Laptops & Tea... Don't Mix!

I bet you didn't realise that did you? That an electrical device and liquid do not make particularly good friends?

Picture the scene...

I was sat last week with my laptop on my knee and a cup of tea in my hand. Now I have a stand type thing to put my laptop on, mainly to let air circulate under it. It tips the laptop up so there is a couple of inches gap between the top of the laptop where the hinges are and whatever you have the stand sat on.

There is a sort of lip at the end nearest you to stop the laptop sliding towards you.

However on occasion I have accidentally sat the laptop on top of this lip... this was one such time.

So I'm sat, laptop on knee, mug of tea in hand, when the laptop suddenly slides towards me and then changes direction and heads to floor. Which of course meant that I tried to stop it falling to the floor (I did succeed in that). However in doing so I jerked the hand with the mug in it and sloshed tea all over the laptop.

Panic station!!!

I quickly mopped it up as best I could, switched the laptop off and put it to one side with some pieces of kitchen towel (paper towel) on it.

Cue the next day when I went to check it... the kitchen towel was now damp to start with, but I couldn't see any other liquid on it.

So I turned it on, and it came on OK... so far so good.

Then I went to log in to something and it was telling me my password was wrong.

That's when I realised that the 'Caps Lock' was randomly turning itself on and off. I then discovered that if you pressed the '9' above the letters I also got a letter 'o'. And if I pressed the 9 over to the right I also got a '#'. Now I kind of understand how I got an 'o' as that is just under the '9'. But a '#'? That's nowhere near either '9'.

Anyway I was googling, cos although the '9' thing would be annoying I could live with it, however that caps lock thing would end up with the laptop going through the window.

Long story short I ended up with the laptop propped upside down, sans battery for 24 hours.

Luckily it seemed to work - I even opened up a word document when I finally switched it back on and pressed every key to check that they were all working properly and that the caps lock wasn't still doing its own thing.

So a word to wise... be careful with liquids around electrical equipment... but you already knew that, right?