Ask HN: What is the worst you poured over your keyboard? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the worst you poured over your keyboard?

5 pointstomw180826 comments

Really. Want some good mood for your almost-weekend-Friday?

Facebook mode on: I just poured my breakfast egg over my keyboard, and it sucks.

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.

Think about that today, when something goes wrong. 1st Its Friday. 2nd: someone else out there has now egg in his keyboard.

Have a great end of the week everyone.

This was probably the most useless thing you are going to read today :D

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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.

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

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

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

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

OMG. I hope it was just Gordons.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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

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 :/

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Deliberately: Thinner

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

Wanted a lower-profile keyboard?

Instant Glue and my keyboard was no more since then

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