UPS Shipping For My Broken Camera
Item Purchased: UPS Shipping For My Broken Camera
Location Purchased: Barbara’s Bookstore / 1218 S. Halsted / Chicago, IL
Price: $4.55
Review: Someone stole the back wheel from my bicycle yesterday. As if that weren’t enough, I pulled my digital camera out of my backpack, then out of it’s soft protective camera case, then opened the viewscreen (sometimes I leave it open, but today I did the right thing after taking a picture in the alley next to my house and closed it) to find a pleasantly crisp vertical crack. Switching the camera on, I wondered “”when the hell did I take that picture of a leaf?” A few seconds later, I realize that that’s no leaf, but a beautifully shaped puddle of leaked liquid crystal.
I spent a few minutes wondering what possibly could have happened during the leisurely fifteen minute walk from home to work that would rupture a LCD screen that is a) closed and b) inside of a protective camera case. I couldn’t come up with any explanation. Properly pissed at the situation, I went to Canon’s website and filled out a repair claim for the damage. Packing the camera with enough bubble wrap to save a Faberge egg from a base jump gone awry, I used the UPS account at my place of work to ship the camera off.
This shipping service is reserved for customers who have bought books from us and would like us to ship a gift to someone. It is a flat rate fee with an extra charge per extra item. Fortunately, I am an employee of my place of work (that’d be weird if I wasn’t, huh?) and am able to stretch these rules a bit. The company actually made money off of me, since the flat rate is put in place to cover our shipping costs and the labor-intensive packaging of the items.
Our UPS delivery people have always been friendly and will sometimes share a smoke with me while I help load/unload their truck with them so I have no problem trusting them to treat my camera with the utmost respect and care. I’m not sure about the rest of the UPS employees who I don’t know, but that’s the chance you take in this life. Packages are always shipped quickly and the tracking service on UPS’ website is quite handy and accurate.
As for Canon, the online repair claim stated that my camera still falls under the manufacturer’s warranty and that the repair would cost me nothing. I am skeptical. I have no way to prove that I didn’t damage the camera myself and cosmetic damages such as a cracked view screen doesn’t seem to be covered under the warranty. I wouldn’t mind paying for a repair I caused the need for, but I swear on everything that any of you swear on that this damage could not have been caused by me. A gentle jostling in my backpack is not enough to crack plastic. I wasn’t participating in any kind of Parkour activities on the way to work, but (oddly enough) Occam’s razor will suggest that I was.
We will see what Canon has to say.
In the meantime, it’s stock photography or scanned sketches of my purchases.
Hopefully, my mother’s superstition is wrong and bad happenings don’t come in threes.
Rating: 4 / 5
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