Tragedy most foul and wicked has befallen Casa Romer!can.

A terrible and grievous loss that clocked my bean sideways like a ten ton hammer yesterday. My first reaction was denial, followed by shock, and then plunged desperately into rabid panic. I couldn’t even bring myself to post about it because each time I reached for the keys, I began to choke up, losing focus on what the monitor was saying and threatening an electrical short from the torrent of tears. Even now, my normally nimble fingertips tremble and quiver as I relay to you this tale of woe.

Perched upon my uncomfortable chair, slavishly hunched over the laptop and further twisting my crooked spine, in an effort satisfy your undying hunger pangs for yet another impeccable masterpiece of contemporary literature, I rotely put myself through the familiar motions of inserting a USB cable into the port eagerly anticipating that golden moment when I could unleash a veritable treasure trove of carefully crafted pixel parcels.

“Hark, hark!,” harkened he, as me unto thee.

Forsooth, what praytell is this madness yonder? A strange and curious sight to see such an erratically pulsating beacon. A singular evil personified in the green eye of a demon! Heresy! Blasphemy! Oh, why, Lord, doth thou smite me as thine enemy?

Yes, my friends, gather round as I orate and cling to your lucky charms lest the beast slip through ethernet, catching you unaware with its virile infection. Are you sitting there, reading this, and wondering wtf? Then you begin to see the damage caused by this trauma. For it is not I am who am crazy: it is I who am mad! Oh, my beloved ice cream bar…

Alas, the operating system didn’t seem to indicate anything had been connected. So, I took a look down the lengths of the black wire to find my primary Nikon dSLR was flashing morse code through the green LED. S.O.S. Blink, blink. No wink. Lies, damn lies! There must be something wrong cu calculatoare mea. Cum sa nu? Nothing could possibly be wrong with my perfect baby and most loved material possession.

I disconnected and reconnected. There’s that hideous light again! How it mocks my sanity, vexing my inner peace. Ah, it must be the battery. It seems to me there was plenty of power on it, but let’s just change it really quick. Still blinking? Okay, let’s change out the CF card and try a different one. Huh? This can’t be happening.

Wait a minute, hold up a second. I think I remember reading about this like… what… three years ago? A certain number of unlucky souls had purchased the Nikon model when it was very first released, but found themselves the unwitting victims a cruel and unusual fate when they found their cameras suddenly frozen in a blinking green light hell.

OMG! NOT ME!! NoooOOOoooOooOOooooo!

Quick, quick, quick! Launch the web browser. Hurry up for Krishna’s sake! Google, you better not fail me this time. Okay, okay. Let’s see what do I search for? I don’t believe this. It’s still blinking. Ah, there’s the search results. Oh, just reading their stories gives me visions of the twisted faces of horrified ghosts of green blinking lights past. There’s gotta be a solution, right? I mean, it’s Nikon… not some flim-flam brand. I never had trouble way back then, why now? Unde este the answer?!

Anecdote after anecdote bore witness to a phenomena I’d long since ignored. Afterall, my black angel had been purring like a kitten since the day I very first took it out of its birthpackage and cradled it to my bosom in ecstacy. Ah, the memory of that moment remains burned into my consciousness as permanently as the tattoos on my skin.

Even though my particular bundle of joy has been performing flawlessly these past three years or so, there were others who were not so fortunate. But I had no idea. In the past, no matter what digital cameras I had owned, I regularly paid attention to the online communities of digital photography fanatics in a never ending game of keeping up with the joneses and participating in unhealthy binge consumerism. That all changed once I owned this glorious machine. I abandoned the technobabble of the geeky crowds of faux photographers. I was head over heels in love, needing only to get away from the computer and run off with my darling.

My precious.

Yet the time-bomb has detonated. In front of my very eyes, she died. A blinking green light of death.

Hastily, I pawed through the original packaging she originally arrived in all those years and miles ago. Everything was in perfect order. Original plastic wrappers, cardboard and foam molding bits, ancient advertisements and a warranty. Of course, the warranty is only valid in the United States, not in Romania. And I’m well past the 1 Year coverage offered.

Did I get my $1500 worth in the short time we had together? That and much more, from some points of view. But am I furious? To the point of collapse.

Perhaps now you can imagine why I didn’t write yesterday. I sat around, aimlessly trying new batteries, new cards, pressing reset buttons, plugging into different USB slots and then alternating by going back online to read the tortured cries of other victims from yesteryear, like some kind of manic depressive running a razor blade over my wrist just as a tease.

As the night set in, we held an Irish wake wherein beer was consumed as I stared as her lifeless body somberly. Once my head hit something soft, I floated into a magic world where a gorgeous fairy came to heal me with her soft touch and make it all not true. Peeling crusties off my eyes the next morning, I leapt out of bed and raced back into the other room like a child on Christmas hoping to find the camera bursting into laughter, slapping its knee and saying, “Duuuude! You should have seen the look on your face! Hahaha, I got you so good!”

What is it that gives me the strength to write today? It might be the fact that I later found out Nikon (after much pressure from a substantial number of disappointed owners of failed units) has issued a service advisory stating that they will repair the D70 Blinking Green Light of Death problem at no charge even after the warranty has expired, if you’ll simply make the arrangements for them to operate on your love.

At least, I’ve still got another Nikon dSLR as a backup camera. She’s a smokin’ beauty! Talk about trading your wife in for a younger model; whoo-boy, lemme tell ya. I feel energized every time I touch it, even if I am sentimental for the broken one. Plus, there’s always the two other film-based cameras gathering dust on the shelf over there…

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 30th, 2006 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.