It began with the letter D, long ago. It was the key used to fire to the right of the ship in a grid, in a game I remember being really addicted to for a few weeks. I also clearly remember two or three warnings along the review about how devious the game was to keyboards. Fair enough. I stopped playing after a while, and other than some more pressure on the letter D, which eventually went unnoticed, everything was normal.
One day something needed to be taken from a huge box kept on top of a shelf, above the computer. The huge box is surrounded by smaller boxes and books. It is no trouble to remove everything - the problem is putting them back into place. Among the things around the huge box are the original G.U.R.P.S. book, and a perfectly new, early 90's edition of "Vampire: The Masquerade", inside a protective bag, looking very pretty up there. But the G.U.R.P.S. book is not hard cover. Because of that, and because it is ugly, it is kept behind the Vampire book, which holds everything in place. With the tampering of the delicate balance on top of the shelf, the G.U.R.P.S. book just had to slide one little bit to the front, pushing the Vampire book out of the shelf. The targetting was surgical: the spacebar in my keyboard received a direct hit. It worked, but had been loose ever since.
Years went on, and the K key became problematic. No specific reason, it just did. It comes to prove that I cannot have a keyboard of Brazilian layout: if K is the first key to go bad due to day-to-day use, surely Portuguese is not the main language I type. But life went on.
Then King of Fighters came along, and in my lack of a joystick, the keyboard would have to suffice. If I can pilot a TIE Fighter with a keyboard, surely I can play KoF. Hard punch to L key, hard kick to ; key. Consider how much I spoke of King of Fighters in the last few posts, imagine what these two keys have been enduring. They, too, screamed for help.
Today I needed to type a paragraph. Meanwhile, some small talk on ICQ. Few things were worse than that: I doubt I ever had to retype the same things so many times. After that was done, I did what I should had done eons ago. Screwdriver at hand, the keyboard was open. Time to shake this dust out!, I thought, as I took it in my hands and turned it upside down, and 105 little rubber thingies fell to the floor. "Oh... gods..." They were always glued to the keys in all keyboards I opened. No matter, I would probably have to remove them all either way. I gathered them and went on cleaning the board.
Generations of dust and crumbs of bread and cookies and legs and wings of random insects (some extinct), one intact mosquito, and a myriad of other unidentified pieces of unidentified things. It took some time, and the poor little vacuum cleaner will probably never forgive me, but it was satisfactorily clean at the end. So the other parts were cleaned, and the many screws were put back in place.
The screws deserve a paragraph of their own. This keyboard has only eight external and nine internal screws. My first keyboard, from the time of the 386 - and which lasted until the Athlon, no less - had six external screws, and thirty-three internal very small internal screws. Thirty-three. I always loved that keyboard. I cleaned it many times, but half of them were solely for the fun of dealing with all those small screws.
No funny climax or witty comment in this story. I closed the keyboard, and all the keys are great. The spacebar, no longer loose, is a bit too hard to press, it will take some time to get used to. And it is a bit more noisy, but having back D, K and L is good enough.
Now that typing is almost pleasant again, hopefully I will write some more in here. For example, about the beauty of having a phone number of your own, or how Etienne got his name, and my attempts at programming, or my complete lack of respect for the dumb portion of the left-wing. Or the war. But I suppose I have plenty of time to talk about the war. Heh heh.
Posted by Etienne at March 26, 2003 10:15 PM