Camera Insurance

Yesterday I finally pulled the trigger and bought a new camera- my sixth one since I started college.  The quality of the cameras I was receiving (usually on my birthday or for Christmas) slowly began to decrease, and for good reason.  I mean, what kind of person needs a new camera once a year?

People that know me, especially people that know me from college, know that I LOVE taking pictures.  Some nights, I would come home to a memory card with over 100 pictures on it.  It would be closer to a film of the night's event than to random snapshots.  Part of the problem is that I used my camera at all times (and often alcohol is involved), so my little electronic friends would be done faster than most.  Following is a short list of how each of my cameras met its demise.

1. Camera #1: my 17th birthday present, it made it through high school without a scratch.  But at the first tropical party at Trinity, some kind of sticky beverage got underneath the buttons, making it very difficult to work them unless you could put up over 150 pounds on benchpress.
2. Camera #2: bought hastily to capture our family vacation in the Outer Banks in August, it lasted until New Years without incident.  It fell to its death in a toilet (note: a clean toilet) at a party in New York City, and although it still SORT OF worked after that, the pictures had weird lines through them.  Then it fell in a drink concoction and it was DEFINITELY done.
3. Camera #3: my 21st birthday present that was bought with my upcoming semester abroad in Rome.  I loved it.  It got through my 21st birthday celebration, Thanksgiving festivities, and Christmas at the beach in Florida.  Unfortunately, my purse got knocked out of the car at a gas station on our drive back north.  Purse: recovered.  Wallet with credit cards: recovered.  Cash and camera: gone (along with all our pictures from Disney).
4. Camera #4: I couldn't go to Rome without a camera, so I got one before I left that took awesome panoramic shots... probably the best feature on it, especially when I used it to create pictures combining one person's lower body with another person's head.  Somehow, this one stayed firmly on my wrist through a near-arrest by the Spanish police in Barcelona, red wine fueled club nights in Rome, sprints through Prague to avoid homeless men peeing in the street, and all the European gypsies that my mother cautioned me would chop off my arm with a machete to get to my valuables.  First week back at school and it got dropped onto a coffee table.  For some reason, a lens bent up at a 45 degree angle won't take pictures... weird, right?
5. Camera #5: Christmas, four months later.  I was hurting.  I had missed the documentation of MAJOR senior year events.  Then what did I find in my stocking?!  A new Kodak!  It was a Christmas miracle.  So maybe it was the cheapest model they made.  Maybe it was bigger than my first camera with its five-year-old technology.  I didn't care.  Fast forward to about two months ago.  After a night out in uptown Charlotte with way too much ridiculous dancing, one of my friends was missing.  We couldn't leave without her.  Unfortunately, I didn't make the most practical choice of footwear.  Solution?  Take off my four and a half inch stilettos while we waited for her to meet us.  Not wanting to stand on the bare pavement, I decided to stand on my purse (after taking out my electronics, of course).  My camera is probably still sitting on that lamppost, waiting to be picked back up.

The cashier asked if I wanted camera insurance on this new one as I was buying it.  I thought about it...

"Does that cover spilling things on it?"
"Uh, no.  Only internal problems with the camera."
"Oh, so like a lens that gets broken when you drop it."
"No, because that would be your fault."

What's the point of insurance then?  I can only hope that it survives this weekend in Boston...