In some respects this is a rant, in other respect I acknowledge it is partially my own fault but it doesn't take away the annoyance.

Had my daughter's 3rd birthday party this morning. Put my camera on a bench in the room away from the kiddies at a play centre. Came back to find 3 mum's sitting on the bench and all the bags that were on the bench (mine was in the middle) pushed to one side with my bag lying on the floor. Opened my camera bag to find that my D700 and 24-70 f/2.8 had been pushed off the bench and landed lens down wedging the lens cover into the lens. The filter mount is damaged, no damage to the glass on the lens itself but when zooming in and out it hits a stiff part around 70mm (where the it moves furthest into the lens case) where it's harder to rotate.

The lens and camera seem to operate fine with no focussing issues but I'm going to book both into a service centre to get the lens repaired and the camera checked which no doubt will cost me $500+ in a repair bill.

What annoyed me about this situation was that these mother's simply pushed the bags to one side and when one dropped off, they couldn't be bothered to check what happened. I don't know whether it was them specifically and I didn't want to bring it up at a children's party but I hope karma catches the guilty party at some point for their inconsiderate behaviour. It would have taken 5 seconds to remove a bag from the bench to sit down instead of pushing them off. The reason people put their bags up was because kids had spilt juice on the floor and in reality, we only came back into the room for 5 minutes for a cake cutting so they could easily have stood for 5 minutes.

I acknowledge it was my own fault for leaving it up there, but I still believe you should be able to leave a bag there without a concern that someone else will simply push it off the bench.

Any ideas on the cost of servicing bodies and repairing lenses?