It's a small world

Has anyone seen my extra digital camera battery? I’m that desperate.

I am not adapting well to this world where valuable electronics are growing smaller every year. Everything about my camera is precarious.

Instead of a closet full of bulky photo albums which are difficult to lose (or in my case, stacks of photos stuffed in shoe boxes), the visual montage of my life over the last five years is sitting on a perfectly fallible hard disk on my laptop. None of the backup options work for me.

I was thinking about backing up all my photos on CDs, but with CDs strewn randomly around the house and in the car, I’m worried that my irreplaceable pictures from Penang and Santo Domingo will be discarded along with pile of AOL trial disks or misplaced in some Los Lobos CD case forever.

Those memory sticks are trouble too. Anything smaller than a pack of gum is bound to end up lost beneath the sofa cushions.

And, I’m constantly looking for that sleek little cord I need to transfer photos from the camera. I need a camera cord that’s 30-feet long and Day-Glo orange so I can hang it from a hook in the garage.

I usually find the cord in a little zippered pouch where I also keep a spare memory card that’s about the size of a Cheez-It. But, I feel the need to put the pouch into a larger pouch so I don’t lose it. So, what’s the point of being compact, if I have to store these gizmos in something large to keep track of them?

I’m not used to having tiny, valuable things. If I lose a Tic-Tac package, I can cope, but my new MP3 player of the same size is worth a hundred bucks. People with expensive jewelry are used to keeping track of small things, so maybe I need a jewelry case to keep all my electronics.

Anything that is small enough for my pants pocket is living on borrowed time. I learned that several years ago when a $90 pair of sunglasses went through the washer’s spin cycle—unsuccessfully. Since then, I consider sunglasses a disposable product and never spend more than $12 a pair.

That’s why I’ve been clinging to my clunky old mobile phone, a five-year-old Nokia, the size of a kosher dill. I’ve been rebuffing Cingular’s offers for a “free” upgrade phone until they offer one that can survive a few washings.

I even misplace my laptop sometimes. This was not a problem 40 years ago. I hearken back to a time when computers, though slow and feeble, couldn’t be misplaced without the aid of a forklift.

So seriously, if you see a Canon camera battery lying around, it’s mine.