Thursday night I was going to do something quick on the computer and I put a glass of water right next to my laptop.

I thought to myself “this is really not a good idea since Pumpkin and Coco like to walk all over the computer desk BUT I should be fine. I am only going to be a few minutes.”

Well, Coco decided to join me half way through what I was doing and tipped the glass of water over. Soon my laptop and the computer desk were dripping in water. I quickly picked up my computer and start shaking it. It should be fine, right?  After it was dried off, I tried a couple of the keys and it wasn’t working but luckily the mouse pad was working so I closed the window I had open, turned off the computer and called Joey. He told me to put the computer upside down on a towel and he’ll look at it when he gets home.

He got home a couple of hours later and started surgery on my laptop. He took a couple of the keys off as you can see here:

And more keys:

And after several minutes of working on the keyboard he tells me that it cannot be repaired so we decide to put the keys back. What are we going to do with a pile of keys anyway? As we started putting the keys back we weren’t exactly sure where they all went – do you have the top right hand side of your keyboard memorized? – luckily I had taken a picture pretty early on in the surgery process and I zoomed in and found where they all went. Whew.

Here is a picture of Coco walking right over what Joey was doing:

I should really train the cats to not walk all over the computer desk!

After Joey told me the keyboard on the laptop was broken beyond repair, I started to think about all the things I do with my laptop and how I would do them on a different computer. I wouldn’t be able to check facebook at work so that would be a problem. How would I stay current on what is going on with all my friends? And then there are websites only my computer knows the password to so that would be a problem. I quickly realized how dependent I am on my computer. Sad.

I got home late Friday night and Joey was kind enough to hook up a monitor and keyboard to my laptop so I have a working computer. Yay!

It seems to be working nicely except when a key decides to get stuck. You can’t do very much when your keyboard decides to press the same key over and over and over and…

It looks like we will be putting a new computer in the budget and I will never have liquids near my computer. Speaking of which, I am thristy!

Last week I started working at a local hospital that is attempting to become paperless. Almost everything is done on the computer and soon there will be no paper charts for patients. This is hard for me to imagine but I’m sure they will find a way to do it. All I have to say is that they better have a huge IT department to support such a feat.

During the hospital’s mandatory orientation they mentioned (more than once) that they have won awards for being so technologically advanced. However, they never mentioned how to log on to their computer systems or how to access your personal information online. Nothing! So, I spent the next 4 days trying to log on to all the applications I needed access to. It was quite a pain and I think I ended up calling the IT support desk close to a dozen times. When I finally found my personal information online I noticed that my social security number was wrong. So, I made a few more phone calls and was told it would be taken care of. I was glad to hear that it would be taken care of and thought everything was good. However, I got a call today saying that they had to change my log-on information and that everything should stay the same.

Well, they were wrong and I am in an even bigger mess than before. I have made close to a dozen more calls to IT today and I still need more help. I wish I could just put them on hold instead of calling them back over and over. Anyway. When I called about my email address not working (after I tested it a couple of times) the IT person said “it looks like there are two Janene Days in the system”. Ahh!! I had to explain to him the whole mess and he said he would let the correct department know. I sure hope everything gets straightened out before I work again. What a pain!

Just as a side note – all the IT people I have talked to have been very nice and helpful. I just feel sorry for the mess they are trying to fix for me.