30 Minute Service

Since I got a D800 the other day, I decided that after 190,000 shots I should take my D3 in to the local Nikon service centre in Beijing and get it cleaned, including the sensor, and replace the rubberized cover that was coming off.

I sat down at the customer counter in their office in Room 307 in East 1 in the Oriental Plaza office building and gave the service guy a list of things I wanted done that I’d had one of my editors write down in Chinese.

He went right to work creating the work ticket. Then he told me the total price for the service would be 286 yuan (US$46.60), I was pretty amazed. I was expecting it to be more, much more.

So I wasn’t ready for the response when I asked how long it would take to get the camera back, and he said, “San shi fen zhong.”

My first response was: Holy christ, I was expecting two weeks, not 30 days.

Then he wrote down 30 on a piece of paper, and I recovered and realized he’d told me “30 minutes,” which I simply was not mentally prepared to hear.

“San shi fen zhong? Wo keyi chile, ranhou huilai? (Thirty minutes? I can go eat and come back and get my camera.”

“Shide.” (“Yes.)

And when I came back, the camera had a new cover, the sensor had been cleaned along with the rest of the beast.

And all this not to mention that I used to have to go to near the Beijing West Train Station to do this before, about a two-hour round trip these days in Beijing. Today, it was at the Oriental Plaza about 15 minutes by taxi from my office on a bad-traffic day.

I’ve kept asking myself all day long, “Nikon did this?”

From what I read, I don’t see these kinds of experiences being written about with regard to Nikon USA.

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