Don’t know why we have the bloody things in the first place.

Other than to add an extra challenge to our home-coming after every holiday: exactly 45 seconds to input a six-digit code before the entire house lights up like a Christmas tree accompanied by a wailing sampled from the sound of nails dragged across a blackboard added to a cat’s appreciation of being plunged into the Rhine on New Year’s Eve.

Not that we actually have anything worth stealing either; it’s just the thought of coming home to find that “someone else has been walking around your abode which makes my skin crawl.

As part of my pre-holiday responsibilities (which I thoroughly enjoy as, for once, it doesn’t involve anything which smells or might kill you if you don’t know what you’re doing); as I was saying, as part of my pre-holiday responsibilities, I thought it would be a good time to check out my photographic equipment (Canon EOS-300D); i.e. batteries, filters, clean the objectives…

The (unique) battery was miserably flat, so flat that the camera even showed up an error message on the display: “Err 2″. So I left the battery to charge for a full eight hours before checking it out again.

“Err 2″: “we-are-really-sorry-but-it’s-not-the-battery-keep-on-searching-dickhead“. One of these moments when you’re thankful to have a 24/7 internet connection at hand!

Not that I was able to erudite a definite diagnosis, mind you: the Canon Support page was incredibly absent of any error messages and the various forums I visited tended to point me towards a problem with the Compact Flash card.

Finally, after spending a couple of hours of digging through quite a lot of irrelevant threads, I finally removed the memory chip, peared into the interface and noticed that, indeed, one of the 50+ pins was bent.

Oooh: the “ol’ bent-pin syndrome”, my irrelevant forums informed me: “that’s going to be expensive”!

Crap! And that just three days before leaving the country..

“Sorry guys: no pics this year!” Was all I had to offer my poor family at that time, while fully aware that a reparation would cost approx. €170..