Guest Blog: F. Radcliffe AKA My Sister

The following is a guest post from my sister. Enjoy!

EWWWWW.*

Having just prepared and eaten a tasty repast, I was ready to settle back down to work. I decided to pop in an episode of The Outer Limits since my work is so boring. But guess who ate right through the video cable even though I got a brand-new entertainment center to stop this kind of shenanigan? That's right: my youngest cat Parker, henceforth to be known (at least for the duration of the afternoon), as The Little Shit.

So I went into my room and got a new cable and came back out to the living room and moved the entertainment center and put in the new cable and put the entertainment center back and turned everything on and sat back down in front of my laptop.

I opened Kensington, my long-suffering laptop, to discover a bug upon his keyboard. Sort of a little grub thing, amber in color and about a centimeter long. I called The Little Shit to come eat it and reached for my Swiss Army knife to lift it onto the floor. When I turned around again, it was to the sight of the bug's wee bottom disappearing under one of the keys.

So I used the knife to lever the keys partway up without snapping them out of the keyboard, to see where the bug had gone. It was under the "P." I snapped the P all the way out of the keyboard and saw that the bug was firmly wedged underneath a little scissor-lift-type mechanism that gives the keys their bounce. And that there was bug goo on said mechanism, because when I had levered the key up from the bottom edge, of course the upper edge went down, right SQUISH! on the bug.

But it wasn't dead. Oh, no. It was alive enough to wriggle itself firmly under the mechanism where no knife edge could reach it.

Now, I should explain that it is very hot in my apartment. Despite the fact that I've had the air conditioner running since yesterday, the thermometer's needle is so far to the right there aren't any more numbers for it to play with. And my thermometer goes to seventy-five, so it's got to be at least eighty and--I'm just guessing here--roughly 9000% humidity.

So I'm getting pretty exasperated at this point at the heat and at The Little Shit and at the fact that my computer has a literal bug in it, and I decide to bring out the big guns. I plug in the vacuum and aim the hose at the keyboard.

This is when my circuit overloads.

Now, I'm afraid that if I leave the bug out of my sight long enough to go down and flip the fuse box, it will burrow under some other key and I will never find it again and it will die an ignoble and sticky death* and then get roasted some day when Kensington has been running for like five hours and is nice and hot and then I will smell dead bug toast.

I do not, on the whole, desire to smell dead bug toast.

So I drag Kensington and the vacuum into the next room and plug it into a socket that still works and try to vacuum the bug out. But it must be bag-changing time, because the hose not only fails to suck up the bug, it actually SPITS OUT A DIFFERENT BUG onto my keyboard. I suck bug #2 back up right quick and put the hose away.

At this point it's pretty clear that bug #1 is d-a-i-d dead. So I give up and accept that I'm a murderer, and go downstairs to flip the switch on the fuse box. On the way I smell that my downstairs neighbors are cooking something delicious and that makes me hate them a little because how come they get to eat delicious-smelling food all the time that makes me feel at once hungry, and bad about my own salami-based lunch, and hot because of that whole convection thing? Bah!

And also, I pause to check my mail, which contains only a very large bill. Apparently it is not chewing gum that hinders my ability to walk, it is trying to open an envelope, because my foot swings out in a wild trajectory, lands on the hem of my BRAND NEW REALLY ADORABLE SKIRT (the purchase of which, incidentally, brings my skirt-owning total to two) and rips a gaping hole in it. Great. See, clearly this is why I shouldn't own skirts. Or vacuums. Or laptops. Or TVs. Or--and this one is important--cats.

So when I come back the air conditioner is back on although there is no discernible drop in temperature. I put the vacuum away and take Kensington into the bathroom, where by a cunning triple deployment of moisturizing stick, tweezers, and Q-tip I am able to scrape maybe a third of the bug out from under the P.

I decide that now that the bug is dead and there is nothing I can do about the dead bug toast, I might as well pop the P key back in place and go ahead and type upon it for all it's worth--surely the bug can't get any more squished, or dead, than it already is.

After I do this, I realize that I don't ever use that P key.

A couple of years ago, The Little Shit fed Kensington some lemonade** and ever since then, I've used a wireless Bluetooth keyboard. So I should have just let that stupid little bug hide under the keys to his little buggy heart's content.

The Moral of the Story Is: Well, actually, I don't know what the moral of the story is. Like the fable of the Cop and the Flaming Squirrel, every step seemed right at the time. When one is sitting down to brainstorm ways to get a bug out from under one's keyboard, one is generally too focused on that specific problem to ask whether one really needs to get said bug out of one's keyboard. So I suppose the moral is, Always ask yourself whether you really ought to do that thing you're about to do.


*A phrase I stole from my friend, Kate. She used it to refer to a plum getting squished in the grocery bag.

**And by "lemonade," I might mean "beer."

*This post rated TV-MA for language.

See? That was fun! Anyone else want to give it a shot?