We’re Safe! (For now...)

When I arrived home from work, the storm clouds were rapidly building over South Texas. It looked like a hurricane brewing, right over my house.

Carol met me at the door.

“I don’t think they fixed it!” She glared at me, as if it were my fault.

“The counter still doesn’t work?” I tried to sound sympathetic and a little outraged at the same time. It isn’t easy. Try it.

“I don’t know,” she fumed, “I haven’t put the battery and memory card in it yet. It just got here a few minutes ago. But look at this note!”

The camera body was still taped up inside a plastic bag. Through the plastic wrap I could read a strip of paper about one inch wide by six inches long. Hand-written on the left was “Still Same?” Typed across the rest of the strip was, “Check folder name of customer’s CF card. Correct name is ‘100OLYMP’, but it may be ‘XXXOLYMP’. XXX is any number. If it is not ‘100OLYMP’, please rewrite folder name correctly.”

I asked Carol, trying not to sound patronizing (she hates that), “Uh, what does THAT mean, do you suppose?”

Hands on hips, she snarled, “It PROBABLY means that they didn’t fix it. It says, ‘Still Same?’ It sounds to me like they think the problem is with our memory card. They didn’t send back the letter I sent in explaining that we had tried another new memory card, and that our old one worked fine in another camera. They probably lost that letter and didn’t know what we did to troubleshoot the problem!”

Now she was really getting worked up.

I suggested (as gently as I could), “Well, why don’t we put the battery and the memory card in and see what it does?”

She acquiesced, but didn’t relent. “It’s not going to work. I’m going to be REALLY mad if I have to send it back again!” I could see not just a typhoon, but also a Tsunami heading for Olympus’ headquarters.

With the battery in and the memory card positioned, she turned on the switch. After the normal boot up activities, the menu proclaimed the picture counter at 462. (That’s the correct number!)

I sensed the Tsunami receding to a swell, and the typhoon was now down to tropical storm strength. The sky overhead lightened a bit.

“Take a couple of pictures and then erase them,” I said. “Let’s see what the counter does.

She took three pictures, and the counter went down by one each time. She then erased the pics, and the counter went back to 462.

The seas calmed, the storm became a zephyr, and the sun broke through over South Texas. All was right with the world.

Well, except for my daughter Christina. She’s having computer problems in Tampa. I’ll probably be on the phone with her for a while figuring that out. She can post about that in her blog is she chooses.

But for now, I’m looking forward to a pleasant weekend.