The Work At Home Mom Project

I’ve been AWOL lately, I know. There are several reasons, many of them related to trying to clean my house instead of sit in front of the computer. But one big reason is that I’m having some laptop related issues. Resulting from my having accidentally, ahem, poured olive oil on my precious macbook.

I’m sure that anyone out there with a laptop who cooks has taken their laptop into the kitchen, opened to the recipe-du-jour. Last week I was making a stir-fry, and my laptop came along for fun. The irony of course is that I’ve made a stir-fry dozens of times with no recipe needed at all; but for some reason I decided that I was going to follow this “how-to” page, which includes a few different sauce variations. So the macbook was on the counter, between the olive oil and the cutting board. On the other side of the olive oil was the stove. I think you can guess what happened.

The right side of my keyboard got hit, the left side was spared. But of course, the most commonly used keys are on the right side — Enter and Delete being favorites of mine. Plus it seems that I hit the SpaceBar with my right hand almost exclusively, I suppose as a side effect of being right handed. That’s probably why enter and delete are over there too, since 90% of the population is right handed like me. Interestingly, a little research on the QWERTY keyboard layout indicates that far more words can be spelt with exclusively the left hand than the right. Of course neither Enter nor Delete would have appeared on original QWERTY keyboards, so perhaps they were put on the right hand side just to balance things out a bit. So now I’m not sure if I should be happy that the left side was spared instead of the reverse. I think I’ll choose not to be happy either way.

Currently I can type, however it is painful. Instead of just sticking down as I would expect from keys that had been covered in coffee or the like, it seems that my keys just don’t register keystrokes unless I hit them slowly and with excessive force. And even then I sometimes have to hit them multiple times. For someone who has been touch typing for 20 years (God, I can’t believe that’s true, man I feel old), it is P-A-I-N-F-U-L.

Forexample,hereis a paragraph wrien asif I could acually touch type again. Doingi with my eyes closedso that I don’t sccumb to the reflex to correterrors. Ugh. Prety nasty, huh?

The internet is a vast repository of resources of course, so I was able to find some fantastic info on how to clean macbook keys after getting the dreaded “coffee virus”. Particularly helpful was the link to a flickr set on cleaning macbook keys after a spill. I spent a good deal of time reading through and laughing at all the different things people managed to spill on their keyboards: Coffee, juice, Coke, white wine, beer, hot cocoa. I didn’t see any other olive oil victims though, perhaps I’m a first. (Although I doubt that, as I’ve discovered in the past, everything you can think of is surely somewhere on the internet — oh, and a quick search proves I’m right.)

Unfortunately, my attempts the other night to clean some of my keys seem to have not been fruitful. They’re just as slow and unresponsive as ever. Maybe I didn’t clean them well enough (entirely possible, since I have great difficulty seeing anything as small as the mechanism that is under the keys and all its nooks and crannies). Or maybe olive oil just doesn’t clean up as well or as easily as those other sticky beverages. But let this be a lesson to all of us — unlike your bike chain, oiling your keyboard does NOT make it run faster or smoother!

Now, time to power down and try cleaning up the space bar one more time… wishmeluck!