Thursday, January 13, 2005

Rest In Peace

Just a quick update on the 'situation':

After the daiquiris threatened to put a terminal end to my keyboard, we knew we had to spring into some fast action if it was going to be salvaged...

First, we made a pitcher of daiquiris to brace ourselves with.

Then, we had sex.

Then we lazed around in bed for 4 hours, discussing what we might like to do tonight, and whether I needed a nap.

Then I got up, and got down to the serious business of calling my friend in B.C. for the low, low price of just 99 cents for 30 minutes. Then I took a refreshing stroll around the block, munched on some carrot sticks for sustenance and announced to the empty room:

"I will save this keyboard or die trying, dammit!'

I armed myself with rags, paper towels, a pen cap, hydrogen-peroxyde, a steak knife, and 2 Q-tips. I meant to grab the rubbing alcohol instead of the peroxyde, and I paid dearly for that mistake, but more on that later. I also could have used more than just 2 Q-tips, but it was not to be.

Note to self: add Q-tips to grocery list.

First, using the knife, I pried off all the individual keys. I do not recommend this to the average joe, because frankly, it was disgusting. I will not tell you of all the horrors that I found under there, because that would knock this blog into a whole nother rating system. I cleaned and cleaned so whole-heartedly that I burned the tips of my fingers with the peroxyde and they are now permanently white and wrinkled.

Then I replaced the keys, which took an absurd amount of time because other than Ctrl, I couldn't remember where any of them belonged. Eventually I got this clever little puzzle all pieced together, and with just the right amount of jiggling, the shift and the ctrl keys both regained their functions. As you can tell, the E is Eing away, just as nicely as always.

There was one snafu.

For some reason, I couldn't get the space bar back in and working. And the space bar is an important key! Mysentenceswouldlookalotlikethiswithoutit,andthatsuredoesget
annoyingafterawhile,doesn'tit?

So anyway, since I have no idea what that pause button did, I figured it could be sacrificed, so I put it where the space bar belongs. It gets the job done, ultimately, but I was not satisfied with it. You see, the truth is, and I do appreciate your discretion on this: I have mushroom thumbs.

Shhhh! Not so loud! Stop with all the laughter, really, it's starting to hurt my feelings now. Simmer down.

Sim, simmer.

Okay, yes, it's true, my thumbs are shaped like mushrooms above the knuckle. They're squat little suckers, the mushroom occurs right after the knuckle, I have no space in between. They're bulbous little biatches. And short, too. So with my fingers on the other keys, I couldn't reach the little pause button. What to do, what to do?

Well, I did have one brilliant idea, one which has probably occurred to many of you already:

popsicle sticks.

I was astounded when Jason told me that we had no spare popsicle sticks just lying around. Well I made that boy sit down and get licking. Popsicles, I mean. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Now keep in mind that after a brilliant high school career, I had an even more brilliant university experience. I'm a bright little bulb. So when it came to attaching said popsicle stick to the pause button, I used the logical choice: scotch tape. The popsicle stick was just a little too long, but I didn't want to cut it because then I would get splinters, and you know what a pain those can be! So I gave up another crummy key that I'm sure I'll never use - the one with a picture of a page with an arrow on it. I've never used it in my life; I'm sure I won't miss it. Jason wore his dubious face throughout all this and tried to keep quiet, but he couldn't do it.

"You're doing that the girl way", he said. "You should let me do it the man way."
Right.
"Does the man way involve duct tape?"

Well, no, it doesn't. He sacrificed yet another "useless' key that I assured him I could live without, since I didn't even know what it was for; the scroll lock key.

He got out his toolbox.
Uh oh.

He screwed the damn stick right unto that button!
And you know what? It didn't work as well as the scotch tape button. Hah!

So yeah, it looks a little funny now. And sadly, the space bar button was not even affected by the daiquiris, it was simply the tragic result of my steak knifery. Goodbye, space bar, we'll miss you.

And the peroxyde, you ask, what happened with that?
Well, Madame La Dropski was gesturing just a tad too wildly, and it landed on the carpet, and glug, glug, glug, long story short, my carpet now has polka dots!

15 comments:

Jay said...

Jason Here!
I wish I could tell you that any part of that story was not true, but sadly, I cannot. I'm typing with the popsicle stick right now and I think it works better than the old spacebar. I cannot look at it without laughing though, man, it's times like these I wish we had a digital camera. The keyboard is also funny because there is now quite a few missing keys, holes where buttons used to be. This whole computer in fact is on it's last legs. I don't know why we haven't invested in one yet, I think it's hard to spend money on something that still works. But barely, there is the whole keyboard fiasco and the computer tower is missing the reset button and side casing. It's older than dirt and slower than Jamie's grandma. Oh great, and now the ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd sticks. When you bump the desk the computer is sitting on, the monitor shifts sizes and sometimes the computer reboots by itself. Plus it's perpetually low on disk space so Jamie likes to make room on it by deleting random .exe files. Andddd to top it off, it's running Windows 84. *sigh* Sometimes I like to hide the computer and tell Jamie we need a new one, but she knows all my hiding places now: in the vegetable garden, the freezer, and buried in the front yard. She always finds it and brings it back in for me to clean off. I'll be rid of it one day, I'm thinking of tying it to the back of the car andd driving it into the woods. I'll tell Jamie it's at a computer farm, running free in the pasture with other computers it's age.

Until then ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddamn this thing.


-Jason

{illyria} said...

i have such brilliant, beautiful, hilarious blog friends. way to go, jay!

JeN said...

ha ha ha ha ha I love this!
And, let me guess, you will continue to drink (alcoholic) liquids in the presence of the keyboard. Maybe it'll develop an addiction.

Unknown said...

it is a sad state of affairs when we start to make fun of the disabled, but i beleive this situation calls for it. so let's do it, and let's do it right.

i for one know the importance of creating humours nicknames for little decrepitcies [a word i just made up!]. see also: i call my arm my wing, thus i am wingy mclimb. ahh, how sweet. now. with your sad little keyboard... think very hard, because if it is the wrong name it will be offeneded and no longer function - despite your attempts at repair.

hmmm. that's a thinker.

spot? no. that's your carpet. ummm. hole? nah. what about... blotch? i typed spot into the thesaurus on dictionary.com and got many words: pickle (how that fits in we'll never know), berth, box, satisfy, hangout, dump, roof, bespatter, and many many more. but blotch is almost like biatch [almost...], and i like it.

and a note on cleaning keyboards: though i have a job that is relevant in the world of child safety, there is not a huge demand for my business card. so. i use the edges and periodically run cards in between keys to scrape out the skin cells that have fallen in between the cracks. ahhhh yummy skin cells in cracks.

ew.

Unknown said...

except i can't spell on my keyboard... believe. offended. etc. the morning office cold air has not warmed up my fingers. or brain. yet.

Lois Lane said...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I lurk. But it's in the friendly laughing with you style, not the creepy, "Clarice..." Silence of the Lambs kinda way.
Anyhoo, I loved this story both Jay and Jason's versions. You two make a great team!
Lois Lane

BeckyBumbleFuck said...

I like how many of your solutions to everyday problems (OK, not that I've spilled daiquiri on my computer of late, but...) involves a little romp as one of the steps in the process. I think that's a very successful approach :) No really. I'm going to start solving problems that way; um, oh, yeah there's that lack-of-a-boy factor. Blah.

Tara said...

It's never a dull day in your house is it Jay? :)

Phillip said...

I liked the part where you fixed the keyboard.

Harry said...

It used to be just fingernails. Then sleazy bars. Next came MTV (remember the good old days?) Now we have keyboards, where the nastiest things on the planet lurk. I tried saranwrap in lieu of those commercial "skins", but the wife thought it too sexy, I guess. Plus I couldn't find my roll of ducttape that day, or she'd never have been able to remove the thing. Well, that about covers it.

Unknown said...

dear jay, I must say you have the craftiness of a monkey and the perseverance of a... um, those desert insects that push big lumps of food up these steep hills and will keep on pushing them even if they slide backwards down the hill and have to do all that work all over again... (yeah, I forget what they are called! :P )

I too had a keyboard spill a few years ago... orange juice and Paseo, in my case. Sticky keys and shorted curcuits.... Typing "hello" would end up as "h34;;oop0". I just bought a new one. :)

Unknown said...

You should dress your popsicle stick keyboard up a bit. You could go the way of popsicle art; something like the sticks in this picture:

http://www.kinderart.com/crafts/popsiclestickkidslg.jpg

A person could construct an entire keyboard out of popsicle sticks if they had enough daquiris or if they drank their way through part of the dog/beer list in the post I wrote today.

I can't wait to see what happens next to your keyboard.

Cal

Jay said...

JeN- Was there every any doubt? My keyboard may need time to dry out, but I surely do not!

Amy- Sorry, yesterday's disappearance was in no way meant to result in search parties. Busy day, hangover, power outages...yeah, stuff happens, eh?

Kel- Let's hope you've laid off the thinking for the weekend!

Lois- Thanks goodness; quiet lambs have always creeped me out.

Becky- What can I say? Sex clears my head. Or makes me sleepy. Or makes me want more sex. I'm probably more addicted to sex than vodka, and they keyboard seems to withstand it better (haha, just kidding).

Tara- Um, we had a normal day once. It was a Thursday.

Harry- You are a true original. Keyboards really are gross. No more sex on the keyboard, I may catch something.

Pearl- No, this is not the first time I've been compared to a monkey. Does this surprise anyone?

Cal- Leave it to a dog to get all excited about the sticks. And thanks, that's something to consider.

Sunny said...

Once, in my days of chatting (sad, I know), I knew a troll who insisted that his spacebar was broken, and that was the reason.he.was.typing.like.this. It was a most unfortunate state of affairs, and left everyone hating him for years afterward.. long after he'd gotten a new keyboard. So, although your sparkling personality and grand ability to write (minus the insistance that "nother" is an actual word, haha), I'm glad you've taken the stoner approach to things and fixed it with makeshift tools.

Kudos to you two. Kudos, indeed.

Jay said...

Why thank you.
Let me take a bow.

And thanks for noticing the nother, too. I started that like a month and a half ago, and it cracks me up every time, and I'd like to think that some else at least notices it!!