DON'T PANIC!!!

So around the middle of the day, The Boss has a PANIC.

She yelps aloud : "MY COMPUTER'S GONE MAD!"

I am thinking, I don't fucking blame it.

She squawks : "IT'S GONE CRAZY!"

I am thinking, ha ha.

She cries : "HELP?!??" so desperately that I am moved to lower my metal weapons and go over to investigate.

Yes, it has indeed gone mental. She moves the mouse slightly, and windows ping open and shut all over the show. Interesting. My first thought is that she is once again leaning on the keyboard, but she doesn't seem to be; I take the controls and quickly come to the conclusion that something in the keyboard has gone awry. A look at said keyboard confirms my suspicions. Basically, some keys appear to be knackered. So the machine is getting endless "returns" and "escapes" or something. If you've ever accidentally leant on your keyboard, you know what I mean.

Here's me : "Your keyboard is fucked."

The Boss : "What? No! How??!"

Here's me : "As in, some of the keys are damaged. The springs or whatever have gone. That's all. You need a new keyboard."

The Boss suffers from this kind of terror about these things.

"HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED?!??"

I stroke my little beard pseudo-thoughtfully and then calmly say :

"Probably.. at a guess, just a guess now... when you were beating the living shite out of it yesterday."

The Boss, a mixture of angry, indignant, confused and terrified : "I WASN'T!!!"

Here's me, pleasantly : "OK"

And I go and sit back down.

So she wrestles with this in her mind and then asks me what to do. Naturally, I respond :

"I don't know."

In the hope that the IT guy has to come over from England to replace a keyboard.




So this amused the balls of me, really, as you can imagine I was practically in tears with the laughter. Until I came back from lunch, and went over to more closely investigate the much-abused keyboard. And this is what I saw.

Now sadly a phone photograph does not do this justice. The lettering is not just worn away, if you look closely, you will see :

The keys are very deeply scored with a series of scratches that look a bit like photos of cliff erosion. The photo, as I say, does not really convey this. This looks like she has actually been sitting using the keyboard like a cat a scratching post, repeatedly digging her nails into held-down keys.

BE AFRAID