You know I’d almost managed to forget about the Peanut Butter Keyboard Incident until I just was reminded of my tech lab days.
Surely you’re not gonna just leave it there! An Incident with Capital Letters™ is always intriguing.
So in college I landed a job as a tutor/work study in the computer lab.
I was just supposed to be computer lab tech support/tutoring assistance for students working on stuff, but my boss was lazy as shit, and so my actual job ended up being tech support for most of the campus so that Kathy didn’t have to get off her ass and actually do anything aside from play solitaire in her office.
Literally, she sat me down and told me “I expect you to stop anyone from getting to my office (you had to walk through the computer lab to get to her office) and speaking to me unless you absolutely cannot solve the problem on your own.”
So, whenever the tech line rang, I had to jump up and grab it, and see what was up. If it wasn’t something that I could solve over the phone, I then had to jog down to whatever classroom/office was having problems and sort things out.
Any tech support person can tell you that the overwhelming majority of tech issues are simple fixes. Every once in a while, though, you get a real doozy.
Such was the case with Mr. T. Mr T was a professor who taught a few sociology courses. He was smart as a whip about his course material, but was also Very Bad with technology and proud of it. He was also a hoarder. He had thirty years worth of files, magazines, junk, stuff, and trash crammed into his office.
I got a call one day to say his keyboard wasn’t working. He was Very Upset about this; we’d just installed new keyboards, and he was Very Put Out that we’d taken his old, functioning keyboard and given him a new, broken one. I ran through the normal troubleshooting…is it plugged in, ect. ect…but no luck. So I tell Kathy where I’m going and head on down to see what’s wrong.
When I got there, I took one look at the keyboard and knew what was up.
Mr T. had…among the rest of his stuff…enough food and snacks stashed in his office to eat for a week if he’d been trapped in there somehow. Apparently he’d been making himself peanut butter toast…and don’t get me started on the fire hazard inherent with a toaster surrounded by three decades of teetering paper stacks…and had set the hot toast…thickly covered with very generous spoonfuls of warm, melty creamy peanut butter…on top of one of his stacks of paperwork while he dug for something else.
His elbow bumped the stack. The peanut butter toast and part of the stack of paper went over, landing facedown on his keyboard.
He picked the toast off and ate it anyway, but then realized that his keyboard…which was now filled with a significant amount of peanut butter…didn’t want to work any longer. So he’d called us to complain.
So I replaced the damn thing, explained in a way-too-patient tone that filling electronics with snack spreads tends to void their warranty, and told him not to eat over it any longer.
And then took that fucker back to my boss and just set it quietly in front of her. She looked at it for a couple seconds, and then just quietly shakes her head and tosses it in the dumpster.