Quote Originally Posted by michaelbsc View Post
I had a twenty something demand to know "What is this" holding up my Yashicamat once.

When I told her it was a camera she told me that it certainly was not any kind of camera and called the supervisor. The middle aged supervisor asked what the trouble was, and she said that I was claiming that thing was a camera.

When the supervisor said that it it was indeed a camera the poor girl just grumbled that it didn't look like any camera she had ever seen.

Heaven knows what she would have thought of the film.
I had a full-fledged adult ask the same question, and more specifically could they open it to prove that it is a camera. This was back in the days when they wanted to look into the film compartment of cameras. So I took the hood off of my Rollei and showed him the prism mirror. That was sufficient.

In another experience I had a British screener question a monopod. He was insistent that it must be an aerial (antenna) of some sort. He could not fathom how a one-legged device could support a camera. Even a demonstration wasn't enough to squelch the questions about what type of aerial it was.

People in general aren't very familiar with old camera equipment.