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Hello everyone,
I lurk here a lot more than I post, but this thread has motivated me to share my own little good Samaritan story.
This probably happened around 15+ years ago, when our daughter was a toddler. We made a lot of home videos on an 8mm camcorder back then (I think this was when digital camcorders were high tech and expensive). One day, we wanted to use it and the camcorder was nowhere to be found. We looked everywhere, but just couldn't find it, and finally gave up. The last I could remember using it was taping our daughter playing with friends or something in the front yard, but after that it just disappeared.
A month or so later ... my wife answered a call one morning and the man on the other end says it is our lucky day. She thought he was a telemarketer and was about to hang up on him when he asked if we lost a camcorder. She told him, yes, we lost our camcorder. He had found a battered camcorder on the shoulder of the I-20 entrance ramp down the road from our house. It still worked and he was able to play back enough of the tape in it to find a frame where my car's license plate was visible. With the help of a friend in the police dept, he traced it back to us. A few days later, he returned our camcorder to us. IIRC, we made him accept $20 or something for all his trouble and we later mailed him a thank-you card with a restaurant gift certificate.
Looking back, I must have put that camcorder on my car's trunk after using it outside, forgot about it, and the next day drove off with it still sitting there. It made it out of the neighborhood and to the freeway entrace ramp before it rolled off the car. If I could find a battery for it, that beat up camcorder would probably still work. A few years after this, I was still able to use that camcorder to play back all of those 8mm tapes we recorded and capture them to a huge, boring library of mpeg's which are sitting on my hard drive to this day.
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