A comedy of manners

Such a day we've had with the recalcitrant cameras, memory cards and computers.  Our head is spinning, but Baby and Tiny keep us focussed with the countdown to supper.

Good customer service is the last bastion of that old-fashioned thing we used to call good manners.  Pentax has it in spades, and Iomega isn't half bad. Our local camera store, Bromfield Camera in downtown Boston, is as close as it gets to the old-time village store.  We LOVE those guys and gals.  But then there's affirmative action and the customer "service" folk with attitude -- not to mention the long, frontloaded recorded messages before you can actually get to talk to a person -- at companies like SanDisk, the makers of our camera's memory card.

Just before the sh** hit the fan, we had thought we had everything figured out.  Took this Althouse shot of the desktop as a test and were about to proudly post.

After all was said and done, the primary problem preventing our camera and computer from communicating was "human error."  The notion that the Iomega CD burner software had wiped out the camera's drivers was a case of mistaken identity.  It just happened to occur in the same time frame when we were installing the new software, but it turns out to have been a red herring. We had actually damaged the little prongs on the camera where you plug in the USB cable.  Solution:  Card reader. Done.

Then, in the midst of the seeming break in the clouds, a completely new storm appeared on the horizon.  After much consultation and tests with the various manufacturers -- including some awesome folks at LC Technology International who had free software and immediate phone support that helped us diagnose the problem -- it came down to a "bad" memory card. That's where the guys at SanDisk with attitude came in, and it wasn't pretty. But we stood our ground, and they're going to send us a new one, free of charge, but not free of red tape.  Meanwhile, we're planning to go out and buy their competition's card -- Lexar -- and use that as our main one, with the free replacement SanDIsk as our backup.

Comments

[American Daughter]

I am sooo glad to see that someone else besides me has cats that get all over the food preparation surfaces, presumably after just having had a good dig in the litter box.

I keep a squirt bottle of disinfectant on the kitchen windowsill. Rather unsightly, but handy. Eliminating the cat is NOT an option.

[Brian]

I'm glad to see you've got the camera problem resolved, Sissy. I always like seeing your little snapshots into Tiny and Baby's life (and of course, your writing) so I was missing them a bit.

Cascading hardware failures are always the biggest pain to diagnose and fix.

[Jazz Shaw]

Love your cats!