Today all my possessions heaved a sigh of relief because I completed my most recent trifecta of calamity with the destruction of my work keyboard.

In an eerie coincidence, all three people to whom I confided that I had broken my keyboard had remarkably similar reactions:

Person A: You bashed your computer screen in with the keyboard, didn't you?

Person B: What did you do? Smash your fist down on it?

Person C: Heh heh. (winks and mimes picking up a keyboard and swinging it through the computer screen)

Although I suppose the truly eerie part is that those things are exactly what I have been daydreaming (more and more often) about doing for the past three weeks. Thanks, no big surprise, mainly to this.

But, plausible as the 'sudden fit of violence' scenario is, that isn't what really happened.

Rather, I was sitting innocently at my desk, using 'the google' to help me find some pretty, non-stereotypical and non-pirate-containing images, when my calendar detached itself from the wall, fell onto my head in a hail of push-pins, and knocked the contents of my water bottle all over my keyboard.

And no, 'contents' does not = 'vodka'.

I dabbed all over the place (desk, sodden manuscript, keyboard) with paper towels, but I didn't think anything of the accident, really. I knew a girl in college who spilled Diet Coke over her mac's keyboard with such regularity that she had a thriving colony of ants living in it by the end of Sophomore year. And still the computer ran fine.

Apparently macs these days are more sensitive. About half an hour later I was tappity-tapping away, when I suddenly discovered that hitting the delete key would start the spell check running, and hitting 't' would bring up all the characters around the 't', plus '@'. And then the caps lock started blinking on and off. And I couldn't erase any of the mess because every time I hit the delete key...spell check! Which went nuts because now everything was misspelled.

So now I have a nice new keyboard, which is so aces because just this morning I was pondering how dirty mine was and thinking about getting a can of air and cleaning it, but now I don't have to! Of course, it is red, and my computer is blue, but maybe staring at both of them together all day will help me work on that patriotism thing.

And luckily our IT guy is on vacation, so I was helped (and quickly) by someone who doesn't think everyone in my department is a moron.

Even if we do sometimes pour water on our equipment.