It's a Miracle!!

My life came crashing down around me recently with a large cup of black McDonald's coffee—flavored blueberry coconut—that lightly splashed my Acer laptop computer.

Blueberry-coconut-flavored coffee on my laptop.

A friend in the booth behind me had asked a political question regarding the chances of #NeverHillary vs. #NeverTrump, and as I turned to enlighten him on that point my arm/finger/sleeve combo took the coffee with it.

My big failing was not lifting the laptop.

The spill didn't seem so great on the actual computer, just in front of it. The McDonald's employee came with a mop and paper towels. I mopped up what I saw, but there was a lingering issue that kept me from lifting my laptop. I'd been meaning to swap out my charger/adapter/cord for a new one for quite some time as it was getting fiddly. In fact, I could barely get it fiddled into a position where it might actually transmit power to my laptop. To lift the computer to clean around it properly might have cut the power I'd spent so much fiddling time to get flowing to it.

The coffee had pooled underneath the computer.

It was only as I closed up shop to move on that I noticed the pool of coffee under the laptop. I didn't think too much about it at the time, not understanding the importance of the fan located there. I did start having fritzy cursor behavior—which evolved into no keyboard response by the next day.

The fan had been spraying coffee into the innards of my computer?

Technically-minded friend #1 explained this to me, as well as suggesting such a spray might short out the motherboard. When I asked if that meant getting another computer—which I'd been contemplating for some time, putting it off as long as possible—he said, quite simply: "Just get a USB keyboard."

That sounded expensive.

But where would I get one of those? Would I have to drive into New Hampshire to find one? Spend $65? "More like $9", defusing my computer/life crisis matter-of-factly. Taking this suggestion to technically-minded friend #2, who was working at the local library at the time, he said: "We have them upstairs. Just disconnect one from the public computers." It was only as I was doing just that I realized I had some of these USB keyboards at home.

Attaching a separate keyboard opened up new worlds.

With the separate keyboard attached via USB cable to my laptop I found I could maneuver both more easily—putting the laptop to the side and placing the keyboard where I could best work it. When using the computer in the car, for example, I could put the laptop in the passenger seat next to me, placing the keyboard in my lap. My computing life had actually improved after the blueberry-coconut-flavored coffee catastrophe.

Then the BEEPING started.

The laptop started BEEPING on first start-up. Next try it would boot up properly. Then it started BEEPING every time I tried booting it up—first time, next time, every time. When I described the sound to technically-minded friend #3 he thought it sounded keyboard-related. This plus the continued fritzy cursor suggested keyboard signals as culprit. A YouTube video showed me how to remove the keyboard with tweezers. "Would I really need to use tweezers?" I asked techie friend #2. "Just RIP IT OUT," he replied (with perhaps a little too much relish).

Busticated keyboard remains

So I RIPPED the keyboard out.

When I got the first layer off I smelled the blueberry-coconut-flavored coffee. Keys went flying everywhere, but I got the connector free. "The connector's key here", techie #2 had informed me.

It booted up (with help from Windows repair function).

I cut a piece of cardboard to tape over the gaping space left by the now ripped-out keyboard. This would protect my computer against any further coffee (or other) assaults. I wrote on it with a Sharpie, to remind myself (and others) how often I'm blessed with things turning out better than I thought they might . .

"It's a miracle!!"

Returning from a medical absence, techie friend #4 mildly debunked the fan-pulling-coffee-into-computer-innards theory of techie friend #1, noting his experience with moisture and computers was almost always related to the keyboard. The fan destroying my laptop from below might therefore be described as a "red herring" in this story.