The following is a true story that proves a theory of mine that I kept under wraps until now for fear of public ridicule and embarrassment. The theory is that broken electronic gadgets, if left untouched for a long enough period of time, autofix themselves.

My first digital camera was a Casio Exilim EX-z50. It was a good – and expensive at the time – camera that was a gift from my dad. It took great pictures, the battery lasted for days and hundreds of shots before you had to recharge (perfect for travel), and it was a true ultra compact. I had minor gripes with it, but that was just me being a gadget connoisseur who’s picky about the little design details that make objects of electronic wonder, but nothing to belittle the awesomeness of this little shooter. The point is: it was a good camera. That is why my eyes watered when my sister one day returned it after borrowing it for a couple days, casually threw it on the coffee table saying “Its broken”. The two words every gadget lover fears most and when heard curses the day he let his friends/siblings/parents borrow his stuff.

At first I couldn’t really take what my sister just said at face value. You know how women are with that kind of thing. “Its broken” is a generic statement that can mean any number of things from “I can’t find the ON button” to “I dropped it from the third floor office window” (now I will probably be receiving hate mail from feminist groups). On closer examination, I found out that my camera was not completely kaput, but sort of brain dead. I’d hit the on button and the zoom lens would expand and then it beeps in pain and instantly retracts, not even allowing me to get into the menu. A quick googling revealed that my camera was suffering a common syndrome known as the dreaded Casio lens error . I took it to the local Casio dealer who advised that the whole lens assembly needed to be replaced, and that it will cost close to two thirds of the original price. With a broken heart, I repacked the camera into its original box and stowed it away in the gadget cemetery corner of my room. A month later I bought a new one (a Kodak P850), which was bigger, had an image stabilizer and a great 12x zoom, but I still missed the little one which died before its time. A friend of mine who was also a Casio owner suffered through a similar ordeal, and I decided to give him mine for the purpose of electronic organ donation . But alas, the different models had incompatible parts.

Yesterday I needed to quickly transfer some pictures from the Kodak to my PC. The Kodak’s battery was dead and I don’t have a card reader, so I dug up the Casio to use it as one. Instead of pressing the PLAY button, I hit the ON switch and lo and behold, the lens expanded and did not retract, the camera beeped happily announcing it was ready to shoot!. The battery was even almost fully charged. I tried it a few times, snapped random pictures, and removed and reinstalled the battery and it still works. A miracle! Maybe not, maybe its just the hot weather we’re getting in Cairo these days is causing the innards to expand and somehow fix the problem on a temporary basis. Maybe the lens assembly was never actually fully broken and the good people at the repair shop wanted to rip me off, and a few months of storage in that cold, dark, desolate corner of my room caused the camera to automagically reconstruct its own parts, Terminator style. But that’s besides the point. My camera has miraculously brought itself back from the dead! I had tried to make it work hundreds of times and took to the “experts” to no avail and now it just decides to come back to life. Explain that.

I will be reporting later if the incredible recovery sustains or if it was just a futile attempt by a wounded gadget to hang on to dear life.