Originally posted by Stewtheking Nothing as brutal as some of these, but I had a 70-210 mounted on a pentax ME super, all balanced on a clearly-not-quite-stable-enough tabletop tripod. I turned away, and heard the *clunk* of the whole thing nodding forward onto the desk, and the filter on the front of the lens becoming significantly less round. The whole rig was inherited from my Dad (to whom I had to own up to said misdemeanour!), and in fact he still had the lens (included said dented filter ring) which I pinched from him when I went to visit a couple of weeks ago.
Oh... come to think of it, I have something similar to that...
Years ago, I bought a brand new Sony RX100 - the original version. I got it just after the MkII was released, so it was a fair bit cheaper than at launch... but still, not an inexpensive purchase. The week after I bought it, I went for a week's vacation to Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel. I was staying in a rental property in the old castle, and it had a stone floor in the kitchen. When I came in from a long walk on a cold morning at the start of my break, I rested the camera on a rather uneven wooden sideboard, then set about taking my hat, coat, gloves, boots and sweat-top off. As I was wriggling out of my sweat-top, I knocked the week-old Sony onto the stone kitchen floor... It landed on one corner of the metal case, dented it in badly enough that the in-built flash would no longer pop out. I still have the camera in storage somewhere...
I'm not sure that counts as abuse, so much as outright stupidity. Still, the end result surely qualifies...