Story time.
Okay, so, I nearly had my new keyboard that I ordered be rendered useless. I managed to fix it just now, using The Tool, which is this absolutely magical gizmo that I keep attached to my giant keychain. It's got pokey bits for every occasion. And tiny scissors. It looks like this:
Funny thing, my cousin actually bought it from a random Walgreens when we were at a convention once. Why? To break the seal on the hotel room TV. The one that they use so you cant plug your own devices in and have to use their terrible services. Used to do that, at every hotel that had such a thing. So we could use whatever console we brought, you see. Though, they used to be simpler, now they are enormous blocky masses that cant be removed. Anyway, that thing has been on my chain ever since. I will say, I'm glad I'm up to date on my tetanus shot. My somewhat recent blood-tastic hand injury involved me getting stabbed by this slightly rusted thing (I was trying to open a pack of cards. I slipped. Got me right in the center of the tip of my index finger. With a blunt piece. Deep. This hurt exactly as much as it sounds like. What a long string of expletives that was...).
Anyway, fast forward to today. See, I have this laptop that I thought was broken. Screen got cracked up real bad! But I had the very abrupt realization that, hey, maybe it might be possible to replace the screen. So I figure, okay. Let's test it and see if the rest of the machine still works. Connect it to the big screen here, and connect this keyboard to it (because the laptop has to sit on the floor due to my weird desk setup... look it makes sense when you see it. The laptop isnt meant to be used here). And then test it out.
That was the plan, anyway. Didnt go like that. I pull the keyboard's USB cable out of my main PC. I wanted to show a picture of the weirdness here, but my phone's central function is "runs out of power if you look at it too hard", so I cant take a picture of it because it died after taking the other two pics. The best way to describe it is that it's this four pronged weird thing. There's the main cable that comes directly out of the keyboard, and it goes some length and then there's this blocky bit. From there, comes four shorter cables. One of them is the "actually does something" USB cable. That's the one that actually gets plugged in. #2 is the "doesnt seem to do anything at all" other USB cable. The other two are, as best I can tell, audio cables. I have no idea what any of those do. They dont need to be connected.
The problem here... and what I didnt realize until too late... is that the thing is much heavier than a normal cable because of all those extra bits. So, it weighs downward pretty hard on whatever port it is plugged into. When I pulled it out, I go to then plug it into the laptop... and it doesnt fit. Try a different port, doesnt fit. Well let's plug it back into the PC and see if I can search the net, maybe I can find an answer to- uhhh, it doesnt fit in these ports either. What? Yeah. That weight... which had been there for a LONG time (my previous big keyboard was the same model as this one, and it had been dragging that port down for months), and yeah, the port it is usually plugged into came apart. And the part that popped out got wedged into the USB cable real bad. It took like 45 minutes of arguing with it, but I finally managed to pry this out of it:
That's what had gotten wedged in there. Pried out with the tiniest of the pokey things on The Tool. I hadnt though that would work, it took a LOT of prying to do. Thought for sure the whole keyboard had just been ruined. Then it finally came out. Examine the metal bit at the end of the USB cable itself carefully, seems to be undamaged. Of course, the USB port that this thing was ripped out of does not work fine.
Just... ridiculous. All that because I hadnt realized that it was pulling it down. NOW I know, so the cable mass is being held up by my art cart so it cant weigh down on any other ports... I'll have to figure out a way to do that without the cart.
And that's today's ridiculous tech disaster. I tell ya, tech in general can be very frustrating at times. It's always something. Ya know what this reminds me of? The old computer mice that werent optical, the ones that had the ball and rollers inside. I remember having to clean those out all the time, usually using my car key to do it. Though, that was way easier than fixing this was.
I would not have the patience necessary to fix stuff professionally. Heck I barely have the patience to fix just this one little thing. Anyone who can do that for a living, I salute you.
If any of you guys have any goofy tech stories to share, I'd love to hear them.
Okay, so, I nearly had my new keyboard that I ordered be rendered useless. I managed to fix it just now, using The Tool, which is this absolutely magical gizmo that I keep attached to my giant keychain. It's got pokey bits for every occasion. And tiny scissors. It looks like this:
Funny thing, my cousin actually bought it from a random Walgreens when we were at a convention once. Why? To break the seal on the hotel room TV. The one that they use so you cant plug your own devices in and have to use their terrible services. Used to do that, at every hotel that had such a thing. So we could use whatever console we brought, you see. Though, they used to be simpler, now they are enormous blocky masses that cant be removed. Anyway, that thing has been on my chain ever since. I will say, I'm glad I'm up to date on my tetanus shot. My somewhat recent blood-tastic hand injury involved me getting stabbed by this slightly rusted thing (I was trying to open a pack of cards. I slipped. Got me right in the center of the tip of my index finger. With a blunt piece. Deep. This hurt exactly as much as it sounds like. What a long string of expletives that was...).
Anyway, fast forward to today. See, I have this laptop that I thought was broken. Screen got cracked up real bad! But I had the very abrupt realization that, hey, maybe it might be possible to replace the screen. So I figure, okay. Let's test it and see if the rest of the machine still works. Connect it to the big screen here, and connect this keyboard to it (because the laptop has to sit on the floor due to my weird desk setup... look it makes sense when you see it. The laptop isnt meant to be used here). And then test it out.
That was the plan, anyway. Didnt go like that. I pull the keyboard's USB cable out of my main PC. I wanted to show a picture of the weirdness here, but my phone's central function is "runs out of power if you look at it too hard", so I cant take a picture of it because it died after taking the other two pics. The best way to describe it is that it's this four pronged weird thing. There's the main cable that comes directly out of the keyboard, and it goes some length and then there's this blocky bit. From there, comes four shorter cables. One of them is the "actually does something" USB cable. That's the one that actually gets plugged in. #2 is the "doesnt seem to do anything at all" other USB cable. The other two are, as best I can tell, audio cables. I have no idea what any of those do. They dont need to be connected.
The problem here... and what I didnt realize until too late... is that the thing is much heavier than a normal cable because of all those extra bits. So, it weighs downward pretty hard on whatever port it is plugged into. When I pulled it out, I go to then plug it into the laptop... and it doesnt fit. Try a different port, doesnt fit. Well let's plug it back into the PC and see if I can search the net, maybe I can find an answer to- uhhh, it doesnt fit in these ports either. What? Yeah. That weight... which had been there for a LONG time (my previous big keyboard was the same model as this one, and it had been dragging that port down for months), and yeah, the port it is usually plugged into came apart. And the part that popped out got wedged into the USB cable real bad. It took like 45 minutes of arguing with it, but I finally managed to pry this out of it:
That's what had gotten wedged in there. Pried out with the tiniest of the pokey things on The Tool. I hadnt though that would work, it took a LOT of prying to do. Thought for sure the whole keyboard had just been ruined. Then it finally came out. Examine the metal bit at the end of the USB cable itself carefully, seems to be undamaged. Of course, the USB port that this thing was ripped out of does not work fine.
Just... ridiculous. All that because I hadnt realized that it was pulling it down. NOW I know, so the cable mass is being held up by my art cart so it cant weigh down on any other ports... I'll have to figure out a way to do that without the cart.
And that's today's ridiculous tech disaster. I tell ya, tech in general can be very frustrating at times. It's always something. Ya know what this reminds me of? The old computer mice that werent optical, the ones that had the ball and rollers inside. I remember having to clean those out all the time, usually using my car key to do it. Though, that was way easier than fixing this was.
I would not have the patience necessary to fix stuff professionally. Heck I barely have the patience to fix just this one little thing. Anyone who can do that for a living, I salute you.
If any of you guys have any goofy tech stories to share, I'd love to hear them.
