Several weeks ago, staring at my 3-year-old Apple keyboard, I experienced a fit of shame: its formerly gleaming white QWERTY keys were stained by the grime hiding in the swirls that decorate my index and middle and forefinger, the digits that depress the keys hundreds of times each day. Worse, the clear plastic cover that looked so stylish when it was new was now marked with the mundane details of my life: cracker crumbs hiding between the keys, flakes of chocolate nestled down deep, a stray Petra hair – all impervious to the corner of a business card, or a Q-tip, or my fingernail.
This is the life of a writer: tap, tap, tap, translating thoughts into words, ideas into sentences, imagination into paragraphs, one letter at a time.
Dreams and dirt, residing together.
Then I came across this wonderful solution, and one afternoon, I gleefully removed all the keys with the blunt edge of a butter knife, stuck my soiled keyboard into the dishwasher and turned the cycle to ON.
When I pulled it out a couple of hours later, all remnants of crumbs and chocolate and greyhound were gone. Some parts were slightly yellowed, due to the fact that I had – ahem – overlooked the instruction to take the keyboard out of the dishwasher BEFORE the dry cycle began.
But it was clean and fresh, and I resolved never again to eat at my desk as I tap-tap-tapped away at the squeaky-clean keys.
My resolve lasted until Monday night, when, with deadlines dancing over my head, I brought a pot of green tea to my desk as I sat down to work. Pouring the tea from the pot into the tea glass – over the keyboard, but of course – a generous glug escaped from the glass and splashed between my pristine keys.
Oh well, I thought. This baby has been through the dishwasher – what harm could a spot of tea possibly cause?
Quite a lot, as it turns out. For the first few minutes after the spill, all was well. Then the “a” stopped working, followed by the “d.” Then the space bar began repeating, leaving huge gaps in my sentences.
I had work to do! Email to answer! Deadlines to make!
For a brief second, I felt nostalgic for pen and paper, but then it occurred to me that cut and paste is much harder with scissors and Elmer’s than it is with Command-P. I’m pretty much dead in the water without my keyboard – my handwriting is almost illegible these days. I yanked the plug out and carried the whole thing to the counter, where I pried off the keys as fast as I could and waved the hair dryer a few inches above it.
Please get better, I urged it. I can't live without you.
But the tea had done its damage. By the next morning, a third of the keys still refused to work, and I felt the cold fingers of panic as I looked at my calendar. Without bothering to shower or select matching clothes, I rushed down to the Apple store and grabbed a flat white box off of the shelf.
“Work to do!” I said to the smiley employee who was devoted to making my Apple experience special. “Have to run!”
My new keyboard is thin and sleek, pretty as can be in its matte silver casing with white, low-profile keys that are soft to the touch. My guess is that this model might not take so kindly to the dishwasher. I’ll have to be more careful this time.
Can old keyboards go into the recycle bin?
