A Couple of Whacks

I was beginning to think that I'd never get around to completing a Christmas post.  I have had a bit of sinus/ear/cough yuckiness and just didn't feel like doing anything that wasn't absolutely necessary.  However, here it is - Christmas Day - and after some help from a Z-Pack, I'm starting to feel a bit better. 

Then... yesterday I got ready to make a few photos and my camera kept trying to start but would simply give me an error message that said, turn it off and back on again.  I thought maybe there was something wrong with the battery's charge and took that out and gave it overnight to charge.  I took out the memory card and emptied everything off of it in fear that it might have somehow gotten corrupted or something equally as electronically scary.

Finally, like everybody else does these days, I went online and Googled it.  Yes, I just typed in "Sony Cyber-shot turn on and off error message."  Guess what!  There were several hits and I happened to click on just the right information. 

Interestingly enough, the first post said to simply tap the camera a couple of times on the table and it would begin to work.  I tried that and nothing changed.  Then, the next post said that it was easy to repair but the person posting worked at a camera shop and didn't feel he/she could advertise where to bring the person posing the question's camera for the repair and posted an email address instructing the camera owner to get in touch.  I was skeptical of this one and didn't try that.  I kept reading along and several folks said they had tried the tapping to no avail and I could commiserate with them.  Finally, a couple of folks said that they had tried the tapping and then decided they had lost nothing; so, they gave their camera a couple of really hard whacks.  One person even said they dropped it on the floor a couple of times and that worked! 

After surfing a bit more using my Google suggestions, I gave up.  I whacked the camera on the kitchen counter a couple of times and got no better results than my hand taps.  So, leaning to the concept that I had lost nothing if it didn't work, I dropped the camera on the floor three times.  The first couple of times I made sure it would land facing straight up.  The second time I made it land with the lens facing down because one of the folks had said something about the lens cover getting jammed.

Guess what... it worked!  My camera is working fine now and I'm wishing I had surfed and experimented and 'carefully' repaired it before Mike's family celebration over brunch this morning! 

So, never hesitate to give something a couple of whacks.  It even seems to work at repairing electronics!