Canon 7D DSLR Camera Doesn't Turn On

This probably can happen to anyone's camera but in my particular case it was a Canon - a Canon 7D...a very expensive Canon 7D that was only about 10 months old.  I was standing by the skating rink in Rockefeller Center in NYC (Yes, 30 Rock) marveling at the golden statue and all of the familiar sights and thought...gee wouldn't it be great to get a picture of this.  That's when it hit me.   Or more specifically that's when nothing happened.  I turned the camera on and nothing showed up on the LCD screen on top of the camera.   I switched it off and on again and still nothing.  This is when I hit the camera on the side in my usual Neanderthal method of fixing things and still nothing.  It was dead.  Then I tried the second battery that I had and still nothing.  Dead. Dead. Dead.

I went on the Internet and someone suggested taking out the little watch battery in the battery compartment that stores all of the state information for the camera.  I actually didn't even know that battery existed so that was interesting to discover.  Not the typical way I would like to find out about stuff like that but interesting none the less.  Anyway, this did nothing too.

When I got back to the Golden State I called Canon support again and after the usual rigamarole of questions making sure a real battery is in the compartment and that I actually switched the right switch to turn things on they suggested I send it in.  A week later it comes back and guess what the problem was?   Drum roll please....

Sand.

Huh?  Yes, sand.  We took a vacation to Hawaii in the Summer and I guess sand got into the battery compartment and shorted the system.  I have an electrical engineering degree and I had no idea sand had such power.  Of course I barely got my degree but that's another story.   I guess I've now figured out the difference between a professional camera like the Canon 1Ds and my camera - one can look sand in the face and scoff and the other can't.

Anyway, before you send your camera into some repair shop and pay UPS exorbitant amounts of money for the privilege, please try to get one of those can's of air and blow into your battery compartment to try to blow sand out or take a vacuum cleaner to see if you can suck it up.   I think this what the Canon repair people did since it didn't look like the fixed anything.  I wish the tech support people at Canon would have suggested that so I could have fixed my camera myself and taken some pictures on my vacation.  Despite what iPhone 4 users say, there is a slight difference in picture quality between a Canon 7D and an iPhone 4 -- just slightly.