For months now, I’ve had trouble with the O key on my laptop. It’s been happening for so long that I genuinely don’t remember when it first started, but I remember being concerned about going to Brazil with it acting up, which means that we’re talking about November last year at least, if not even earlier. That’s a long time.
The problem is, simply, that the key likes to… well, pop off. It’ll just detach from the keyboard at inopportune times, whether or not I’m actually touching it or not. Pop! It’s gone. Well, that was the first problem, at least; it happened and I googled and got this quick fix and reattached it, and that would happen a few times a week. It was frustrating, sure, but it was fine, really.
Less fine was the second, related, problem. After the key had been popping off for awhile, it stopped working sometimes. Not always, and not often, but every now and then, I’d hit it and… nothing. Well, not nothing nothing; sometimes the key would lift off when I lifted my finger, as if my hands were covered in glue — that was fun — but, despite that, there would be no “o” on the screen.
During all of this, I’d think to myself, I should put the laptop in to get fixed, this can’t go on, and then I’d think to myself, But I need my laptop to work, eh, I’ll do it later. Weekends would roll around and I’d think of it and remember I have the podcast to record, and when I didn’t, I’d simply get distracted, so it stayed like this for months. I didn’t mean for that to be true, but it was, alas.
Cut to two weeks ago, and I’m working at 5am because deadlines, typing away in bed and feeling very determined to just do the job and get it done, and the O key just… stops working entirely. Entirely. I hit it repeatedly, I let the key come off and reattach it, and it just doesn’t work. It’s at that point, at 5 in the morning with a deadline due, that I realize just how often the letter O appears (Spoiler: a lot), and that things can’t go on like this.
Within ten minutes, I’d jury-rigged a workaround and have spent the last week or so working with that and thinking, Maybe I don’t need to get it fixed, after all, because the shutdown of everything makes it hard to get it repaired, sure, but also because I am, at heart, very stupid.