World's longest rental?

Captain Pierce

Captain Pierce

Veteran
Probably not, but this made me laugh today...

Two and a half years ago, almost to the day, a customer failed to return the DVX100A that they'd rented from one of my company's branches. We tried to get the police involved, they weren't real interested, and eventually we just gave up on it (and about six months ago, I finally got the go-ahead to replace it with an XH-A1s).

Today, the guy came back to return it. :D It's in the wrong case, it's missing the DC coupler and AC cord, and the IR receiver on the back of the handle is busted, but it's our camera.

Bizarre.
 
Why would he return it? Isn't that kind of like walking into a police station with a bloody knife. I don't even know if its the right thing to do at that point if your sober. I would have just mailed a check for the camera.
 
From what I was told, the story was that the camera was rented to shoot his wedding, he and his wife left the country right after the wedding, and the guy who was supposed to return it for him never did. He just got back, discovered the guy still had the camera, and brought it back.

It does explain why the police could never find the guy (not that I suspect they looked all that hard for a $3500 camera, or whatever a DVX was going for in January of '07), but not what happened to the accessories (particularly the hard case).
 
Don't know if that's been decided yet.

Hey, let me ask you guys a couple of questions. First, is there any chance that one of the big Panasonic DVX batteries, the CGA-54's or whatever the full part number is, would have any charge left after 2.5 years? Second, and nobody may know this, but is the AC adapter/charger the same around the world, and they just give you a different AC cord based on your region, to fit the wall plug?
 
hahaha, that's great.

When I worked at Panavision, we had a guy who brought in a tripod which had been missing for decades. He said, it was passed on to him by someone else almost a dozen years ago. He no longer wanted it and thought he'd give it back. The tripod was so old, it had been out of production for many many years. The thing was probably about 30+ years old. It was one of the classic 'pana-pods'. (before pV went all ronford)

The computer rental system had been updated many many years since then, and when I typed the tripod into the barcode system, the tripod sticks had no record of ever existing. It had been deleted from the system years ago. I had no idea what to do with the sticks and he had since just walked away. So a prep tech eventually asked legal if he could keep them, and they said no. It was promptly sent to storage... somewhere next to the holy grail. :)
 
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Well what I do know is that 70% of the equiptment i buy won't bloody work because British wall plugs are 100% different to Americans. So then thou has to go around travelling and ordering a replacement cord, plug, porn etc.
 
Captain Pierce said:
Second, and nobody may know this, but is the AC adapter/charger the same around the world, and they just give you a different AC cord based on your region, to fit the wall plug?
Click to expand...

I'm using a PAL DVX here in the States no problem, I just swapped the AC cord portion (just the cord, not the "box" portion) with one from an NTSC model. In fact, it might have even been a cord from something else. In fact, I think I shaved down one side of the plug to get it to fit into the box. Are you supposed to do that? Probably not, but you certainly can. It never caused the IR receiver to blow off the back end either.
 
Ki-Ki said:
Well what I do know is that 70% of the equiptment i buy won't bloody work because British wall plugs are 100% different to Americans. So then thou has to go around travelling and ordering a replacement cord, plug, porn etc.
Click to expand...

porn?
 
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Nothing worse than ordering pr0n and finding out it's PAL... (or NTSC if you live in PAL land...)

Just for fun, I figured out what the rental charge for this order would have been. Back in January of 2007, our rental rate on the DVX was $250 for one day. For the first month, it's 7.5 times the day rate, and for each additional month it's 6 times the day rate. So, for 30 months, that would be $45, 375. What was MSRP on a DVX back then? $3995? You could have bought 11 of them for that price and still have some money left over for accessories... :D
 
You should have taken a baseball bat to his car and caused about 3500 bucks worth of damage... then come back inside and say "Yeah. That about covers it."
 
Captain Pierce said:
Just for fun, I figured out what the rental charge for this order would have been. Back in January of 2007, our rental rate on the DVX was $250 for one day. For the first month, it's 7.5 times the day rate, and for each additional month it's 6 times the day rate. So, for 30 months, that would be $45, 375. What was MSRP on a DVX back then? $3995? You could have bought 11 of them for that price and still have some money left over for accessories... :D
Click to expand...

Jeez, he could've bought a Red One rig for that much. Or hired a professional film crew to shoot his wedding on 35mm with a Panavision.
 
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