Ah, the irony. We’re taking today off work, but we still have to get up early to make it in to town for a meeting with Jenaya at the Broker,Inc office. The meeting went well, basically filling Jenaya in on what has been going on at WonkaTech, and letting her know what some of our plans are. Essentially we’d like to start working four days a week instead of five, to free up some time for another project, and we wanted to see how that would go over. Jenaya agreed to bring up some of the issues at her next meeting with the I.T. manager, so we’ll see.

Next it was off to Oakey Avenue to meet up with the Toshiba repair guy we’d missed yesterday.

Jim is cool. He checked out the keyboard, verified that Mountain Dew is basically acid and eats away the copper contacts in about 10 minutes (indeed, this could be verified by my own unofficial experimentation.)

He unplugged the keyboard module and removed it, and said he’d have to order the replacement part as there were none in stock, and usually they kept the laptop overnight or whatever in a lockup. I was a little nervous about this, because it had a lot of data on the hard drive, both personal and work related, and we asked if perhaps we could remove the hard drive, or take the laptop with us and bring it back when the new keyboard arrived?

Jim understood the situation, and even verified that, if he left the original keyboard disconnected and used an external USB keyboard, the laptop functioned fine. So everything was looking pretty good for interim use of the laptop, until, while Jim was rummaging around in the back of the repair office, he came back with a cardboard box. “This just came in,” he said, “but the woman whose laptop this is for won’t be back in town until the 28th, so if we put this one in your laptop, we’ll use the replacement we ordered for you in hers, and no-one will have anything to complain about.”

He wrote up the repair bill as though the keyboard had “just failed” so that the repair could be considered under warranty.

So, lessons learned: 1) Jim is a cool guy; 2) do not pour Mountain Dew on your laptop keyboard.

On the way home down Rancho we passed a cafe called “New York Bagel Bakery” about which we have read reviews but never actually found in person before. A quick U-turn and 10 minutes later we had a couple of sandwiches for lunch, and a dozen bagels to put in the freezer.