
Ask HN: What is the worst you poured over your keyboard? - tomw1808
Really. Want some good mood for your almost-weekend-Friday?<p>Facebook mode on: I just poured my breakfast egg over my keyboard, and it sucks.<p>Because first, I cannot get that egg-yolk out, but second, it reminded me how much more it sucked when that colleague poured orange juice all over my laptop few year ago. The laptop still works I think, but with an external keyboard only. And the smell is just as amazing as the whole experience.<p>Think about that today, when something goes wrong. 1st Its Friday. 2nd: someone else out there has now egg in his keyboard.<p>Have a great end of the week everyone.<p>This was probably the most useless thing you are going to read today :D
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jasonkester
There is a certain type of front-end work that's really hard on keyboards, I
find. CSS nudging where the thing wants to either stick in place or jump at
least 10 pixels, but no amount of tweaking, negative margins or padding will
do the trick, all to fit a silly design mandated by a bad freelance client for
a project you've already checked out on.

I used to get these odd fist-shaped dents around the JKL area when doing stuff
like that. I've mentioned them to the Dell on-site guy when replacing them
under warranty, but he didn't have a good explanation either.

They happen a lot less often now that I'm working on my own projects.

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dennybritz
Soylent. Laptop was unrepairable after that. Needless to say, I quit Soylent.

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marcofiset
You do realize that this has nothing to do with Soylent, right?

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craftkiller
We'd need more information. Maybe his lack of coordination was a result of the
radical sudden change in his diet.

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microman
Gin. Like people, laptops also behave stupidly after drinking gin.

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tomw1808
OMG. I hope it was just Gordons.

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scrumper
A flight attendant dumped an entire screwdriver on my 2 day old macbook pro at
the start of an 8 hour flight. Entirely accidental, but a pretty rare mistake
for BA cabin crew to make. We got towels on it immediately and aside from a
few sticky keys around the top left it worked pretty well for the flight and
continues to be fine 4 years later. I took it as a sign that I shouldn't be
drinking vodka at 7am and ordered a cup of tea to replace it.

~~~
rockerBOO
Took me a second to realize that actual screwdrivers don't cause sticky keys.

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AnimalMuppet
Was the egg raw, or cooked? That makes a great deal of difference in how I
think about how awful your experience was.

Not a keyboard, but: Many years ago, I worked for a company that was using
microwaves on living tissue. They used salt water (saline solution) to
simulate blood - it has a similar thermal reaction to microwaves. We had this
VMEbus rack with various circuit boards in it. The top card in the rack was
the graphics cards. And we had this VMEbus rack without the top on in the lab,
so we could get oscilloscope probes onto the circuit boards...

I happened to be looking at the monitor when the tub of salt water got dumped
onto the graphics card. I suspect it looked something like an acid trip (don't
have any actual experience to go by).

They turned off the power, rinsed the graphics card with distilled water, then
dried it in an oven at about 150 F to dry it out thoroughly. It worked after
that.

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tomw1808
I've seen whole data centers still working completely flooded with water.
Crazy.

The egg was a soft cooked one. Nice and yellowish egg yolk running between the
keys.

Btw: The keyboard works, cleaned it thoroughly with just water and tissues.
Took a while, but its worth it.

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kek918
Coca-Cola, except it missed my keyboard and went straight into the desktop
computer cabinet. The cabinet door was open at the time. Amazingly it missed
all of the components and the coke gathered at the bottom.

On another occasion I spilled a whole cup of coffee over my keyboard though.
Some buttons stopped working. I _would_ open it and wash the circuit board,
but it presented a good excuse to get a new keyboard instead :)

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atmosx
[http://www.qdb.us/29152](http://www.qdb.us/29152) <\-- I don't know why, I
remember spreading my coke all around the desktop reading this... I totally
spit my coke laughing/choking when I got to the point where the guy spit his
lemonade.

It was somewhere between 2001-2003. I still find it funny, can't tell why.

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trm42
I have had two pouring incidents in the last ~20 years or so. They both
happened within a week and in both times it was tea. Still laughing,
especially for the second time ;D

At the time I was a student so probably had really, really bad sleep-
deprivation (=really jumpy or something) from too much of anime and hobby
coding. Oh those were the times :D

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seekingcharlie
I poured a whole cup of tea. The whole thing.

It stopped working immediately, so I just shut it off, but left it to dry
upside-down (something I read online that would apparently help).

I went and bought a new laptop right away, knowing that I wouldn't be able to
work otherwise.

3 days later, I turned the tea-tainted laptop on & it worked fine.

Now I lug two laptops around with me :/

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EnderMB
I feel your pain. The same thing happened to me about two months ago, but
sadly my laptop never recovered. When the tea hit the laptop there was a load
of buzzing, and that was the last of that laptop...

Luckily, the hard drive survived, so I moved my files over to a new machine.

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arnold_palmur
I "strained" a big red solo cup filled to the brim with iced tea and crushed
ice all over the keyboard (seeping out through the other side onto my desk)
with the ice remaining on top of the keys like I was sifting gold. Somehow
nothing broke and the keys were a bit sticky for a day, but that's it.

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wuschel
A 300 ml mixture of sugars, proteins, water and salts: COFFEE.

Disassembled the entire notebook into small parts, washed it with destilled
water, isopropanol, destilled water, let it dry for a week or so, re-assembled
it (don't forget to make pictures).. et voila, it worked!

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rahimnathwani
When I was a kid, I spilled an entire glass of milk into my Acorn Electron. I
guess the electronics were protected somehow from they keyboard above, as I
don't recall any ill effects. It didn't even turn off.

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NameNickHN
Vanilla ice cream, real strawberries and strawberry syrup on a keyboard.
Wasn't the same afterwards even though turned it inside out and I cleaned it.

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ddorian43
Was eating milk and cookies and put the bowl on top of the monitor (big old
crt monitors) for a moment. The bowl leaked and fried the monitor.

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undersuit
Ranch dressing all over my Kindle. I've been able to remove the most of it
from the keyboard with plastic collar stays.

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wanghq
I am sure if you post this on reddit, you will get some different answers
(sometimes, more creative).

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pvaldes
Deliberately: Thinner

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tomw1808
Thinner? ... Deliberately? ... but why?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Wanted a lower-profile keyboard?

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Rahvil
Instant Glue and my keyboard was no more since then

