Nine months ago (yikes!), I was an idiot and left my camera at a bus stop on my way to work. Ever since then, I’ve been using a camera that my friend Rick very kindly let me borrow until I could afford a new camera of my own. Well, it looks like that day may be coming pretty soon — I’m getting a new camera for free!
My current job has me staffing a facilities management (FM) site — running a small on-site copy facility for a company’s local offices. There’s been an ongoing contest for the past few months among all the various FM sites that we run for this company (they operate in a number of states) for the most number of positive customer comments. Each FM site was to send in any customer comments they received, good and bad, and the site with the best ratio of positive comments to income (to keep smaller single-person sites like mine on an even keel with larger, busier facilities elsewhere) wins.
Well, I got a call from our local account manager this morning letting me know that we won! Not only did we win, but it was a virtual shutout: our site got somewhere around 120 positive comments (no word on how many negative comments there were, but I know I haven’t seen any), and from what she told me, all the other sites got zero. Apparently, for some reason, while we were passing out comment cards and following up with customers to make sure their jobs were done correctly and on time, the rest of the sites just didn’t bother to participate in the contest. Seems more than a little bizarre to me, but I’m hardly going to complain!
So next Wednesday, I’ll be heading out to have a little celebration after work at one of the local happy hours with my manager and our account manager, and at some point in the near future, I’ll get my prize — a new digital camera!
Of course, seeing as how I’m a greedy little self-centered sod who’s never satisfied with anything, I’m wondering if I can manage to do myself just a little bit better. According to the flyer announcing the contest from a few months ago, the camera in question is a Nikon Coolpix 3200. Now, it doesn’t look like a bad camera, but is has gotten a few troubling user reviews on DPReview. Also, it apparently comes without a memory card, and the memory cards it uses are SD/MMC, while I have a couple of CompactFlash cards (including one 256Mb) here that I’d hate to have to replace with something else.
What I’m wondering is if there are any local business (Best Buy or something similar) that will take a receipt-less “return” of an un-opened box — this is the Christmas present season, after all — in exchange for a sale on a slightly better camera in the same rough price range (letting me pay the difference if the target camera is slightly more expensive). Since the current retail for the Coolpix 3200 is in the \$200 range, I figure I could get one of the mid-range Canon Powershot series for just a fairly minor out-of-pocket cost — if there’s a place that will let me do this, of course.
Any ideas? If not, I’m certainly not going to turn my nose up at being handed a free camera, even if it’s not everything I might want! No matter what, it’ll be nice to have a camera of my own again.
“See My Ships” by Violent Femmes from the album 3 (1989, 3:17).