Ritz Camera customer requests camera repair
Wednesday, July 5th, 2006
A young girl and her grandmother came to the counter at Ritz Camera and requested a repair for their Kodak C330 they had purchased two weeks before. The girl said that she had been using it the morning of the day it stopped working, and the camera showed no signs of problems. She said that it “suddenly” stopped working, and that she would like to find out if there was some way the camera could be repaired for little to no cost (the $150 repair for the $300 camera was too high for them). The grandmother added that she hoped the manufacturer’s warranty would apply in this instance, since this camera seemed find the day before.
I’m used to hearing an introductory argument like this: I’d say close to half of the repairs I accept are said to be completely sudden, with no known reason for the failure. Of those, I can usually get around half to admit that there may be a chance that the camera was dropped: only a select few actually admit it.
Therefore, the comments to the contrary didn’t faze me. I could tell something was being held back. “Was this camera dropped?”, I asked. The granddaughter immediately vehemently denied anything of the sort. There was absolutely no chance that the camera was dropped, she was certain. No chance at all. It never was dropped. No. Not ever. The way the girl denied it seemed to indicate that she knew it was definitely not a fall or jarring that caused the failure of the camera, but something else entirely; and she seemed to know what it was.
I switched to the another problem often found in camera failures dropped off for repair at the store: water damage. “Well, maybe…”, the girl said. Bingo. “Well, the camera didn’t get wet, but the bag did. I mean, I dried the camera out; and when it was drying I tried to get it to work: but it didn’t. Is water bad for cameras?” One would think most people would realize by now that water and electricity don’t mix, but then again, she was just a kid. The bad thing was that the grandmother didn’t seem startled by the question, but rather by the daughter admitting about the water damage. She obviously hadn’t found out about the water/camera combination in advance. Just what had she asked her granddaughter before coming to the store? I think “How did you break it?” would be my first question.
Intrigued, I opened the camera battery pack again. I had opened it before to trade the batteries out to see if it was related to dead batteries, and had noticed something strange about the battery sticker: it was peeling. The camera had gotten so waterlogged that the stickers had begun to peel off inside the battery compartment. When I challenged the girl about exactly how much the camera was exposed to water, she seemed a little flustered, but said she didn’t know.
I realized I could find out what exactly the granddaughter was up to quite easily. I quickly removed the memory card from the ruined camera and put it in a functioning camera, and viewed the last picture taken. It was a picture of the girl in front of me, taken by an unknown photographer. The girl was wearing a life jacket. On an inflatable raft. In the water. In the rapids.
I’d say the camera got pretty wet.