Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Argh. Every time I tap on the laptop keyboard the screen goes black. With a little prodding, i.e., further tapping and/or lowering and raising the screen part in tandem, it comes back to life. Sometimes. Then, two weeks ago, it stopped coming back to life. Frustrated and busy with other things, I let it lie like an ancient antique artifact * on my desk.

Today, with some time on my hands, I took it apart, pulled out the battery, blew all the dust and debris from the interior guttage, and re-assembled. It seems to be behaving itself right now, though I am typing this very, very gently. Perhaps there’s a lose connection somewhere inside I can’t see or get to. Who knows? Well, I guess a computer tech would, but I don’t want to drop a couple hundred bucks to find out. Let’s just see how the laptop responds over the next couple of days.

With that in mind, expect some posts over the next couple of days. I am overflowing with ideas, though I haven’t actually written anything. Plan on being busy tomorrow despite having Columbus Day off, so maybe I’ll take finger to keyboard and see what magic, if any, happens. And hope that this friggin’ Dell – only three years old – performs to expectation, i.e., normally.

* = Remember OOPART, from a blog post back in August of 2016? Coined by cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson, it stands for Out Of Place ARTifact. It refers to such anachronisms as the Baghdad Battery, but could apply to my laptop if, say, it was discovered in the year 800 A.D., when Charlemagne was crowned king of half of medieval Europe.