Twice in moments of distraction climbing from the back of Edward's BMW, I dropped my camera onto the pavement. It looked OK when I retrieved it, both times, so I did not think much about it until I tried to delete a few blurred pictures discovered I couldn't. The delete malfunctioned, due, no doubt, to the jolts of being dropped.
I have taken and kept lots of blurry pictures over the years, so the loss of the delete function did not immediately concern me. Apart from this function the camera seemed to operate normally.
That night we had dinner on the 96th floor of a building with a panoramic view of the sprawling city. During dinner I mentioned to Edward that the delete function on my camera had stopped working, no doubt due to the drops, and that I was worried I would fill up the memory card before we left China.
No problem, Edward told me, you can just remove the memory card from your camera and delete pictures after you have downloaded them onto your computer.
What a wonderful idea. Why hadn't I thought of that?
Puzzlingly, nothing appeared on the screen to indicate the computer recognized the card. I tried several approaches with no results. At some point, it dawned on me that I might not actually have found the real card slot. Suddenly concerned, I tried to retrieve the memory card only to discover that I could not pull the card back out of the slot. The more I tried, the deeper it went until I lost sight of it inside the computer.
More embarrassed than worried, I decided to ask Edward to get the memory card out when we saw him next morning. He is studying to be an engineer, after all, a tech-savvy guy.
The next morning as we gathered for our trip to Guangzhou, I explained my little predicament to Edward. No problem, he said. He went to get his set of really small screw drivers. When we got to the hotel in Guangzhou, he went to work on the computer. Soon he had a pile of very small screws and a larger pile of various computer parts.
Finally, Edward announced that he would get me a new memory card to get me through the rest of the trip because -- despite the fact that he could see the chip and despite the pile of disassembled parts -- the card would not come out.
Our plan to get a new memory card didn't work either. After buying and trying several memory cards that were "too new" to work in the camera -- Syan jumping out of the car in downtown Guangzhou and meeting up with us later -- borrowing a camera from YuSi's father that had directions in Chinese, we decided to give up finding a memory card. To get pictures, I enlisted the help of various people with cameras or i-phones, exchanged email addresses, and asked for copies of their pictures via email.
So we operated like that for the remainder of our trip -- various people took pictures for me -- and I took the 15 or so pictures every day that the camera's internal memory would hold. We limped through the image recording final phase of the trip. One benefit of this fiasco is that I had learned how to erase the camera memory through the computer while they were wired for downloading, a trick that would have saved all this hassle to begin with.
Once I had told him my rather long, painful story, he popped the CD drive from the side of the computer, shook out the memory card, and asked me why I hadn't called him.
It took less than 90 seconds and required no tools.
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