Overheard a customer say his camera 'just needed a good shake'

Guy comes in with a Nikon F2 that's been rattling for months, says he figured a few hard shakes would fix the loose part inside. Took me 20 minutes to fish out three broken shutter curtain gears that had been bouncing around in there, how do people come up with this stuff?

3 comments

3 Comments

michael_bennett1129d ago

Oh come on, you're telling me you've never given a stubborn piece of electronics a good whack? I had a clock radio in college that only worked if you smacked it on the side just right. If the camera was already broken and rattling, what did he have to lose? A few shakes might have dislodged something temporarily or at least told him exactly where the problem was. Was he supposed to just stare at it and hope the gears reattached themselves?

tylermurray29d ago

Had a VCR back in the 90s that would eat tapes if you didn't slap the top of it hard enough when you put one in. Not a tap, I mean a solid open palm smack. Got to the point where I'd just wind up and let it have it every time, like it was a ritual or something. But here's the thing, that VCR had this loose spring inside that would pop out of place if the mechanism moved too slow. The slap would jiggle it back into the groove. Worked like a charm for years until I finally took it apart and found the little guy sitting there all bent and tired looking. So yeah, I get the instinct to shake things. But a camera with metal bits rattling around? That's like shaking a jar of loose screws and hoping they assemble into a robot. You're not fixing it, you're just giving the parts a wild ride before they settle back down in the same broken spot.

theawest29d ago

Agree with @michael_bennett11, I smacked my old TV remote for years before it finally gave up! Honestly though, shaking a camera full of loose metal bits is basically turning it into a blender for its own parts.