I Miss You. Come Back.

I hate my keyboard. Until recently, I had a really great keyboard that even had a special button you could push to bring up the computer calculator without having to go to "Start" and scrolling through all that mess because I'm too lazy to work out my checkbook on paper. There were lots of other fancy buttons that did stuff on my old keyboard, but I hadn't had a chance to figure them out yet. I was still honeymooning with the calculator key.

So.

On my birthday, MY BIRTHDAY, I'm balancing out my checkbook and clearing off the (top layer of) debris on my desk. I'm feeding stuff into shredder and feeling good because (a) my shredder is a stripper and not a cross cutter and therefore I can recycle my shreds and (b) Discover, Geico, Clearwire and some sleazy mortgage company won't be getting any love from me. Then I hear a terribly grindy noise. Bad. Things stop working. Now let me preface this by saying that my shredder is under my desk in the dark. It's a cat-hair-lined cave under there, and no one goes there unless something computer-related goes terribly, noisily wrong. And occasionally to dump out the recycling bin which also lurks under there. What I'm saying is, it's dark. And bad things happen in the dark.

I shredded the cable from my keyboard to my computer.

I sat there, dumbfounded, one shredded wirey end of cord in each hand. I poked at the keys on my keyboard thinking perhaps it'd developed some sort of psychic ability and didn't actually need this cable. I considered trying to rejoin the wires like I was a surgeon and my keyboard was a drunken farmer who'd just stuck his hand in the combine. Or, alternatively, some kind of farm machinery that could take off a limb; I don't know a lot about farming. I put the keyboard on ice and wondered what to do.

Hey, that keyboard had sentimental value: Toasty bought it for me. It made the perfect clicky sounds and required exactly the right pressure to register a keystroke. It seemed to understand what I meant, even when I couldn't type the words with my fat manatee fingers. I miss it.

This keyboard, this fourteen dollar craptastic keyboard, is to REAL keyboards what Romper Room fat plastic keys are to the things that start your Jaguar. This is not a great comparison, I know. I blame the crapboard. It misses letters all the time. You have to strike the keys hard enough to cause sparks, and then you get six gggggg's or nnnnnn's in a row. This isn't just a no-frills keyboard, it's the keyboard the gods send you when you've been so foolish as to shred your last one. This one's an "Ativa." That's not even a word. It was probably supposed to be a word like "Activate," only most of the letters didn't register.

I hate this keyboard.

I'd tell you about my temp job, but I really hate this keyboard.