Oh the fragile tools of the contemporary documentarian. The enterprise rests on sensitive electronics that can’t handle a little liquid, which is what happened on my last flight back from Chicago. I spilled my drink, some of it on my keyboard. This is not good.
The "S", "D" and ";" keys were the first to go. On the way home I got some silica gel and packed the laptop in a plastic bag with it, hoping to quickly dry out the machine. It didn’t work. The next day I took it to Seattle Laptop. "Well, if it were a Dell, no problem, we could get a new keyboard in there tomorrow, but it’s a Fujitsu, and it might be months to get a part." They disconnected the keyboard so there wouldn’t be any further damage. I bought a USB roll-up rubber keyboard and used that for my Mono Lake workshop. But the last day of the workshop the USB ports all stopped working, and I effecively had a dead computer. When I got home I sent the laptop off to Memphis. Friday I got a phone message. The motherboard was damaged too. Total cost to repair, $598.40. That was one expensive drink of water.
I’m working now on my old IBM Thinkpad 560X, which has the nicest action of any keyboard I’ve ever used. It’s a clunkly, aging machine that runs, barely, on Windows 98 and regularly gives me Spool 32 shutdown messages, to no apparent effect, and seems to have a bad sector on one of the hard drives (I keep getting Win.ini error messages on startup.) I can’t figure out how to configure a wireless card on this machine, and it affects how often I revise the blog. I can’t get online from anywhere, like I got hooked to doing with the new computer. The total capacity of both drives is 4gb and it’s maxed out at 512mb memory, limitations that make it useless for photography. But I have affectionate feelings towards this old machine--it was my companion for all my European trips when I was working on my Ireland book. All my travel dispatches were composed on this old machine. Now though, I need to copy this piece onto a floppy and upload it from the desktop.
Comments