Sunday, February 19, 2006

Got Milk?

I had a little mishap yesterday, I spilled a bowl of frosted cheerios all over my laptop. The keyboard was in a sea of milk. What a mess. After wiping it up, I tentatively pressed the keys and needless to say, any key I pressed produced a series of keystrokes that created gibberish on the screen and launched other programs. Yikes!

After a frantic call to my computer guy, I got my hairdryer and started drying. He recommended drying it for a bit, waiting 24 hours and testing the keyboard again. Interestingly enough, the rest of the computer seemed to work fine (screen, mouse and hard drive) even my iTunes kept playing.

As I was getting ready to start a writing session with a client, my sweetheart went to the store and bought me an external keyboard and voila! a few minutes later I was back in business.

Sure enough, 24 hours later, I gingerly tapped a few of the keyboard keys and they worked! Some of the keys feel sticky, others a little mushy, and there was one casualty, the right mouse button got cemented in (probably the extra sugar from the bananas) but I'm delighted to report that we're up! I'm ordering a new laptop keyboard tomorrow as I do not like the idea of a hardened white lake under my fingers as I type.

Lesson learned: Eat your cheerios at the kitchen table with your sweety-pie!!!!


2 comments:

Dustin said...

sometimes we must learn the hard way eh?

Unknown said...

One of the kids spilled sticky Coke on the key board. I immediately got out the vacuum cleaner, put on one of those brush nozzels, and spent several minutes sucking away at the key board, upside down.

Then I held it upside down over the sink and used the sink sprayer to lightly spray the keyboard. Then another few minutes with the vacuum sucking. Then I reversed the hose and blew on the keybord to dry it. Half an hour later it ran like it should.

The bonus is that the key board was, for a little while at least, free of crumbs!