The Daily Ping

About two weeks ago I was pouring tea at my desk at work. A few minutes later I realized I had left a small puddle of water on my desk. I cleaned it up and went about my day. At about 5 o’clock, though, I realized that my space bar was giving me two spaces every time I hit it, but then it stopped working all together. I couldn’t put a space between words without cutting and pasting a space from another document (talk about a pain!). I thought maybe there were some crumbs in the keyboard, so I turned it over to shake it out. Then the waterfall began. Apparently, I had gotten just as much (or more) water inside the keyboard than I did on the desk.

The next morning, I sent our IT department an e-mail: “Doyouhaveanextrakeyboard?Ispilledwateronmineandnolongerhaveafunctioningspacebar.” I was given a new keybord and chastised.

Then last week, the same scenerio presented itself: I spilled a bit of water on my desk. I decided to immediately turn my keyboard over and dump out any water that was inside it, before it could cause any major problems. I thought I had done so in time, as my keyboard worked well for a few hours. Then some more wackiness ensued.

Current result: When I press my up-arrow, it does the up-arrow and then the equivalent of hitting the “PrintScreen” key. When I press the down-arrow, it’s like pressing the down-arrow and then the CAPS LOCK key. If I cut some text and then use an arrow key before I paste it, I lose the text on the clipboard. And when I’m using the numeric keypad on the side, certain numbers will turn Num Lock on and off and others will turn CAPS LOCK on and off.

But I’m not about to ask for another keyboard. I just wanted everyone to be aware in case my e-mails started looking like they were WWI (Written While Inebriated). -ram