Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/04/27
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]The man who rents my house in Gothenburg is one of the technical gurus at Hasselblad. My next door neighbour is their number one company repair man (he has recently gone freelance). I live in the shadow of greatness :-) One day during a lawn BBQ at a time when I was a bit miffed about my Leica system I offered to swap it for a Hasselblad "factory reject" thinking I could get a good deal. I will never forget the whithering look I got from them. Their response was too embarassing to relate further. Anyway we got to talking about reliability and, as they needed repair men, Hasselblads couldn't be all that perfect. They agreed. But they had an interesting philosophy. Hasselblad could make a camera that was totally reliable but would be so overbuilt that it would be too heavy to use and therefore could never realize its potential. Completely useless. A camera is a "thing". And "things" break. Live with it. Shelley put it better than anyone when he described a ruined statue in the desert. ... On the pedestal these words appear, "My name is Ozymandias, king of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. A camera whether Hasselblad or Leica is a THING. I remember when I was at school and we cursed when something went wrong. The teachers tried to replace our curse by making us repeat Johnsons complaint ... Blast the perversity of inanimate objects. Naturally, as schoolboys it became ... F*ck the perversity of inanimate objects. Teachers will never learn :-) What really surprises me is the number of folk who are outraged when a THING malfunctions. Alan