Coffee and keyboards. They don’t mix. Especially fancy wireless keyboards which are built to look good.
First thing on Tuesday morning, as I was logging on to work systems, I managed to knock a coffee cup over. It spilt all over my desk, and just enough on to my keyboard to make me think it was just a splash. After mopping up the main mess (doubly a tragedy as I was in need of caffeine on Monday, and the thought of wasting it seems wrong), I turned my attention to the keyboard.
It was buggered. That’s a technical description by the way. The coffee had - inspection later turned out - seeped into the main part of the apple keyboard. After removing the three structural screws on the base (1.4mm alum/hex screws. The smallest screwdriver/key you can buy seems to be 1.5mm. Nice one Apple), I was faced with 35- 40 screws, too much to deal with after such a bad day as Tuesday.
I decided to buy a new keyboard, and deal with cleaning up the old one as a ‘project’. It’ll take me 2-3 hours to open the keyboard and clean it up, with a decent chance it’ll be buggered regardless. So I ordered a new one, plus a plastic cover for future protective purposes… Wireless keyboards are able to move further afield, so lounging on a sofa and typing is possible, which means closer proximity to hot sugary beverages (thankfully no sugar involved in that mornings incident).
But to give you an idea of how unbearably shit my day was, just as I clicked confirm order on my Apple Store order and start the credit card processing, Safari barfed with an error. Oh joy. Happy, happy joy. Now my order was in limbo land, as I couldn’t find it in either my shopping basket or my pending orders.
A phone call to Apple showed it was held up in their internal systems, but they’ve not phoned me back to advise whether it’s good. This morning I have received a confirmation e-mail (36 hours late), so it’s looking promising.
Moral? Don’t NOT drink your coffee boys and girls. It’s good for you in more ways than you think.
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November 11th, 2004 at 9:18 pm
Funnily enough, the exact same thing happened to me once. Totally ‘buggered’ my Apple keyboard - but it wasn’t a wireless one and so wasn’t too pricey to replace, but still expensive. Needless to say, I did spend a while attacking it with paper towels and a hairdryer… But I presume all the precious caffeine ruined the circuit boards. Half the keys worked though! Not used it for a while, maybe it works OK now…