Notes on the Destruction of a Computer Keyboard, 1995
With scintillating digressions on memory, morality, and vending machine fare
Alakazam!
Come June of this year, twenty-nine years will have passed since I destroyed the keyboard of an IBM Personal Computer that did not belong to me. In so doing, I took away everything it was and everything that it ever would be. At the time I could only think of concealing my crime. I know now that concealment creates a burden heavier than any immediate punishment. It is a relief to finally tell the story entire.
June 29, 1995. I know the date with certainty due to a combination of memory and calendar prowess. Memory tells me that I attended a three-month class in C language programming in that year, and that it was on Thursday nights. I also recall a joke that I made that night, and that joke lets me place the date exactly.
How, you may ask, can a mere joke so neatly imply a date?
Attend: The teacher, a man of Tunisian birth who spoke with a distinctly British accent, was writing a program on the whiteboard, using tax calculations as an example. He wrote the line, “int dependents = 0;” We had only recently learned the concept of declaring variables. It was the Thursday before the Fourth of July. These facts combined and, unbidden, the joke wrote itself and demanded immediate expression. I raised my hand. When the teacher called on me, I asked in the most earnest possible voice, “Would it be correct to say that you just wrote the declaration of integer ‘dependents’?”
Only my colleague who was also attending the class, and who knew my ways, laughed. No one else, including the teacher, realized that an Independence Day-themed joke had been made. But I’m sure you get it, and you also understand why the joke could only have been delivered at that exact moment, as otherwise it would have lacked all context and it would have worked on only one level, not as a joke at all but only as a dunderheaded statement of an obvious fact about C programming (which is, sadly, how it was interpreted by all but two of the people who heard it).
To complete the reconstruction via memory and deduction, consult a calendar from that year and you will see that the Thursday before the Fourth of July fell on June 29, 1995. Now you know how a seasonal joke could help to fix a date in one’s memory.
Not that the date matters much, or at all.
Moving right along. Soon after my joke passed nearly unnoticed, a cry went up from a woman sitting on my left and across the room. She wailed, “Guh-ross! This keyboard is sticky and it doesn’t work!” In those days, a woman in the field of programming had but to raise an eyebrow in order to summon a crowd of men, all a-jostle in their chivalrous desire to lend technical assistance. The woman with the problematic keyboard was so instantly swarmed by concerned men that some of them must have leapt over or crawled under one or more tables in order to arrive contemporaneously with the lucky few who sat near her. Most of the men acted on an impulse of which their parents would be proud, and one acted on that same impulse while simultaneously—and honorably—upholding the reputation of Tunisia on the international stage. A few were just horn-dogs, and a small number were simply scrum-joiners who weren’t clear on what the problem was but who hated to be left out.
Regardless of motivation, the doughty crew soon formed a brigade of sorts, stretching from the woman’s seat to a supply cabinet in the back corner of the room. Thus formed up did they acquire and deliver, from hand-to-hand, a replacement keyboard. One intrepid gallant earned individual notice (and the envy of his fellows) by fetching a moist towelette with which the gratified damsel cleansed her besmirched hands. Another earned one demure smile and a dozen glares of hatred by proffering a waste can into which the towelette was daintily dropped with a flick of the now-sparkling lady fingers.
The class resumed only after some minutes of communal speculation as to what had befallen the erstwhile keyboard. How had so many of its keys been rendered inoperative, and what was the mystery goop that covered it? Had the substance come from within, like the dollop of deadly chemical that, legend has it, lurks in the center of a golf ball, waiting to melt your fingers off if you dare violate the dimpled surface? While we well knew what had happened to the keyboard, my colleague and I joined in the general tut-tutting and I may have even essayed a tsk-tsk to solidify my credentials as a concerned and bewildered person. The eventual consensus, raised by another but then zealously promoted by me, was not an eruption from within the keyboard but the action of external forces, to wit: that some heinous bastard in a daytime class had ruined and engooped the keyboard but had not owned up to the deed.
They were half right. They got the timing wrong. The hypothesized heinous bastard had accidentally destroyed the keyboard and staged the coverup mere minutes before the class session.
I blame that accident on my poor dietary habits. I worked at a satellite office some miles from the main office where the class took place. When my workday ended at four-thirty, I had to drive to the main office in heavy rush hour traffic. There was no time to stop somewhere for a bite to eat, and I did not ever plan ahead by packing some food. I would, therefore, arrive at the classroom at around five-thirty in a famished state. My only recourse for nourishment was the vending machine near the classroom.
It has long been my habit to make my vending machine snack selection based on weight, not flavor. Were it strictly a matter of taste I would choose a milk-chocolate candy bar. But the vending machine version of that item weighs less than two ounces. Potato chips weigh less than a bag of feathers. I like to experience at least one cheek-popping mouthful when consuming a snack, and insubstantial portions do not deform my oral cavity in that gratifying manner. It therefore always comes down to choosing among some less delectable but more voluminous pastries—something with bread and sugar, possibly with glaze, or ideally (but rarely in those waning days of the go-go superabundant economy) filled with a generous quantity of pudding.
The vending machine near the classroom offered only one variety of pastry—a glazed honey bun weighing four and three-quarter ounces. I bought one before class each week. I would then repair to the classroom with my booty and consume it while reviewing the week’s reading assignment.
I am very punctual. I always arrived a solid half hour before class. I am also studious and efficient. In that half hour, I always occupied myself productively by studying. Add to those good qualities my concern for treating the property of others with respect. To damage or mar someone’s property would be tantamount to stealing. This sterling trait led me to always place the computer keyboard on top of the computer monitor before sitting down to my snack. (There were no flat screens then; a monitor was a large, cubic object.) After placing the keyboard atop the monitor, I would spread a paper towel on the desk and place the unopened honey bun upon the towel. I would then open my textbook. Only then would I unwrap my glistening treasure.
Having thus virtuously protected equipment and table from even the slightest incidental englazement, I would bend to the tasks of eating the honey bun and skimming the chapter. Upon finishing the honey bun, I would carefully fold the paper towel around the sticky wrapper, discard the agglomeration in the trash can, and wash my hands in the nearby restroom. Thus fortified in body and mind, with my brain super-charged by fat and sugar, I was primed and ready to learn.
That’s how it usually went. But that’s not how it went on June 29, 1995.
On that date, I failed to notice that the computer monitor was not on the level. A tall person must have used that computer last, for I soon learned that the monitor was tilted back on its gimbaled base. Oblivious to the potential hazard, I did everything exactly as I always had and eventually commenced eating and reading. After I had taken just one bite of honey bun and skimmed just one sentence in my book, there was a sudden loud report followed by a sound like a million die being cast on a linoleum floor in a mad game of craps.
The keyboard had slid from atop the monitor onto the floor. In those days, keyboards were connected to computers by a thick, coiled cable. The weight of the keyboard and the speed of the fall had enabled the keyboard to reach the floor and smash into it, end first, with great force. The keys—all of them—abandoned ship and skittered away from the point of impact. Then the tension in the cable asserted itself and the keyboard now hung suspended a few inches from the ground like the gutted carcass of a deer.
What remained was not technically a keyboard anymore. It was now a plastic slab with 104 holes in it, with a tiny spring protruding from each hole. I learned three interesting facts about keyboard architecture (circa 1995) that night: 1) the keys are removable, say if you slam the whole thing to the floor from a height of over four feet; 2) each key is made up of two pieces—a blank inner shell that has a post that goes down over the spring in the hole in the plastic slab, and an outer shell on which is printed the key’s letter, number, symbol, or function; and 3) given the different sizes and orientations of different keys, you can’t just match up any old inner shell with any old outer shell, at least if you want the two to form what feels to your typing fingers like a single, purposeful unit, and if you also want that unit to function as designed.
I do not know the world record for gathering, matching, and reassembling the randomly scattered 208 key components of an IBM PC keyboard of that vintage, but given that I accomplished it before the rest of the class arrived, my personal record is just under twenty minutes. And that with cheeks initially a-popping from the first shark-worthy bite of honey bun, and with fingers sticky from the glaze mixed with my flop sweat. I coincidentally polished off the honey bun during that same time, but I doubt that the authorities are interested in combination events such as Keyboard Reassembly While Consuming Well Over a Quarter Pound of Glazed Pastry.
Alas, I don’t think the Guinness World Record people would even acknowledge my reassembly time, with or without the honey bun consumption factor, for I imagine they would require that the reassembled keyboard would have to function as well as it did before its sudden separation into its component parts. My keyboard, sitting there so bravely (and stickily) in spite of its grievous injuries, was functionally kaput. I had totaled it.
Earlier I touted my virtues of punctuality and care for the property of others. Now I faced a test of my honesty. I promptly failed that test with flying colors. Or whatever is the opposite of flying colors. Slithering colors? My immediate and only thought was to hide the evidence of my crime. Thank God for interchangeable electrical components. It was a simple matter to swap my keyboard with the good keyboard from another computer in the classroom.
To those who wonder why I didn’t trade for a working keyboard from the supply cabinet, as the Hero Squad would do for the wailing woman some thirty or so minutes later, I answer thus: I had no idea that the doors of that cabinet hid a cornucopia of factory-fresh keyboards. In my experience, no supply cabinet before or since held such wondrous goods, free for the taking.
While I am only now publicly confessing my keyboard destruction, there was in fact an eyewitness to everything I did that night. My colleague who also attended the class also arrived early, so he was sitting next to me the entire time. Chief among his virtues were a preternatural calmness and his strictly-observed habit of minding his own business. He did not even flinch when the keyboard smacked the floor, so unrelated was it to his own affairs; he did not bestir himself to help me gather the 208 key components that had arranged themselves on the floor into a high-tech mandala; he did not comment as I reassembled the achy-breaky keyboard just inches away from him at the same long table, my fingers a desperate blur of activity; he did not utter commiserations when my keyboard failed the Guinness World Record Functionality Retention Test.
He made only one comment the whole time. After I had swapped bad keyboard for good before anyone else arrived, I resumed my seat and allowed myself a long sigh of relief. At that point, my colleague simply said my first name aloud. Just that one word. His tone spoke volumes, but of what I am not sure: awe, reproach, amusement, revulsion, some admixture of those things, or possibly of other things. Or perhaps, given his non-involved, non-commenting nature, he merely meant to label my actions most simply and directly, and thereby also to sum me up.
Perhaps he knew things about me, and my craven actions had demonstrated those things so clearly that, if he had to say anything at all, it would just be: “Chris.”
Boing!