Bad Tech Week

Okay, what the hell happened this week?

I come into work on Monday and find that my mouse — brought here from the States died. It would click, but not move. No amount of cleaning the ball or loading the driver would help. It was a wonderful mouse: thumb roll bar, three buttons and a scroll wheel. My carpal-tunnel loved the damned thing.

Even better, I can't find one here. I'll look in other stories over the weekend, but I ran around to four places on Monday at lunch and couldn't find one. I have to make do with something less useful, proving again that The Man is out to get me.

My laptop's keyboard went nuts. The ';/:' key didn't work when I pressed it, but would randomly spray them throughout anything I was typing — usernames, passwords, text — clearly nothing that a few extra semi-colons would affect adversely. I tried the can o' air and prying the key up to clean out the goop. Didn't help. I tried reloading the driver. Didn't help. I checked the other keys and found that the '[/{' key was odd, too. The [ would come out, but the { wouldn't: which implied that it wasn't physical.

Dell tech support was very helpful. They sent instructions on how to replace the keyboard and told me the part number that I need. (And if I was in the States, it would be especially useful to me.)

Dell's parts number was less helpful. Before you could get a quote, you had to open a new sales account and they couldn't use your old sales account to do this. AIGH! Then they couldn't send me a US keyboard, because I was in the UK. Happily, I only needed to be indignant for a little while to get that one sorted.

End result I should have my new keyboard soon. I just hope that it takes care of the damned problem.

Update: Followed the instructions to remove the laptop's internal keyboard, blew out the dust and checked the connections, before reconnecting it — no difference.