My Canon PowerShot S410 broke while I was at the wedding this weekend. Just as we walked into the church at exactly the time the wedding was supposed to start and we sat down the zoom lens made an awful crunching sound and then proceeded to get stuck halfway between out and in. The camera suffering from an unfortunate priapism then squawked in pain with a beeping sound that was fine before the processional music began but was then deemed unacceptable once the violinists started to play. I tried forcing the lens back into it’s home with some pressure and it went inside again but upon attempting to get it back out it had erectile dysfunction and only peeped out a few inches. It was impossible to get it into the discernibly turgid state necessary to take a photo and instead offered me the consolation of the error code E18 on the screen on the back of the camera. I then pulled at it to get it out of the position but the tiny peeping eye didn’t give much room for yanking on. So I declared it dead for good, pushed the lens back into it’s socket and declared to Sarah that we would have no pictures of this wedding from my camera. Luckily they had a full paparazzi gallery of wedding photographers complete with a man wearing a women’s suit and bleached blond hair working to focus the flash bulb above the bride and groom.

But for me it is a painful and effeminizing feeling to have a camera that can’t shoot so I was not feeling myself for the whole weekend. So this morning I decided to call the Canon corporation to ask them whether they had a little blue pill that could make my camera work better. Apparently Raphael Palmeiro’s blue pills have been working well this weekend as he hit three homers in three games for a 3 of 4 win rally by the Orioles over the Red Sox. So I called and quickly got through to a service representative. The first question I had expected was to identify the camera by the serial number. I don’t have any idea where the serial number would be. This wasn’t their question. The man asked what the problem was and I then told him that the lens wasn’t protracting and retracting normally. He told me to pull the battery out, wait a few seconds, and then try again. I didn’t do this but instead just pressed the power button to turn it on. Of course, without all the pressure to film a wedding, my camera had overcome the stage fright and the lens extended normally. I then went through the paces to try the zoom and this worked well. Next I tried turning it on and off ten times and the lens worked like a champ opening and closing.

Now I am certain that it is broken and this is a short lived phenomena since this lens problem has been happening off and on for a long time with the camera. But if I mail it into the shop without the problem being apparent they will likely mail it back telling me I suffer from a common mental disorder potentially leading me into ruin rocking in the corner in a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So, despite the fact that the camera will celebrate it’s one year anniversary in mid-August and thereby be ineligible for repairs of blue pills, I am not yet able to send it back to the Canon Corporation. It is probably for the best. I couldn’t find the receipt in the half hour routing around the apartment that I did. It is also good to know that cameras operate by the same principles of most sickness and injuries that I suffer from. When I invest in fixing it by going to show it to the doctor, dentist, electrician, mechanic, or editor - it mysteriously goes away.