The Demon of Breakage--Once More, With Feeling

[cathyr19355]

Remember the keyboard on Eric's laptop? The one that popped the plastic spring ring things on the down arrow key?

We finally took it to a repair shop across the street from my office. They kept warning me, "we may have to replace the entire keyboard." Eric said he wasn't surprised, so I carried on.

They called me back yesterday. $82 for a new keyboard, $99 for labor. How long it will take will depend on how fast they can get the new keyboard from the supplier. Arrgh.

On the bright side, the overhead light in Eric's office is finally fixed. The third electrician we called finally showed up. He diagnosed a place on the wiring where the insulation burned off and caused a short. This is fortunate because if it hadn't shorted out the light, it probably would have caused an electrical fire. He charged us $145 for the repair. A heck of a lot cheaper than replacing the house, I say. :-)

Comments

[mirell.livejournal.com]

I would personally opt for just buying a new keyboard from IBM, and screw the labor costs. IBM nicely had the manual on how to unscrew the old keyboard, and put a new one in. Even marks the screws necessary on the bottom!

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

You don't understand. If we did that, Eric would have to install the new keyboard, and he's still leery of actually dealing with hardware. He's kind of phobic about it.

[mirell.livejournal.com]

Didn't Rob say he was too used to working on old mainframes and the like, with $32K cards that you could easily break, or something of the sort? ^.-

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

Yes he did, and Eric is inclined to this theory himself.

[landley.livejournal.com]

Darn it, we were making progress. He had compressed air cans and was experiencing their niftiness for himself. He _installed_a_sound_card. I'm guessing he's backsliding now that I'm not there?

Rob

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Are you and I gonna have to tag-team Eric until he gets comfortable with hardware?

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

If you guys want to do that, you're going to have to move to Pennsylvania... and somehow I just don't see that happening any time soon.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Not me, certainly.

Maybe we can do an intensive treatment, a la A Clockwork Orange.

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

To the contrary. In fact, the niftiness of compressed air cans plays a role in this saga.

What originally happened was that the down arrow key on the laptop started to stick. So Eric hauled out the compressed air can and popped off the keycap to blow the cat hair and accumulated crud out. Unfortunately, the plastic spring ring things came out while he was doing that and... you know the rest. :-(

[landley.livejournal.com]

So this would be a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, then? :)

Some keyboards are really easy to put back together once you've popped a key off, and some are a serious pain. My thinkpads were always on the easy end, but I didn't get the expensive high-end ones...

Rob

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

Nah, knowledge has little to do with it. (Eric understands how to reassemble the key, but doesn't have the dexterity to do so.)

I personally think it's just bad luck. By chance, I had a keycap pop off my new laptop, but nothing else came loose, and I was able to pop the keycap back on without incident. All of the full-size keyboards I've ever seen have had easy-to-reassemble keys. But this keyboard--even after I saw where all the pieces were supposed to go, I couldn't figure out how to get them there, and I kept assembling the plastic interlocking rings things backward (they were *not* shaped in such as way as to make that impossible, unfortunately).

On second thought, strike my original statement; it was a combination of bad luck and less than optimal keyboard design....