How I Fixed My Keyboard
my first computer repair experience
 
 
    Over Christmas (1999) I got some kind of virus (not my computer, Me!).  I was really sick so I was drinking some tea (the only time I drink tea is when I'm sick).  My hand was still in a cast at that time, so I was using my left hand to hold this cup of tea that was filled almost completely to the top.  Of all the dumb luck, I sneezed.  My hand shook and the tea spilled all over the left side of my keyboard. AHH!!!

    I was chatting with a good friend of mine on icq at the time, and I told him what I had done.  I grabbed some paper towels and stuck the edges of it in the cracks of all my key's to dry it out before it got sticky.  Everything seemed to be okay after I did that, except all of a sudden, every message I typed (ICQ) had about 20 lowercase Ds in it.  So.....   I told the guy I had to go, and I was just about to shut down my computer when I thought, ya know, Dad's gonna come home in a few hours and he's gonna be VERY ticked when he sees what happened.  So I started trying to think of what I was going to tell him.  Then I thought, why bother making up some story?  Why not just try to fix it?  What's the worst that could happen?  If I could fix it, I could tell dad what happened and he'd be proud that I fixed it myself instead of calling him.  If it didn't work, and I screwed it up even worse, I'd just tell him that my right hand was broken, and I was sick so he's not allowed to yell at me.

    So I unplugged it, pulled it on the dining room table, and flipped it over... There were a bunch of little screws, and I realized I needed a screwdriver. So I went upstairs to get the little one that I made in Shop back in 8th grade.. but it was too big. So I went down to my dad's workshop in the basement and found a tiny little one and brought it back upstairs. It fit perfectly so I took out all the little screws (about 15). Then I took off the bottom part and, for the first time, saw the inside of my keyboard!  It looked pretty cool. There was a bunch of little rubber sucker-lookin' thingies with a plastic sheet type thing on top of them... so I took the plastic sheet off, and sure enough, right where the 'd' would be there was sticky tea on the plastic  sheet thing. So I wiped it off... Then I found more tea on the d's sucker-lookin' thingy, so I wiped that off too. Then I screwed in the four corner screws and plugged it back in to test it and........
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IT WORKED!!!!!!!
So I unplugged it, screwed in the rest of the screws, and then plugged it back in... so everything's ok now.

And that's how I fixed my keyboard.  :-)
 

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