ADVENTURES IN SHIPPING LAND

Last week I spattered a bit of coffee into my keyboard, rendering the entire bottom line of letters inoperable, along with the space bar and a few other vital functions: the period, the comma, the question mark. For a while it was kind of fun to substitute ^ for N and ^^ for M and 6 for b, but then people began to send me replies saying, “Hey, I can wait for you to get a new keyboard!” At first it was funny, but not if you really wanted to know what I was saying.

Locally there are no MAC products, not even in Great Falls. (I haven’t tried Lethbridge.) When you ask the computer people, they draw themselves up and say, “MAC’s are not REAL computers.” (Wait till I can afford one of those little green Third World “kid” computers!) So I went back to trusty old Mac Mall, where the only difficulty was that the person taking the order was unintelligible until I finally managed to twist my head into “Mexico-speak” by pretending I was in an old Western, talking to Katy Jurado. She said, “Two beezeenees days,” meaning Tuesday delivery, but I had a hunch that the weekend airplanes kept flying and indeed, the Fed Ex man was just here.

I didn’t really expect him today because I saw a Fed Ex truck this morning and it’s 3:30 PM now -- there wouldn’t be enough deliveries for the truck to still be in town. But the delivery man who came just now was in a much bigger truck and said the little truck in the morning did ground deliveries but HE does AIR deliveries. (The truck doesn’t have wings.) Both trucks come out of Great Falls, but the air division is based in Memphis. The drivers don’t even know each other. They are not “really” the same company, sort of like the faux Starbucks in Barnes & Noble.

So I took the occasion to ask about DHL, which is how my shipment of books came from Calgary -- at least they took the books as far as Billings and then mailed the box. Somewhere along the way the end of the box was torn off and two books were lost. Fed Ex says this company was American Airborne or something like that, which was then bought out by a German air company -- it’s very big Back East but has little presence in the West. DHL must stand for something in German. Deutsche-something.

Anyway, speaking of Barnes & Noble (which we weren't) I’ve continued to try to puzzle out why you can’t buy a copy of “Bronze Inside and Out” off the shelves of Barnes and Noble, but you CAN buy a copy from their website. In fact, their website seems to be somehow attached to the Amazon website -- same info, same updates, etc. I begin to suspect that they are one company pretending to be two for the sake of name recognition, but the physical stores and the online store are TWO different companies pretending to be one. I strongly suspect that a little well-placed payola would make “Bronze Inside and Out” suddenly appear on bookshelves throughout the Barnes & Noble shelf franchise, but how does one know to whom to pay the money? And which one is it that claims that there is no way to order Canadian books, not even through the Michigan State University American distributor?

Anyway, I’m back on the keyboard again and whether that’s a good thing depends upon who you are!

I was surprised by some of the problems. I could do anything the mouse would do, so I ended up sending some messages that looked like ransom notes with words cut out of magazines. But my passwords contained letters and elements from the bottom line, so I couldn’t get into my bank account, for instance, or post comments on some blogs where you have to prove you’re not a machine by imitating wobbly letters. There were some websites I had never bookmarked because they were simple to spell, like imdb.com.

One of the major advantages was that I was in the midst of arguments on a couple of listservs and not having a keyboard made me stop and think for a few days. Always a good thing. I thought of going to the library and using their computer, or down the street to Jack’s art gallery where he has a setup for tourists to use, but I still wouldn’t have been able to access listservs. Also, I get quite shocking spam and wouldn’t want to wish that on the library. And it was a good excuse to phone up relatives, some of whom were raised when phone calls were considered a luxury or emergency expense.

Another advantage is that the keyboard is a discrete part to itself, so it could be swapped out -- it's not integrated into the machine as it would be with a laptop. My new house rules (no coffee, toast or cats at the keyboard) would almost eliminate the advantages of a laptop! No more composing in Starbucks! (As if I ever did.)

One of the more shocking bits of techie advice that I got was to run the old keyboard through a modern dishwashing machine with a dry cycle. I don’t have such a machine -- my idea of high tech is a “boughten” dishcloth instead of an old piece of T-shirt. Others told me they’d successfully recovered keyboards by sloshing them in distilled water and airdrying them! Won’t work on wireless, they say. The techie said to throw in the mouse as well, since it has a wire tail. Certainly counter-intuitive given that the problem was liquid in the first place!

But I’d worn all the letters off the keys and there was really QUITE a bit of cat hair, toast crumb, etc. in there, so maybe it was just “time.”