That we’ve now made it a full year into official, all-across-the-country (if not the world, but let’s keep things in some kind of sensible perspective) COVID-inspired lockdown is the kind of thing that has inspired multiple threads of journalistic coverage over the past week or so: retrospectives of where we were one year ago, oral histories of whatever particular industry you want to think of about just how their specific slice of the world has been impacted by what’s happened in the past 52 weeks, and so on. As with every notable anniversary of anything, there’s been a substantial amount of reflection happening and being shared across media.
Which means that it’s time to take note that, as of writing, we are somewhere like 54 weeks since I decided that I should really take my laptop into a repair shop to take care of the fact that the “O” key is broken, and has a tendency to come off when hit, or else not work at all, and therefore force me to type more slowly and deliberately — or else have to retype certain words after the fact. (It doesn’t escape my notice that the last sentence had a fair amount of “O”s in it; does that count as irony?)
Weirdly, I remember this so clearly because I more or less made the decision to deal with the problem — which had actually started when I was on the plane to Brazil, months earlier — just before lockdown started, but I procrastinated as is my tendency, and suddenly, the word was given. Specifically, I remember thinking innocently, fine, I’ll just put it into the shop when lockdown is over, it’s probably only going to be a few weeks and I can put up with it until that’s done.
Ah, if only I knew then what I know now…!
Of course, what I know now is that I can be remarkably patient with typing if I need to be, and that somehow I can survive without a fully working keyboard longer than I’d expected. Admittedly, I did almost buy an entirely new laptop as a solution at one point last year, but at least I knew enough to know that was an overreaction at the time…