My laptop is dying. I know this because, roughly 18 months after my O key decided to detach itself from the keyboard on a flight to Brazil — the same flight that my phone decided to start off-gassing, as it happens, although I wouldn’t realize that was exactly what was happening for another few months — the S key has decided that it’ll only work roughly fifty percent of the time that I hit it. What’s that old saying…? “One key stops working, shame on me, two keys stop working, Apple’s keyboards are a pile of shit…?” Something like that.
The thing is, I planned on getting a new laptop for myself some time ago; I remember thinking before the end of last year that I would probably do it just after the holidays, when I (foolishly) believed that work would be settling down and I’d be building up something close to savings again. I knew it was only a matter of time before the other keys decided that they should follow the O into something approaching a state of disrepair, if not outright abandonment of the keyboard, and I wanted to get ahead of the curve. I just need to wait until I feel a little bit more solvent, I thought. We know how that worked out.
The thing is, there are so many words that require the S key, and the way I type — a way that more than a few people have pointed out is ludicrous and unnatural, like watching a particularly adept caveman at the keyboard — means that I don’t always realize what letters are missing before I’ve already moved on to the next word. The end result is that everything just takes longer to finish now, because I find myself having to go back and correct things, realizing that I didn’t really type “myhelf” in that last bit because I know there’s no such word, but who knows if and when the S key actually want to do what it’s told.
If things get much worse, maybe I can just handwrite everything and take photos. How bad could that be?