zen-y

Coffee vs. keyboard

For years now, my fascination with the concrete world of technology has been tempered by abstract concepts like fate and luck.

Take this past summer. The easiest way to humble yourself before the Gods of Olympus and Apple Store employees is to drop your iPhone on a tile floor. That’s exactly what I did.

Any hobby, it’s probably the same way. Like to ride horses? Get kicked in the face. Like to watch motorsports? Get your head taken off by an accident-ejected rubber tire. Like to sit outside and watch the rain come down? Get struck by lighting.

It happens all the time.

So it was this morning, when I finished my morning ritual that goes something like this:

1. Eat breakfast and read blogs
2. Make coffee
3. March upstairs and shower while coffee brews
4. Get dressed
5. Make sure hair is Dapper Dan perfect
6. Come downstairs, make lunch for work, and pour cup of coffee
7. Sit at iMac and do a project
8. Leave for work

It was during step seven that the trouble spilled almost literally in my lap.

Getting up to leave and head to work, my top-heavy coffee mug tipped away from me and onto my iMac’s keyboard - as well as the table underneath.

It was one of those moments where you stand in abject horror and try to process the information your senses are giving you.

“What just happened? And why does God hate me so very much?” you might ask yourself. I certainly did.

It’s easiest to blame myself. As I said, these brief reintroductions of the Universe’s perverse sense of humor strike every often enough to keep me humble. The Great Cosmic Egg cracks, and I end up with yoke on my face. When I was conceived, my birth may have threatened some long-dormant Norse thunder god who, from that day forward, cursed my existence with the burden of this kind of luck weighing me down from now to Rapture. Shit happens.

But also, I blame the coffee mug.

From what I’ve seen, there are two types of sealed-lid travel mugs in the world - the wide-bottomed, stable mug:



And the kind of mug that fits conveniently in a automobile’s cup holder:



The one I spilled was the latter variety. Top-heavy, skinny at the bottom, and without a lid. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time.

There has to be a middle ground between the unspillable hockey puck of a mug and the prissy, suburban cup holder model. For spill-happy mutants like myself, the Market has to have created a niche product that protects both me and my machinery. I need it, and - like teen starlets and their cocaine addiction - I’m willing to pay good money for it.

I also need it to fit in a cup holder, however. On my trips into work, when I’m fiddling with the radio and tempting fate on icy roads, I need my mug to sit securely in its place.

Thinking back, it’s happened before. My former work keyboard had to be taken out of my cubicle on a stretcher. My mouse pad? Even worse. There’s now a company policy in place that I can’t have one of those giant paper desktop calendars to scribble appointments on. My employers and I have had The Talk, and expectations have been made clear: the less I have on my desk, the better.



Luckily, I was using an older Apple Pro keyboard, stemming from the late G3/G4 era (above). The keys rest in a see-through plastic shell, meaning that most of the coffee I spilled seaped down to the bottom and left a puddle below the keys. The first thing I did, after the spill, was turn the keyboard upside down and tilt it on its corner so the coffee could drain onto a towel.

There it still sits until it dries completely. After that, the best I can do is plug it in and hope for the best.

I’ve heard of other Mac users tempting fate and running their keyboards through the dishwasher. Some, remarkably, have survived. Other recommend setting your drenched peripherals in flour or rice to absorb the moisture. These, to me, are last-ditch measures - like springing from bed, gun in hand, to “check out” the noise in the living room in the middle of the night. Sure, you have to protect your home, but sometimes a noise is just a noise.

There’s also the brand new iMac keyboard that came with the machine, still sitting in its packaging, as a backup.

“But Dave,” you might be asking yourself, “Why weren’t you using the new iMac keyboard instead of a 10-year-old model?”

My answer would come in the form of a lifted finger, pointing to the first six of seven paragraphs of this post. If you read that, you understand why my sparkling-new keyboard still sits in a box, untouched and uncoffee’d.

The lesson here is that these things happen. Never when we expect it, and surely never when it’s convenient (I was on my way out the door to leave for work). But the Great Magnet never pulls like you want it to.

No, there comes a price for our passions. When tragedy strikes, our heart aches, and in the meantime we learn what our passions mean to us. We care deeply about things, and - in return - those things don’t care anything about us. It’s in the Bible.

The other lesson is that, from now on, I’ll keep the lid on my coffee mug until some genius manufacturer can produce the un-tippale, fit-in-cup-holders coffee mug.

Either that, or an attractive waterproof keyboard. Apple, I’m looking in your direction.