My Samsung WB300 is dead. Nothing heroic, it just dropped into a pool of water.

It turns out bringing a $250 camera to a child-filled water park is an excellent way to come home with a $250 paperweight.

In retrospect it would have been better to go with shockproof and waterproof rather than brittle and sponge-like.

Putting a wet camera into a bag of rice, to me, is like someone planting their beloved dead pet into a pet cemetery and hoping for a Stephen King miracle — you know if it comes back, it ain’t coming back normal, but you just need it to come back.

So I tried and, after several days buried in rice, and another eight hours charging, the blue “on light” of my digital camera works. Nothing else does, just the blue “on light”.

$250 to replace it… you know what doesn’t cost $250 to replace? Waterproof disposable cameras. Guess who forgot to buy one before going to the waterpark, and then said “ah, fuck it” when given the opportunity to drive ten minutes out of the way to get one on the way to the waterpark? This fuckdiot, right here.

And now I have the world’s worst blue lamp.

I picked up a FujiPix SL240 as a replacement, but it mostly sucks and blows at the same time. I have another week to decide if it’s worth keeping (it’s not), then I take it back to Walmart and get my money back.

The next, next camera will probably be a Olympus SP-815UZ… if I can find it at a BestBuy near me. Which I can’t right now because their website is messed up.

The WB300 was my second digital camera. The first, a Kodak EasyShare Something, lasted four years. But then it was crushed in a ‘slipping on ice’ incident. Water. It’ll fuck your camera up regardless of the season.

*special guest photographer, my girlfriend.