9 December 2024

Just another day in the office…

One of the things that makes our job working on the Gazette is the people we encounter day to day.

There was one chap who gave me a bit of a fright, and then even more of a laugh, the other day. He’d come in with his little digital camera on which he had some photos of his 97-year-old mother nearly being “eaten” by the dinosaur at Withstock along with an amusing caption (see it in all its glory on page 7 of the paper this week).

I plugged the camera in to my computer, copied the pictures across, and he went on his merry way.

The following day, he returned with the camera, looking a bit upset. “All the pictures have disappeared off it!” he said.

How could I possibly have deleted them?! I thought, beginning to panic. All I did was plug it in, copy the pics across and then unplug it.

The chap then said he’d forgotten his USB lead, so while he went home to fetch it I hastily Googled “how to recover deleted images from a digital camera” and started to ready myself for a bit of a dispute as to how the pictures had ended up vanishing.

Then he came back, looking a bit shamefaced. “It’s my fault,” he said, producing second, identical digital camera from his pocket… the one that had all his pictures safely on it, and that he’d had in his drawer at home all along. “You could do without nervewracking things like this, couldn’t you?” he added.

Well, yes, I’m sure another grey hair will have been added to the collection. But I didn’t stop laughing for quite some time…