Wine, water and a hairdrier

Last week it was all going swimmingly, and then it was swimming in it.

I'd fired up the computer, sat down with a glass of red wine to try to get up to date with blog posts ... and Aaargh! I'd knocked over the glass, tipping wine over the keyboard and desk. Mostly into the keyboard. Jan rushed in with paper towels, and we mopped up as best we could. I knew that if the wine dried out it would make the keys sticky, so I unplugged the keyboard and held it under the cold tap, sloshing water freely all over it. Drastic, I know, but water should dry out and not cause damage, whereas the wine would be catastrophic. After shaking the drips out I patted it down onto paper towels, and then gave it a fairly gentle hairdrier treatment.

That's done it, I thought, and so I connected it back to the computer, a bit too soon. Uh-oh: the computer made its "I'm not happy" noise. More still to do.

Water had got right inside the keyboard, unsurprisingly, and was visible through the clear plastic case. I needed to take it apart. At work the next day I borrowed the tiny-sized allen key and separated the bottom from the top. But I got scared by the two flimsy ribbon cables joining the two halves, so I didn't dismantle further. I managed to insert a piece of ordinary paper to where I could see there was water trapped between two pieces of plastic, and eventually I judged that it had dried out sufficiently for reassembly and re-connection.

This time there was no unhappy noise, and everything now seems to be working fine. Hooray!

I'm still way behind with my posts, though.