The unthinkable happened today at the office when a book fell over and spilled a polystyrene cup with a couple of mouthfulls of Mountain Dew over part of my laptop keyboard.

I know better than to have precariously balanced cups of acidic substances near computer equipment, yet somehow this happened anyway. Perhaps the Visual FoxPro 6.0 command reference was getting tired of being ignored. (It was on the desk when I arrived, and it’ll be there untouched when we leave.)

I soaked up most of the excess with tissues and thought I’d got away with it, but 10 minutes later the END key stopped working; then the DOWN arrow stuck ON so everything was scrolling away on me. I copied important files to the network, then shut the laptop down and rang Toshiba support.

They recommended a local licensed repair place called “Advanced Systems & Networks” and it was half-past four when I called them, they said that their guys go home at 5:00 but if we hurried we might catch them. We quickly packed up our stuff and arranged to take Friday off before leaving the office and driving up-town to brave the traffic.

Alas, we were too late. The offices of AS&N were closed.

We have a meeting with Jenaya at the Broker,Inc offices tomorrow, so we figured as we’d be out this way the next morning, it wasn’t such a big deal.