To pass into glass reality

When last we looked at bunnyhugger's camera, I had broken bunnyhugger's camera. And the Camera Shop guy had said if I could get a replacement for the broken door they'd be able to put it on, reducing the problem to one of finding a camera of the same model with non-broken door. But bunnyhugger discovered a camera shop in York, Pennsylvania, which has a suspiciously large number of the latch mechanisms for exactly this model of camera. It now has one less than that suspiciously large number.

When I brought her broken camera and the new latch to the Camera Shop on Monday they were extremely optimistic. The Old Guy was sure the Repair Guy would be able to put that in and said it would surely be a quick repair. Maybe not even enough to warrant the normal bench fee. He spent a while trying to find a serial number on the camera and turns out it doesn't have one, or at least not one in an obvious location. He also tried to close the camera door to set it away in a compact form and remembered, oh yeah, it was there because it wouldn't close.

Given how sure they were this would be fast I was half-wondering if they were going to hurry to it before I left, but it was the closing hour so I took my receipt and left, immediately regretting that I left the land line as contact number. If they called with an estimate I didn't want bunnyhugger to know what this cost.

Tuesday afternoon, they called, leaving the message that it was already ready for pickup. We didn't have time to go down there before pinball league (even with my coming from home we didn't really have time for all this). But Wednesday? I could pop over after work.

As they brought out the repaired camera --- looking great, snapping shut and opening crisply, and cleaned up so the bits of dust and smudges it had accumulated were gone --- Young Guy, bunnyhugger's favorite person there, noticed me and brought over a pack of developed black-and-white film. He said he had just moments ago e-mailed bunnyhugger to send the Google Drive with the scanned photos and that the negatives were ready for pickup.

I asked about the developed negatives from the film I had dropped off ten days ago --- and which scans they e-mailed the Google Drive of last week (color film they develop on-site; black-and-white has to go to a separate lab) --- and they couldn't find it. After some searching they worked out: oh, it was filed under my name, not bunnyhugger's. And Old Guy checked his computer and said that the film hadn't been marked to preserve the negatives once scanned. I was stunned I'd missed that and regretted it because, among other things, bunnyhugger likes keeping her negatives and that reel of partially exposed film was a roll she'd had, unused, since the 90s and it has value as artifact.

When I gave bunnyhugger this bad news she said that didn't make sense: the shop normally keeps negatives for a month or so for pickup unless you specify that you don't care about saving it. I might have failed to check a box saying I wanted to keep it, but I certainly would not have checked a box saying I didn't want to keep it. So I'll need to use my superpowers of being okay with calling people and asking them to look for stuff to see if the vintage, half-wasted reel is still there somewhere.

No pictures today; too busy with other stuff. Tomorrow, maybe. We'll see.

Trivia: Michigan has had towns named York in Branch and Washtenaw County, a York's in Sanilac County, and a Yorkville in Kalamazoo County. Source: Michigan Place Names: The History of the Founding and the Naming of More Than Five Thousand Past and Present Michigan Communities, Walter Romig.

Currently Reading: Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie, Gary Weiss.