(no subject)

Awoke this morning to discover that I'd fallen off the power grid somewhere in the small hours; the face of my clock radio was a blank grey, the lamp did not come on when I groped for the switch. It's a bit depressing to realize that, these days, my immediate first thought in such circs is "Oh god, something very bad has happened," and to drop back onto the bed, imagining bombings of power plants, mass outages, riots in the street, etc. (My second thought was "Oh god, no coffee," with a sidebar musing on how very badly equipped I would be to deal with urban mayhem sans caffeine.)

But as I lay there, I didn't hear any riotings, and eventually I got up, found clothing and glasses and purse, and staggered out to drive around and ascertain the extent of the outage. I quickly found that the crappy diner on the corner was lit up, and the traffic signal a block down was working; so in a cheerier frame of mind I decided to take self and laptop to someplace where I could get sweet sweet coffee, and maybe a wireless connection that would let me check LJ. (Friends! The apocalypse has been called off! First thing: coffee! Second thing: LJ!)

And my sunny mood lasted right up until the moment when, in trying to pry the foil lid off a container of coffee creamer, I splashed perhaps a quarter-teaspoon onto my laptop keyboard.

I have somehow managed to never spill anything onto a keyboard in my ten-plus years of on-line life, so I freaked for a moment. Then I turned the whole thing upside down and shook it; then daubed carefully with my napkin around the "p" and "o" keys, which took the most direct hits. For a while it looked like everything might be OK, but then the "o" key stopped typing, and then, as I was trying out the other keys, the "p" became stuck in the down position, and would not unstick itself. I shut down, waited a few minutes, rebooted, and the computer emitted an ear-piercing beep for perhaps fifteen seconds before booting, with the "p" still apparently stuck down.

I went home, where the power at least was back on and my desktop computer was working, and have now spent three hours trying to figure out what, if anything, I can do about the situation. Discoveries to date:

--even getting a diagnostic once-over is going to cost me at least $60;
--I may well have to have the whole keyboard replaced;
--while in theory new laptop keyboards aren't too expensive, I have an Acer, and trying to get any information whatsoever from Acer is an exercise in teeth-grinding frustration;
--the Geek Squad website is just incredibly, amazingly annoying, and almost entirely information-free;
--but the Acer website is even worse;
--Acer also has a scarily bad rep for customer service, based on the discussion boards I found.

So, anyway, it'll cost me money, and that is all very annoying, to be sure, but not the end of the world. What was strange was that I found myself getting really over-the-top irrationally violently angry about the whole thing, though--stomach churning away, head throbbing, slamming my fist against the wall. And that puzzled me, because I don't usually wig out over money stuff, or *stuff* stuff--puzzzled me until I finally decided to decompress, zigzag around through some of my usual websites, see what was happening in the world. And I went and rechecked some MetaFilter threads I'd been reading yesterday, and I realized ... ever since I read this, and this, and this, I've been working very hard at basically Not Thinking About This, because if I let myself think about this much at all, I will lose my shit quite thoroughly. And since I kind of need my shit at this point, I'm working to keep the shit-losing stuff nailed down below hatches, but I think it's really taking quite a lot of psycho-energy to keep the hatches nailed down, and the result is that I'm decompensating and having silly rage-attack tantrums over pointless crap like malfunctioning laptops.

So I'm deflecting, displacing. Because I'm still not up to looking straight-on at what really seems to have happened--to have been done--or to the possible consequences of it. Just not up to it. Will whine about computers instead, or maybe go to the gym and hit something hard.