Brandon M Jones
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This might be the most insane story to date ever posted in this forum...
I am half hoping someone here with a sense of humor can respond with their own story of equal or more insanity to ease my mind and let me know I am not the only person the universe is currently beating up on.
To say that I have had the most horrible luck imaginable in the past 2 months is honestly an understatement. I have endured a series of events recently that has me legitimately concerned to leave my house at this point.
So here is a quick rundown of those events. I tell you all this to simply preface what I am leading up too, which I believe is the icing on the triple layer cake of horrible experiences in the past several months of my life.
1.) Waterpipe in our brand new 1-year-old house leaked causing thousands in sheetrock damage.
2.) A tree branch fell on the roof of my car at my wife's grandparents house. (3,800 dollars)
3.) Crashed our company's Inspire Pro 2 with an X7 underneath it. Destroyed it completely.
4.) Service Mechanic at the motorcycle dealership backed into my car door literally right in front of me. (2000 dollars)
5.) A guy on a job in Atlanta spooked me causing me to accidentally drop my Scarlet-W off the tripod as I was mounting it. The Brain is amazingly ok, but my 7-inch monitor needs repair (pending)
6.) While on another shoot at a Race Track, a kids father had a massive stroke literally right in front of me and I wound up doing CPR on him until medics arrived.
7.) While leaving my office to go home to my wife, someone rear ends me in the rental car my auto insurance company gave me due to my actual car being in the shop.
And now (drum roll) as of last night, the grand finale of all the asinine things thus far...
So my wife and I just returned this past Friday from the annual family beach vacation. While we were gone we commissioned a close friend of ours to take care of our two cats and our dog for us.
She is a long time, very close friend of ours and we both trust her implicitly. After returning home Friday night, we unpacked, settled back into the house, and went to bed. Everything seemed perfectly normal as we left it.
My wife is a nurse and had to immediately go back to work that next day because it was her weekend to work. So with her working, I decided to catch up on a few projects my self. I worked in my upstairs office and continued hammering out a project I am working on for a client.
Sunday I decided to do the same thing. Continue working. Life of a creative right!? We're nonstop. Well about halfway through the day, a couple buddies of mine called me asking if they could come over and talk about an upcoming project we are doing pro-bono for a friend at a local racetrack.
One of the guys is a fairly new friend who is heavily interested in getting into higher-end professional media. He knows that I own a RED and so while kicking ideas around conceptualizing this film we are working on starting, he notices my pelican case with the RED logo sticker. It is neatly sitting in the corner of my office tucked in with several other pelican cases, right where I usually keep it when I am not out on a shoot with it. Having never seen a RED before, he immediately asks if I may open it up and show it to him. At this point I digress back into my story about the pain of dropping the Brain several weeks ago and having to ship it back for repairs. But I decided to go ahead and open the case to at least show him some of the perks to RED cameras and explain to him how modular they are and can be built in many different ways.
This is where the story takes a turn.
Upon rolling my office chair over to my Pelican case and then opening the latches. I flip the lid up and am instantly hit in the face with the most unbelievably foul, pungent, eye burning, hair melting smell I think I have ever encountered.
Justin and Beau instantly retreated and I low crawled out behind them feeling as though a flashbang had just gone off in my sinuses. We flung windows open, turned fans on, and then with t-shirts over our noses went back in to try and figure out what was causing this unearthly odor.
At first glance, nothing appeared out the ordinary. All the parts and accessories were still neatly tucked into their slots in the foam. Everything looked normal. It wasn't until I picked the V-Mount I/O Expander up that I realized something was even more severely wrong than just the smell its self.
In the slot where my camera Brain would normally be, was the V-mount module. When I lifted it up, I noticed that on the bottom left-hand side, the paint had become severely modeled and bubbled. There was what appeared to be "battery acid" or some type of severe corrosion all down the side of it and all of the ports had severe corrosive damage on and inside of them. I was speechless and in utter disbelief...
Quickly soon after, I realized that this was not my only issue... My top-handle, my 512 Mini-Mag, the Multi-tool, the Mag-reader, the PL Mount, and literally EVERYTHING IN MY CASE, was corroded and destroyed... This is the moment panic set in... my chest got heavy... heart started fluttering... literally felt like I was about to have a straight up panic attack. (And I am a Marine...I don't panic. Send rounds down range in my direction. Cool. Screw with my RED. I'm done) This camera has been a 10-year dream... I spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours saving up my personal money to buy a RED. I've got the hoody, the shirts, the stickers. I am the ultimate fan girl for this brand.. And now, in this moment, I realize not only have I dropped the single most expensive thing I have personally ever bought in 27 years of life, but now, ALL of the accessories are all also destroyed, and I have absolutely NO REASON AS TO WHY......
"Ok, Brandon. Calm down. It's just money. You'll figure it out... HA! IVE GOT IT... CALL MY REP! HE'LL FIX THIS AT 5 PM ON A SUNDAY NIGHT!!!"
(I am not sure if he'll appreciate me doing this or not, but Nick Watkins is literally the kindest dude I have ever had the pleasure of doing business with. He has responded to me at 2 AM in the morning before with answers to technical questions, and now, at 5 PM on a Sunday, he is FaceTiming with me on my phone, trying to make sense of what it is we're both looking at. He is the literal embodiment of this brand. Always kind. Always knowledgable. Always there when I need him. Seriously can't say enough great things about him!)
So from here. Nick assures me that we will get this all figured out. He opens a support ticket and tells me he will call me back first thing in the morning.
After closing the lid. Chain smoking a few cigarettes, and having a glass of sweet tea. I decide to finally more calmly inspect this horror scene of a camera case. Justin, Beau, and I get the case and bring it downstairs. We lay down trash bags and start slowly inspecting and assessing each piece, one by one.
At this point I honestly believed that a Schottky Diode or some kind of capacitor had exploded or leaked somehow. I know basics of electronic components and know that some diodes can smell horrible when they explode, but nothing I could rationalize really seemed reasonable to me in that regard. There were no batteries in this case. No ignition sources, No LiPo batteries anywhere. Nothing. So we keep going. Digging through the now graveyard of my RED case.
Once we get everything laid on on the table... That's when I find it. The source. The culprit. The reason for this murder scene... I pick the foam layers up out of the case, and in the bottom of the case, underneath the very bottom layer..... is a pool..... of cat urine...............
Somehow, someway, at some point in time in the recent past... one of my wife's cats... apparently mistook my pelican case.. for their litter box. Then, at some point, I am assuming soon thereafter, someone, closed the lid and locked it. Trapping inside the caustic liquid acid that is cat piss.
So with nowhere for the liquid to evaporate, it completely destroyed and corroded every circuit, every connection, every pogo, and every conductive contact and wire in all components trapped inside the case.
What I still do not understand is how this happened. I sincerely do not ever remember leaving the lid to my case open. I am very meticulous and almost OCD to a fault about taking care of my home and all of mine and my wife's possessions. I am clean. I am organized. And I am very aware of exactly how I leave things. Of course, my first reaction was to assume that the house sitter somehow had involvement in this situation. I called her, and upon inquiring she said that she does remember a night she rans the cats out of my office and closed the door, but does not remember if the lid was open or closed to my case. I am not going to ruin a friendship over material possessions that can be replaced, but the not knowing or being able to answer the why and how has been very frustrating.
So anyway. If you're reading this, and if you also own cats. Please be aware while they are cute, they are capable of literally destroying everything you take pride in. I am not getting rid of or punishing the animal. I am just very upset with the situation. Please keep your Cameras locked up somewhere in an upright position. And also, buy it through a business and get insurance on it... trust me...
Pictures are attached
I am half hoping someone here with a sense of humor can respond with their own story of equal or more insanity to ease my mind and let me know I am not the only person the universe is currently beating up on.
To say that I have had the most horrible luck imaginable in the past 2 months is honestly an understatement. I have endured a series of events recently that has me legitimately concerned to leave my house at this point.
So here is a quick rundown of those events. I tell you all this to simply preface what I am leading up too, which I believe is the icing on the triple layer cake of horrible experiences in the past several months of my life.
1.) Waterpipe in our brand new 1-year-old house leaked causing thousands in sheetrock damage.
2.) A tree branch fell on the roof of my car at my wife's grandparents house. (3,800 dollars)
3.) Crashed our company's Inspire Pro 2 with an X7 underneath it. Destroyed it completely.
4.) Service Mechanic at the motorcycle dealership backed into my car door literally right in front of me. (2000 dollars)
5.) A guy on a job in Atlanta spooked me causing me to accidentally drop my Scarlet-W off the tripod as I was mounting it. The Brain is amazingly ok, but my 7-inch monitor needs repair (pending)
6.) While on another shoot at a Race Track, a kids father had a massive stroke literally right in front of me and I wound up doing CPR on him until medics arrived.
7.) While leaving my office to go home to my wife, someone rear ends me in the rental car my auto insurance company gave me due to my actual car being in the shop.
And now (drum roll) as of last night, the grand finale of all the asinine things thus far...
So my wife and I just returned this past Friday from the annual family beach vacation. While we were gone we commissioned a close friend of ours to take care of our two cats and our dog for us.
She is a long time, very close friend of ours and we both trust her implicitly. After returning home Friday night, we unpacked, settled back into the house, and went to bed. Everything seemed perfectly normal as we left it.
My wife is a nurse and had to immediately go back to work that next day because it was her weekend to work. So with her working, I decided to catch up on a few projects my self. I worked in my upstairs office and continued hammering out a project I am working on for a client.
Sunday I decided to do the same thing. Continue working. Life of a creative right!? We're nonstop. Well about halfway through the day, a couple buddies of mine called me asking if they could come over and talk about an upcoming project we are doing pro-bono for a friend at a local racetrack.
One of the guys is a fairly new friend who is heavily interested in getting into higher-end professional media. He knows that I own a RED and so while kicking ideas around conceptualizing this film we are working on starting, he notices my pelican case with the RED logo sticker. It is neatly sitting in the corner of my office tucked in with several other pelican cases, right where I usually keep it when I am not out on a shoot with it. Having never seen a RED before, he immediately asks if I may open it up and show it to him. At this point I digress back into my story about the pain of dropping the Brain several weeks ago and having to ship it back for repairs. But I decided to go ahead and open the case to at least show him some of the perks to RED cameras and explain to him how modular they are and can be built in many different ways.
This is where the story takes a turn.
Upon rolling my office chair over to my Pelican case and then opening the latches. I flip the lid up and am instantly hit in the face with the most unbelievably foul, pungent, eye burning, hair melting smell I think I have ever encountered.
Justin and Beau instantly retreated and I low crawled out behind them feeling as though a flashbang had just gone off in my sinuses. We flung windows open, turned fans on, and then with t-shirts over our noses went back in to try and figure out what was causing this unearthly odor.
At first glance, nothing appeared out the ordinary. All the parts and accessories were still neatly tucked into their slots in the foam. Everything looked normal. It wasn't until I picked the V-Mount I/O Expander up that I realized something was even more severely wrong than just the smell its self.
In the slot where my camera Brain would normally be, was the V-mount module. When I lifted it up, I noticed that on the bottom left-hand side, the paint had become severely modeled and bubbled. There was what appeared to be "battery acid" or some type of severe corrosion all down the side of it and all of the ports had severe corrosive damage on and inside of them. I was speechless and in utter disbelief...
Quickly soon after, I realized that this was not my only issue... My top-handle, my 512 Mini-Mag, the Multi-tool, the Mag-reader, the PL Mount, and literally EVERYTHING IN MY CASE, was corroded and destroyed... This is the moment panic set in... my chest got heavy... heart started fluttering... literally felt like I was about to have a straight up panic attack. (And I am a Marine...I don't panic. Send rounds down range in my direction. Cool. Screw with my RED. I'm done) This camera has been a 10-year dream... I spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours saving up my personal money to buy a RED. I've got the hoody, the shirts, the stickers. I am the ultimate fan girl for this brand.. And now, in this moment, I realize not only have I dropped the single most expensive thing I have personally ever bought in 27 years of life, but now, ALL of the accessories are all also destroyed, and I have absolutely NO REASON AS TO WHY......
"Ok, Brandon. Calm down. It's just money. You'll figure it out... HA! IVE GOT IT... CALL MY REP! HE'LL FIX THIS AT 5 PM ON A SUNDAY NIGHT!!!"
(I am not sure if he'll appreciate me doing this or not, but Nick Watkins is literally the kindest dude I have ever had the pleasure of doing business with. He has responded to me at 2 AM in the morning before with answers to technical questions, and now, at 5 PM on a Sunday, he is FaceTiming with me on my phone, trying to make sense of what it is we're both looking at. He is the literal embodiment of this brand. Always kind. Always knowledgable. Always there when I need him. Seriously can't say enough great things about him!)
So from here. Nick assures me that we will get this all figured out. He opens a support ticket and tells me he will call me back first thing in the morning.
After closing the lid. Chain smoking a few cigarettes, and having a glass of sweet tea. I decide to finally more calmly inspect this horror scene of a camera case. Justin, Beau, and I get the case and bring it downstairs. We lay down trash bags and start slowly inspecting and assessing each piece, one by one.
At this point I honestly believed that a Schottky Diode or some kind of capacitor had exploded or leaked somehow. I know basics of electronic components and know that some diodes can smell horrible when they explode, but nothing I could rationalize really seemed reasonable to me in that regard. There were no batteries in this case. No ignition sources, No LiPo batteries anywhere. Nothing. So we keep going. Digging through the now graveyard of my RED case.
Once we get everything laid on on the table... That's when I find it. The source. The culprit. The reason for this murder scene... I pick the foam layers up out of the case, and in the bottom of the case, underneath the very bottom layer..... is a pool..... of cat urine...............
Somehow, someway, at some point in time in the recent past... one of my wife's cats... apparently mistook my pelican case.. for their litter box. Then, at some point, I am assuming soon thereafter, someone, closed the lid and locked it. Trapping inside the caustic liquid acid that is cat piss.
So with nowhere for the liquid to evaporate, it completely destroyed and corroded every circuit, every connection, every pogo, and every conductive contact and wire in all components trapped inside the case.
What I still do not understand is how this happened. I sincerely do not ever remember leaving the lid to my case open. I am very meticulous and almost OCD to a fault about taking care of my home and all of mine and my wife's possessions. I am clean. I am organized. And I am very aware of exactly how I leave things. Of course, my first reaction was to assume that the house sitter somehow had involvement in this situation. I called her, and upon inquiring she said that she does remember a night she rans the cats out of my office and closed the door, but does not remember if the lid was open or closed to my case. I am not going to ruin a friendship over material possessions that can be replaced, but the not knowing or being able to answer the why and how has been very frustrating.
So anyway. If you're reading this, and if you also own cats. Please be aware while they are cute, they are capable of literally destroying everything you take pride in. I am not getting rid of or punishing the animal. I am just very upset with the situation. Please keep your Cameras locked up somewhere in an upright position. And also, buy it through a business and get insurance on it... trust me...
Pictures are attached
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