Lost Camera

I have just read something that makes me so angry I say we declare war on Canada and invade tonight!

Ok seriously my buddy Tiberius over at DSOTW dug up this story somewhere.

It seems this woman named Judith went to Hawaii on vacation and lost her expensive camera with over 500 of the pictures she had taken on her trip. So she created a blogspot blog called “Lost Camera” (another great blog name!) and loaded up a bunch of pictures that strangers had taken of the places she visited to kinda sorta keep a journal of the places she had seen.

Then the story takes an interesting twist. Her next post about 2 weeks after the original starts like this:

I hadn’t posted here in a while, because just after the last post, I got a call from an excited park ranger in Hawaii that “a nice Canadian couple reported that they found your camera!” She gave me their name and number, and I eagerly called to reclaim my camera.

Sounds like good news: she is gonna get her camera and all her pictures back, right?… WRONG!

The post goes on:

“Hello,” I said, when I reached the woman who had reported the camera found, “I got your number from the park ranger, it seems you have my camera?”

We discussed the specifics of the camera, the brown pouch it was in, the spare battery and memory card, the yellow rubberband around the camera. It was clear it was my camera, and I was thrilled.

“Well,” she said, “we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he’s been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can’t bear to take it from him.”

I listened, not sure where she was going with this.

YEAH Where the hell is she going with this?

“And he was recently diagnosed with diabetes, and he’s now convinced he has bad luck, and finding the camera was good luck, and so we can’t tell him that he has to give it up. Also we had to spend a lot of money to get a charger and a memory card.”

It started to dawn on me that she had no intention of returning the camera.

“We’d be happy to return your photographs…”

I was incredulous. “This is an expensive camera, you know.”

“Oh, we know, we looked it up.”

“I was hoping to offer a reward for it, but I was also hoping to get my camera back.”

Silence. It is now clear I will never see the camera again. I’m shocked at what seems like an utter moral failure on her part, despite her claim to want to “do the right thing.”

“Ok,” I say. “Why don’t you send me my memory cards, and, say, $50 and we’ll call it even.”

I give her my address.

I don’t hear from her for nearly two weeks. Friends suggest filing a police report.

Finally, I get a package in the mail.

“Enclosed are some CDs with your images on them. We need the memory cards to operate the camera properly.”

I call, furious. “I was shocked to get your package today. Our agreement was that you were to send me my memory cards, not that you would keep an additional $120 worth of my property on top of the valuable camera you already chose not to return.”

“You’re lucky we sent you anything at all. Most people wouldn’t do that.” We go back and forth a bit more. She eventually hangs up on me. I call the police department in her town (in Canada) but they tell me that it’s a U.S. issue, since that’s where the property was lost.

I am out $500 and some measure of faith in humanity.

I do, however, have the photos. Thanks again to the Flickr community for loaning me yours in the interim.

Now are you as sputtering mad as I was when I first read this?

If you are gonna keep the camera why get this woman’s hopes up?

How can anyone think this is teaching their child how to do the right thing?

What kind of low down Canadian piece of crap has the chutzpah to tell someone over the phone “we are stealing your stuff and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it”?

Needless to say Judith got lots of comments with lots of suggestions on ways to get her camera back or at least get back at these scumbags. More than a few of them were over the top and she has since turned comments off.

It looks like she is going to get the local press to run her story and hopefully shame these folks into doing the right thing.

So this is my little part in getting the word out. If you know any Cannucks next time you see em sucker punch em just in case their the one with Judith’s Camera. (I’m Kidding!)

But seriously, this is one of those stories that needs to be told to as many people as possible in the hopes that someone knows these folks and lets them know just how infamous they have become. If you have a blog please pass it on.

By the way, am I the only one who thinks the idea of creating a blog about your lost camera shows just how fantastic blogs are?

This post can also be found at The Real Ugly American.. You don’t really need to go there to see it since you already did. Its the same post only uglier. No it’s not really uglier; that’s a joke. How could a post be uglier? Well I guess I could use some bad words or something but I didn’t so it’s the same thing.