I mentioned the other day that I was having trouble with my newish Nikon D7000. It wasn’t a huge problem, but it was something that I wanted to get checked out. The LCD screen was frequently not working. You can set a digital camera to show you the picture you just took. And you can specify for how long you want that image to show on the screen before it turns off. In my case, the picture would sometimes not show up at all. And even when I pushed the “play” button, the LCD screen would not turn on. Sometimes, the picture would almost appear. I could see it forming on the LCD screen. It would be extremely dark, but I could just make it out. It was like the picture was struggling to form, and then it would disappear.

I knew that I would have trouble recreating this problem when I brought my camera back to the camera store. This problem only seemed to occur when I was outside in the hot sun and had been using the camera for a while. Once I was inside an air conditioned room and the camera was nice and cool, the problem would go away. It’s like having a problem with your car’s engine and then that problem would not occur for the mechanic. It can be frustrating.

Well, it turned out that this wasn’t a major concern. The camera did NOT, in fact, malfunction when I brought it to the camera store. However, the clerk there is a very nice guy and he listened to my story and suggested that we send the camera in to the Nikon center to have it checked out. Luckily, there is a Nikon center in Taiwan, so it wouldn’t be necessary to send it out of the country. All I needed to do was bring in the camera with the warranty card. I offered to bring in the entire box with all the accessories – in case Nikon was going to replace the entire kit – but it doesn’t work that way. In fact, you should really strip down the camera as much as possible when you send it in under warranty – remove the memory cards, filters, and battery. That reduces the risk that these things will get lost along the way.

I returned to the camera store the next day with my camera and the warranty card. I wasn’t in the greatest of moods, I have to admit. I never am anymore at the end of a long work day. I’m usually exhausted by the time quitting time comes around, and I barely have the strength and patience to handle the drive home on my scooter – something I used to enjoy immensely. I work a pretty long day, and I find that adding just one errand – such as going to a camera store – after work can really do me in. I end up not getting home until 8:00 and I’m exhausted and I still haven’t had dinner and I’m hot and sweaty.

The first time I went to this camera store to have my camera looked at, I drove my scooter straight there from work. I knew it was going to be a bit stressful. My camera store is in the main camera district in downtown Taipei. And this area is incredibly difficult to get to by road I find. You are not allowed to drive a scooter down Zhongziao Road through downtown. Only buses and taxis are allowed. Therefore, you have to swing up above downtown and then somehow find a way to head south. Or you have to swing below downtown and then fight your way north. It’s a major challenge either way. Perhaps if you’ve grown up in Taipei, you know the routes to take. Me, I get confused, turned around, and trapped whenever I try.

My plan was to just drive down Civic Boulevard until I was in the neighborhood north of the camera district and then park my scooter and walk the rest of the way. That seemed the best option. However, it wasn’t easy. Civic is set up in such a way that the blinding setting sun shines straight into your eyes. It’s impossible to see anything in the late afternoon. Add to that the chaos of rush hour traffic, and it is a stressful drive. Finding a place to park is equally stressful. Then, to my surprise, I found that it was even more difficult to walk to the camera district than to drive there. I kept hitting massive streets that had no crosswalks at all. I kept having to backtrack and turn around and find new routes. It took a very long time and my mood was getting worse and worse. I also had this foreboding that things were going to go wrong with the camera. I just have that kind of life. The big things tend to go well. It’s the little things that go wrong. If there is one little thing that can go wrong, it will when I am involved.

In some places and in certain periods of your life, the little things don’t matter that much. If, for example, I were back in a small city in Canada, bringing my camera in for repairs would be a breeze. You hop in your car, drive to the camera shop, park in the huge and dedicated parking lot, and drop off your camera. If you happened to forget a piece of paper or something, you just hop in your car, go home and get it, and you’re back in ten minutes. Here in Taipei, as I said, one of these errands is a huge deal. It sucks the life energy out of me and takes hours. It’s like I have to dedicate an entire day and evening of my life to it, and if it doesn’t work out, it’s a big effort to do it all over again.

So as I was walking to the camera store getting hotter and hotter and more and more tired and irritable, I tried to prepare myself for what was to come. I tried to adopt a calm state of mind and put everything in perspective. If things didn’t work out, and I had to come back the next day, it wasn’t the end of the world. Just stay calm. Don’t get upset. Be patient.

Right from the beginning, things went a little bit wrong. The previous day, I had spent a good amount of time with the clerk who had sold me the camera in the first place. He is very friendly and helpful and he now knew the whole story about the camera. We had gone over it in detail. I wanted to deal with him. However, when I went up the narrow stairs to the camera store’s second floor, I saw that he was very busy with a group of customers. He saw me, but try as I might to insist that I just wait for him, I was handed off to another clerk. My heart sank.

This clerk led me through a back room and then down another set of very narrow stairs to a completely different store. This didn’t bode well for Doug. I settled down on a stool, and then the clerk asked me for the necessary documents. I had brought everything I had and laid it all before him – the original receipt, the warranty card, and a bunch of other material – everything that had come with the camera. He looked at it and then asked for something else – a red piece of paper. He showed me a sample and said that I had to have that red piece of paper or he could do nothing for me.

Despite all my attempts to attain a zen and calm state of mind, I instantly switched over into intense annoyance. I had talked to the other clerk at length the other day and we had settled all the details. I was very clear with him just so we could avoid this exact situation. I’d asked him many times what exactly I needed to bring. And he had said NOTHING – NOTHING AT ALL – about any kind of red piece of paper. I had no memory of ever getting a red form. He’d told me that all I needed was the warranty card, period. Now I was faced with having to go home and dig through all my papers and try to find this mysterious red form. And then I’d have to dedicate another entire evening after work to this errand.

I said to the new clerk that I wasn’t happy about this. No one had told me I needed to bring this red paper – whatever it was. It was a big effort for me to get to this camera store, and I didn’t want to do it again. They really should have been clearer when I was here the other day. I didn’t get angry or really upset, but it was clear I wasn’t pleased.

Then, however, we really started to go around in circles. I could tell that something was wrong. When I said that I didn’t have the red piece of paper they started rummaging through shelves and drawers. They were looking for something, but they couldn’t find it. They got out a big ledger and starting going over the pages running through a couple hundred entries. Then they got on the phone and started making phone calls. I had no idea who they were calling or what they could be talking about. I finally interrupted all this activity and asked what was going on. They said something about not being able to find my camera. So they were calling Nikon and trying to track it down. I was confused and told them that the camera was right here – and I pointed to my knapsack. I had my camera in my knapsack, which was sitting on the floor beside my stool.

This made no impression on them, and they got back on the phone and then started running up and down the stairs. A panic started to build. They spoke to me again, and once more I indicated my knapsack saying that my camera was right here. Did they want it now? I hadn’t produced it up to this point because there was no room on the counter for it anyway. It was covered in books and forms and papers and we hadn’t seemed to reach a point where they required the camera.

This went on for a minute or two longer, and then the penny dropped. I realized what was going on. They thought I had come to PICK UP my camera. They thought my camera had been repaired and that I was there to get it. That red paper was the receipt for a camera being handed in under warranty. Somehow, when my original clerk – the guy who I had previously thought highly of – had handed me off to the other clerk, he hadn’t explained that I was dropping off a camera. He somehow had given them to understand that I was picking one up.

Once I realized this, I unzipped my knapsack and pulled out my camera and showed it to them. Ah! Ah! Ah! Now it all made sense. Now they pulled out a set of forms and filled out the warranty information – on a red piece of paper – and we finished the transaction. Now I DID have a red piece of paper – my receipt for the camera – and we were all set. They will call me when they get word from Nikon on what they find with my camera. My guess is that they will find nothing wrong. They’ll just clean up the insides and tighten connections and send it back. Maybe they’ll find something actually wrong and fix it or replace some of the parts. We’ll see.

I left the camera store feeling slightly embarrassed that I had nearly lost my temper over the red paper. I knew better than to assume anything. With a language and cultural barrier, you rarely can know for absolutely sure what is going on. You really can’t assume that someone has made a mistake or screwed up. You have to just be patient and stay positive and let things run their course. Chances are that if something seems to be going wrong, it’s really not. It’s just that you don’t understand what is going on.

 

Tags: D7000, LCD, LCD screen, Nikon, Nikon D7000, scooter, Taipei, Taiwan, warranty