My fancy new camera arrived yesterday afternoon. It’s a Nikon D50, and when Larry the mailman handed it to me, I jumped up and down. Wait, no. That would have been dumb. I jumped up and down when he told me he had it in the truck, and then I jumped up and down as I followed him out to the truck to get it. Larry appeared bewildered, or at least as bewildered as possible for a man in shorts, knee socks and a sweatband.
“How do you know your mailman’s name?” Dusty asked me once.
“I order a lot of stuff online,” I said. And it’s true. The leasing office guy calls me Parcel Queen. But Larry is also awesome, partly because of the sweatband, and partly because when I moved into a new apartment in the same complex last year, he put all my mail in the box for my new apartment, even the stuff that had the old address on it. A mailman that acts as a human address forwarding system even though he doesn’t have to is a very good mailman indeed.
As soon as I got to my apartment, I unpacked the box, put the lens on the camera, put the battery in, put the CF card in, turned the camera on, and took a terrible picture of my coat hanging on a hook by the door. I did all this while on the phone with Andrew. I swear I was paying attention, Andrew, really I was. What did we talk about again?
(Kidding! Kidding! We talked about f-stops, right?)
Then I took the camera with me to a Tegan and Sara concert at Stubb’s, where Michael helped me figure out the settings and gave me some good pointers. I took a shitload of terrible blurry pictures at the show, and when I got home I took a shitload of less blurry but still terrible pictures of my apartment. Whee!
And of course I brought the camera to work with me today, and showed it off to a coworker or two. Then I checked my gmail, and there was a message from the guy who sold me the camera.
“Did I send you the wrong camera?” it said. “I shipped another camera on the same day, and I think I may have switched the boxes. If I did send you the wrong camera, can you send it back to me? I’ll refund the shipping cost and send you the right one.”
I opened my desk drawer, looked inside my purse, and sure enough, I had a Nikon D70. What kind of person buys a camera and spends an entire evening with it without noticing that it’s the wrong camera, you ask? A person who was on the phone when she opened it, maybe? Or a person who spent most of her evening taking pictures in the dark?
No, I think this is the work of a person who is so excited about a new purchase that she jumps up and down while stalking Larry the mailman on his way out to the truck. I was so happy to get it and make sure it worked and try it out that I forgot to check the most important thing about it. God help me when I try to haggle on the price of a new car. And definitely God help me if I ever buy a house. If your crappy house is for sale, make sure you offer to sell it to me. I’ll be the one shouting, “OH MY GOD THIS HOUSE IS AWESOME I’LL TAKE IT!” while shingles rain down on my head and rats crawl up the legs of my pants.
I spent no small part of this afternoon exchanging e-mails with the seller. There was a brief, shining moment during which it was suggested that the other buyer, who really did like the D50 he received, might accept the difference in price from me so that we could both keep our new cameras. “YES!” I replied, “I’ll send him the monies! If he has Manhattan and some rubber doorstops and leftover hot dog water, I’ll buy those too!”
But that fell through, so tomorrow I’m sending back my beloved new D70 that was never mine in the first place. And next week Larry will be even more bewildered as we repeat this process, this time with a little less bouncing.
Seriously, though, I’m really disappointed. It’s not the seller’s fault, I know. Well, technically it is his fault, but it’s understandable. It’s quite the letdown, though, to have a new camera one day and then not have it the next.
Here are the photos I took with the camera that wasn’t mine. Starting next weekend, we can all look forward to many more crappy photos from here on out.