I Love Technology

It was about time for a new laptop, and so last summer I gathered up all my one dollar bills that I made from waitressing and bartending and brought them to the apple store and paid for a good chunk of the new Macbook Air.  It took some getting used to, but I love it.  It's wonderful and fast and smooth and clean and weighs nothing.

These days, after working eleven to twelve hours programming radios and digging holes for the water meter company, I go home and shower and put my pajamas on and then do some work on my beautiful laptop for the company in Minneapolis that I used to work for before this whole trip around the world thing.  (My plan is to work like a dog for a few months and save up enough money for another epic trip.)

Last week I started to feel like I was going to catch a cold.  So I added a tablet of Walborne (the poor man's Airborne) and a packet of Emergen-C to some hot water.  I like to drink it like a tea and it usually helps me not catch the cold I thought I was catching.

So I was working, drinking my strange tea, and I don't know how it happened but I knocked the tea over and it poured onto my brand new beautiful laptop.  Not just water, but sugary powdery thick water.  What an idiot!

I said so many swear words while I ran to the kitchen to grab a paper towel and tip it upside down and try to dry out the keyboard.

I got it as dry as I could and washed it up with a soapy paper towel.  But I was in the middle of a project for my old boss and so like an idiot I kept working even though the keys were all sticky and weird.  I seriously didn't want this laptop anymore.  Ew!

Soon I noticed that the 'h', j', 'k', and 'l', keys weren't working!  Ugh...I finished the project copying and pasting and emailed my boss using the number '1' for 'l' and a '7' for 'k' and so on.  I tipped the laptop upside down again on a paper towel and went to bed.  The next morning the keys still weren't working.  I kept it upside down some more and finally googled "spilling on your keyboard" and was horrified to discover I had probably just ruined my brand new expensive computer.

At work one of the guys has a neighbor who fixes computers though and I brought it in to him (an Australian!)  and he took it all apart and found out that none of the moisture made it inside the computer and only my keyboard was trash.  He said I was very lucky and the fact that there is no humidity here was probably a big factor.  With a mac, that means replacing the whole top part of your laptop.  Since I thought my whole computer was ruined when he quoted me $250 for the keyboard I almost did a cartwheel of joy.

$250.  Almost the entire purchase price of my former netbook.  The netbook that never got stolen or gave me any issues for two years.  This is why I shouldn't ever have anything nice.

The Australian gave me this keybode to yooz whyle the paht taykes its toim getting hee-ah.

What an amazing and interesting blog post!

But that's one thing you never really talk about is it?  How dependent we are on our technology and if it isn't working properly how much it can absolutely cripple us?

p.s. I never did catch that cold.