To say last night was eventful would probably be the understatement of the year.
I was sat on the sofa, sorting through about 10 years worth of backup cdrs, cdrs with anti virus and spyware solutions that I’d done to take round to people’s houses to sort their pc’s (and never labelled) and lots of loose original PC games. Whilst not exactly the most glamorous of jobs I could have been doing, it was a necessity and something that only I can do.
Sue was cooking tea, we had steak slice (pastry for the first time in three weeks ftw!), potato waffles (they’re waffly versatile) and beans (see the advert said they went with beans).
She’d just brought tea up at about 6:30, was pouring me out some coke and turned around to go back to the other sofa and pour herself some coke when she fell over. Proper big style fall, not a stumble. She went straight down and almost into the coffee table. No idea what happened. Her toe was bleeding quite badly and her arm hurt. Other than that she’s fine (thank god).
Problem being, she had most of a 2l bottle of Coke Zero in her hand and her laptop was sat in front of her sofa.
The keyboard was covered, the laptop was still on. I flew over there, killed the power, unplugged everything (we’re still trying to find the USB mouse dongle), pulled the battery and got the thing on the floor. There must have been around half a pint of coke in there. It being a HP, getting the keyboard out didn’t seem like the easiest thing to do. I tried to get most of the bezel off from around the top but the screws weren’t having it. Found out the top bezel screws were in the battery compartment. Eventually got them out and got the keyboard out.
There were one or two small puddles of coke below the keyboard, I mopped these up. The mobo seemed to be dry.
Found a new keyboard on ebay at £12.50 and bought it just in case.
Looked at the keyboard and the underside was covered in sticky back plastic. There were mass puddles of coke under there. Took the keyboard downstairs and ran it under the cold tap, couldn’t shift the stuff from the underside so had to break the stuff and pull it off. Gave it a really good clean, shook as much water out as I could. Put the heating on and then put the keyboard on the radiator. Flipped it every 5-10 mins and after 30 mins it was bone dry.
Put the laptop back together, ran some tests, tested the keyboard. Everything seems okay.
It probably helped being Coke Zero – no sugar, no sticky. Still liquidy which is bad for laptops.
Phew.
That was probably the scariest moment I’ve ever had (Sue, not the laptop silly). If anything had happened to her I’m not sure what I would have done.
This morning she tells me that she hadn’t had anything to eat yesterday and she’d last eaten at about 1am at work. Giving her around 17 hours of non-foodage. Couple that with not sleeping yesterday morning very well and she probably fainted from exhaustion and lack of energy.
Eek.
So yeah, last night wasn’t fun. I’m just glad Sue is okay. I’m also glad the laptop is okay because that would have cost me money to fix.
I hope tonight is nice and quiet and we can just both chill out.
