Emergency!

I guess most of us have made the occasional emergency blip, when we got to the end of the evening without a suitable photograph and we have taken something just to avoid missing a day.

However, today I had a real emergency. I was out planning to take a landscape in the Hertfordshire countryside, but I only had my little compact camera with me. I turned the camera on, the lens extended in the normal way and then started making nasty graunching noises, and the display showed a message along the lines "Lens fault, reset the camera" and then the camera turned off - with the lens still extended. I tried powering it on again, but the same thing happened. So I returned home without a photograph.

When I got home I tried one more time, and the lens folded away properly, and then opened properly. It now seems to be behaving normally. So is the camera faulty? Can I rely on it? Will it go wrong again? I think I would prefer a confirmed fault to this uncertainty.