Looking out over Florida Bay from the roof of Fort Zachary Taylor
The Widelux is a swing-lens panoramic camera. Eventually, the camera develops a “banding” issue, which this photo highlights extremely well. An alternating pattern of light and dark bands is transferred to the film. This happens when the swing-lens gets dirty, and the motion of the lens across the field of view, is no longer smooth. My Widelux was certainly due, considering that it was manufactured around 1965, and I have not had the camera professionally cleaned, and I have no idea if a previous owner had either.
The timing wasn’t great, because I had plans for the camera in August, but I called up a shop near Chicago on Friday that works on Widelux and they said that if I could get the camera to them by today, they thought the turn around could be fairly quick. I immediately sent the camera their way, and have watched the USPS tracking service online, only to see that no one has been around this week to sign for the insured package.
Which leaves my camera in postal service limbo.
So my question today is this: When exactly did customer service die its excruciating death? I realize that it has been on life support for some time, but when did we actually pull the plug?
This has been an incredibly busy week for me, which I’m thrilled about. The perfect weather has come at the perfect time. Unfortunately, it also means that I do not have a lot of time to call the camera shop several times a day to ask: “WTF?”
I’ll try one more time in the morning, then I will request that the USPS ship the camera back to me, so that I can ship it to another shop.
Leave a Reply