neer rains but it pours

[denise]

email i just sent sarah:

"the key on my keyboard in between the c and the b has just broken, so we hae an appointment at 7:35pm at the annapolis apple store. loe, me."

for some reason, this is making me giggle a lot. maybe while i'm there i'll hae them replace all of the keycaps that hae had the finish eaten away by my acidic skin! you can tell what side of the keyboard i use the shift key and space bar on, that's for sure. top fie keys used, by amount of keyeaten away: dl,.s -- and the left shift key. the nmase and left cloer and option keys are pretty bad, too.

(My skin also eats the laptop casing next to the trackpad on the right and under the keycaps on the left. It's ery easy to find my laptop in a pile of Macbooks, that's for sure.)

Comments

[hkellick]

Acidic skin?

Some superpower...

[jenrose]

hahhaa... my first thought was, "Go find that letter on the character map and then copy paste, it's just ctrl c... ctrl... oh... wait..."

[denise]

I know! Couldn't it have been any other key?

[astridv]

You could replace the v with the b, then eberything will just sound like you habe a stuffed nose.

[ignaz]

Or with the "w," and then everything will sound like you're doing an impression of Pavel Chekov!

[jd]

Or have a Spanish accent.

[jadey]

The last time I brought my laptop in to get its screen fixed (under warranty, mind you!), I asked if anything could be done about the damage to the buttons and track pad from *my* acid skin... and they called it normal wear-and-tear! I suppose it's good to know that my crazy mutant powers of plastic melting are "normal"...

[akatonbo]

I replaced my keyboard (from 1996!) sometime after moving here, so within the last 3 years... already my D key is totally blank, S C L and N are mostly bare, A F and M have large chunks missing, and R F and K have noticeable pieces gone. Just the letters, though, not any real physical damage to the keys themselves. Also, it is obvious that my shift key of choice is the one on the right, which still has half an up arrow on it but no actual 'Shift'.

[jenrose]

We always joke that the lack of visible letters on my keyboard is a primitive security system vs. people who hunt and peck.

[sporky_rat]

Love your Bester icon. Mm, Bester.

[kaki]

Dying keys are not fun. On my old keyboard, at some point all number keys except 5 and 6 broke. Which included the loss of several special characters.

Fortunately my letters don't tend to dissolve. But the "texture" is kinda ... rubbing off on some keys, especially the left shift and the right half of the space key, and some letters. Which is kinda eww.

[elmyra]

Friend of a friend once spilled orange juice over the lower half of his keyboard. The resulting email was:

"keyoardfukedrigsrewdrier"

Cracks me up every time I think of it.

[celestinenox]

::nearly chokes::

That just cracked me up reading it! Good thing I'm alone in the office today!

[reginagiraffe]

Loe is you!

[melannen]

That's funny! D, L, and S are also the almost-eaten-through keys on mine - only I use a d-orak keymap, so that's actually e, o, and n. It must have as much to do with resting position as actual typing use.

[reya_starck]

Assuming your laptop has one, I'd say: "Psst! On-Screen Keyboard!"

If it hasn't got one, I didn't say anything ;)

[alierak]

Och! Aye, that be a fair mess, when ye hae not the keys to be expressin' yer true feelin's fer a lass.

*ahem* Anyway, kareila had a laptop where her palms wore off the finish around the trackpad. Best thing to keep it from worsening turned out to be clear fingernail polish...

[sine_nomine]

Oh good! I'm not the only one who read that as Scots Gaelic!

[starwatcher]

.
Years ago, I read that someone with a mild metal allergy painted the inside of a ring with clear nail polish so that she could wear it. For some reason, it stuck in my memory, and my last computer showed me my 'most-wear' keys. I've treated them with the clear nail polish, and the wear has slowed down considerably. (Not that mine was ever close to what yours sounds like.)

Anyway, maybe if you clean the keyboard with an acid-neutralizer, then coat the tops of keys in clear nail polish, maybe you'll be able to go longer between fixes.
.

[ryan]

I might try that if I ever replace my G15. The G15 has backlit keys, and the paint seems very easy to rub off, so most of my keys are just blue splotches when the backlight is on.

[iamshadow]

Reading this post, I've got a vaguely Scottish accent in my head. It just looks a bit dialect! (Hae is actually Scots for have, so it's not even a spelling error.)

[jenrose]

Glad I'm not the only one....lol

[abyssinia]

It's so not just your skin. My poor PowerBook looks like a meteor shower landed to the right of the trackpad. Seriously, eating ALUMINUM

Oddly, the keys are fine...

[denise]

I think it's that I rest my hands on the keys even when I'm not typing. The pitted case is also in different spots, too, which indicates that my usual positioning when I'm reading something on-screen is for my right hand to be positioned lower, so the thumb can tap the touchpad or the middle finger can hit the space bar while the first two fingers can use the mouse gestures if necessary, while the left hand is positioned so the thumb can hit either the spacebar or the clover key + C, V, or W as necessary.

It's very fasinating to see that apparently my hand positioning is so consistent!

[longmagpieroads]

Hee.

I've sent emails like that before. :-D So you'll be in my neck of the woods tonight? Awesome.

[sara]

I have had a lot of Mac keyboard problems myself, so I do sympathize.

This last time, I bought a silicone thing that fits over the keyboard -- the thing is stamped "iSkin.com" -- and although it took a while to get used to the different keyboard feel, and the thing has a tendency to slide off if I'm writing while lying down, I haven't lost any keys (or had anyone pour a sippy cup full of milk into my keyboard) since installing.

[maschalismos]

Yeah, I did this and bought a stick on cover for the area around the trackpad when I got my current macbook pro because I KNOW what my skin does to metal mac laptops. I also know those two things are the ONLY reasons why my laptop doesn't look like someone decided to do an acid etching art installation on it.

[denise]

I've thought about that, but the few times I've tried one, it messed with my tactile feedback so badly that I couldn't get used to it. I am Very Picky about that shit ...

[sara]

It took a couple of weeks before I was used to it, and now it feels very rattley without (I was really grouchy about it! But the little weasels poured milk in my laptop while I was in the shower! It cost $250 to fix!)

[denise]

I would've just started tying the weasels down when showering. ;)

[sara]

I had A Few Choice Words, let's just put it that way.

("So help me God if I EVER catch either of you putting your HANDS on my COMPUTER again while I am IN THE SHOWER you will NOT LIKE what will happen next! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?")

[montanaharper]

I'd only had my brand-new keyboard for a month when the letters started to have obvious wear. Not a problem for me—I'm a touch typist—unless I'm trying to, say, type with one hand while eating a sandwich with the other, but everyone else in my house whines about it.

After about a year of use, it's easier to say what's left on the keys of my ergo PC keyboard than what's missing: all the "function" and number keys are fine, as is backspace, capslock, Q, left shift, Z, left and right "windows" keys, Y, J, most of U, most of I, [, ], \, comma, period, /, right ctrl, right alt, and the "menu" key. The number pad is fine, as are all the navigation keys (insert, delete, home, page up, etc.) except the down arrow, which is totally gone.

See?



(Please to be excusing the dust all over the keyboard; I'm moving and have stirred up approximately half a metric ton of dust in the process. Ugh.)

[denise]

Oh yeah, if I have some kind of keyboard where the keycaps are just decals, they're gone nearly immediately. The MacBook Pro designers seemed to recognize this as a problem, so they made keys where the letter was actually a recessed carving into the key itself, covered with a film to protect it from wearing off.... so of course my skin ate the protective film and proceeded to keep etching away the key. So there's like, this giant crater on the keycaps.

It's kinda funny. :)

[xenacryst]

Somehow I find that the messages people create when a letter is missing from the keyboard to be truly entertaining. This probably says some disturbing things about me.

[swordage]

I destroy keyboards with my touch, too! My last keyboard alarmed my friends when we had LAN parties. I always thought it was totally normal.

[msilverstar]

I wore out TWO iBook keyboards that way, they just sent me new keyboards and I put them in (much harder with MacBooks).

I was making such a mess of the area next to the trackpad that I bought one of those protective stick-on covers.

But the trackpad is biting the dust itself, so I took off the layer and it looks slightly less like it's my fault...

[pauamma]

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/terminak.html

[av8rmike]

I thought your keyboard looked strange, but I didn't take a close look at it. I had just assumed it was some kind of stick-on substance to help with your touch-typing, not the surface wearing off!

[stultiloquentia]

Ha, same way you could grab a group of people, throw all their denim in a pile, and have them find their own again by patterns of rippage.

(I kill my clothes like you kill your keyboards. You know how in stories people are always going on about the sensual pleasures of really old, worn-soft pairs of jeans? Mine never get there. I eat through them first. (If I make the mistake of bringing them with me to Nova Scotia at Christmas, my mother tries to preserve their longevity by swiping them and sewing heart-shaped patches all over my knees and ass. Sometimes even before they've ripped...))

[princess]

I do that too, although not to the same degree. I've completely wrecked the finish on the trackpad, and a few of my keys are missing letters...they're almost all missing texture.

[dunvi]

I could never figure out how people got their keyboards to disintegrate that way. When I had all-inclusive techy-stuff on hand (paid by the school, too, so free!) I would have to resort to drastic measures to get my keyboard replaced when the squishies underneath the caps started to screw up - usually buy pulling off two or three of them.

Meanwhile, I'm totally intrigued by the people who say they use mostly left shift and those who say they use mostly right. I'm a left shifter all the way, personally.