of mind and my blood stopped boiling. I'm hanging on to the fact that my admitting to being immature saves me from being labeled as psychotic.

However, this little debacle created a new drive in me. I finally did the smart thing and googled my broken camera. It turns out it's a very common problem with this model, and a few others to boot. The darn thing was actually recalled back in 2005! I called Nikon to explain our problem, just to verify that this would be under the recall, and after giving them not much information at all, they said to send it in. The repairs would be free. Now don't I feel silly about sulking over a damaged camera for 9 months when it could have been fixed in 2 weeks?

I also decided to check with our cellphone carrier to see what kind of deals they would give me on two new phones in the hopes that I could have that always-there-point-and-shoot-camera as well. Our contract is up in just a couple of months, so of course they had a whole slew of enticing deals for me to extend our contract, one of which being $225 dollars off the phone of my choice. My fingers began to tingle with excitement. I'm not used to having anything go my way, and so to have my cake and eat it too, was just about the best thing to happen to me since being told that my dad was released from the hospital.

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