A.J. Walker

writerer

When Gravity Goes Wrong

When Gravity Goes Wrong, or How Gravity Tried to Kill My Computer

Been in isolation since last Friday. Been really busy doing stuff in and around the house and the garden - to be fair I have so much here another month of isolation may be just about enough time to sort it all out. One of these things was a hole in the ceiling of the living room that came about as a result of a water leak before new year. The leak was fixed by a plumber back then, but a hole of a few inches across had remained. I bought a kit a while back but have only decided to spend the time on it when my time was kinda open ended by the requirement to isolate.

So on Tuesday I actually fixed the hole in the ceiling! Bloody hell. Not too difficult I suppose but due to being ceiling and not a wall there was a lot of unwarranted reliance on the glue on the backing of the pad used to cover the hole. The damn thing fell off whilst I was putting the filler on it. The patch proceeded to fall sideways as gravity was seemingly randomly broken at the time. If fell fully six feet horizontally away from where it fell: right bang on top of the keyboard of my open laptop (which was charging on the floor some way away from the sofa). You could not have hit it so perfectly if you had tried.

I raced to rescue the patch and filler and to clean the screen of the laptop - whilst simultaneously attempting to turn the laptop off. Then I had to deal with the keyboard. The easy thing was cleaning the trackpad and the larger edges of the computer. The biggest problem was the keyboard. I had to quickly but as safely as possible attempt to clean the keys from all the filler that seemed to have miraculously splattered across multiple edges of about two thirds of the keys. I had to clean as best as possible the larger area before it had set. Whilst waiting for it to get a bit firmer to scrape off each side of the key one at a time: whilst trying to avoid the dust of the stuff getting into the gubbins of the computer. In short I was worried that the keys would jam up, and/or the filler from the ceiling would end up inside the computer and cause serious damage to it. I mean for fuck's sake it was stressful.

I did as good a job as I could with the laptop. But have left it untouched since Tuesday lunch time when it happened until late Wednesday night. I wasn't sure if it was severely damaged, lightly damaged or had survived. And tonight I turned it on and… so far so good. The buttons are all working and there's not obvious signs of issues with the laptop. I think at the weekend I'll open it up and give the internals a check and clean. Better safe than sorry.

In summary, it is god's way of saying DIY is dangerous and beware gravity: it does not always pull down vertically - annoying bugger.


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