By Jim Hagarty
My laptop was sitting on the kitchen table one night, its power cord plugged into a nearby wall. An emergency of some description arose (a gerbil farted or a cat smacked the dog) so I jumped to my feet and took off. So did my laptop when my feet became entangled in the cord.
The little black box that has become my lifeline flew off the table and landed on the floor completely flat, exactly the way it had been sitting before its launch. I just about fainted and shouted some high seas pirate words in my startled state as I discovered long ago that this sort of calamity is made better by ear-deafening profanity, preferably four or five super offensive words strung together like some sort of garlic necklace made to ward off evil spirits.
I picked up my precious machine and placed it gingerly back on the table. The swearing worked; so far it is working as well as the day I bought it, although it froze once before I went to bed which has me a bit nervous.
This incident reminds of a similar accident at work a few years ago with the Mac desktop I was working on. It was my routine back then to munch on some peanuts and a glass of water. I would dump a few nuts from the bag in my left hand into my right hand, pop them mouthward, then pick up the water in my right hand and take a sip. But I became involved in a conversation this day and thinking I was holding the bag of nuts, tipped over the water into my hand instead, sort of like the old cartoon character Quick Draw McGraw shooting himself in the face. Remember: Bang, Phew (as he blew the smoke from the end of the gun), Bang, Phew, Phew, Bang.)
The water quickly leapt from my hand all through my keyboard. Horrified (Mac keyboards are expensive) I flipped the keyboard over to let the water drain away but it was too late. It started immediately to malfunction. I grabbed it and jumped in the car to take it home where I had another keyboard of my own.
That night my wife said not to worry about it, that it would probably dry out on its own. That’s all she knew.
I got out a hair dryer and blew away for awhile on the soggy keys. Then I went on the Internet to see what I should do. Make sure you don’t use a hair dryer on it, said one site, as the heat can melt some of the smaller elements. One site suggested ridiculously that if you left it alone, it would dry out on its own, maybe in a few weeks. Another site helpfully advised me to remove every key cap and dry everything I could with Q-tips. So I spent a long time doing that.
But every time I tried it out on the computer, its performance was terrible. When I would press on any key just once, it would just keep typing that particular letter over and over and over though my finger was no longer on the key.
I finally gave up and just set it aside, resigned to the idea that I had just donated a Mac keyboard to the company I was working for. A couple of weeks passed and I plugged the wrecked board in for one more try. Magically, it worked just fine.
My wife said it probably just needed the time to dry out.
Yeah, like that would be the answer!
Ha!
