Why me?

[Huge]

Twas on the Monday morning ... (Well, OK, Sunday afternoon).

The sun is shining in my study window, so I pull down the roller blind. The plastic "chain" that operates it breaks (actually, it's a nylon cord with little plastic balls on it that operates a toothed wheel). Fortunately the break isn't on a piece that passes through the mechanism, so while I'm downloading Solaris patches, I think about ways to fix it.

Ah! I'll saw the end off a biro, and glue the two ends of the broken chain into the piece of tube thereby formed. So I find a dead biro, and start to remove the little plastic plug in the end, using the scalpel that lives on my desk.

The scalpel blade snaps off and falls into the keyboard of my Sun workstation.

So now I have a broken blind, a broken scalpel and there's a very sharp piece of metal hiding in the keyboard somewhere.

Perhaps I'll go for a coffee.

[Andy Hall]

Think positively. At least you are running an operating system and not Windows.

[John Rumm]

Turn the keyboard over and give it a shake... that will leave you with the interesting prospect of a sharp thing hiding in the carpet ready to stab you in the toe! ;-)

[Huge]

Tried that. It doesn't want to come out.

I have fixed the blind, though.

[Derek Geldard]

If you did that on one of "Sir" Clive Sinclair's models you'd end up with more than that ;-)

DG

[John Rumm]

Now which order does qwerty go in again? ;-)

[Steve Firth]

This week's c*ck up was when I noticed that the holder for my Satnav/PDA was getting a bit sloppy. The glue holding the gooseneck to cradle seemed to have given way and the entire assembly was rotating about 30 degrees under vibration.

So I disassembled it and glued the gooseneck back in using superglue. I left what I thought was an adequate time - about 20 minutes before fitting it back in the car. Not long enough and a single drop of glue oozed out and fell on the light switch glueing it into the off position.

Now why is superglue like this? Stick two components together and the stuff doesn't set for hours, or ever. One drop however permanently bonds two things together that you don't want glued.

Anyway fortunately for me, I had polished the dash with a silicon polish and this acted as a release agent so I was able to pull the knob off and then clean off the glue without leaving marks.

[Cicero]

=============================== Unless you had one of the early models (ZX81) in which case you'd have a punctured but harmless thin sheet of plastic described optimistically as a 'touch sensitive keyboard'.

Cic.

[Andy Hall]

Off with some of the keytops then.

Otherwise you know that next time you have to press L1-a you will jab your finger and go to sleep for 100 years.

[Huge]

The problem is that I can't hear it rattling about inside. It definitely fell onto the keyboard, but I wonder if it's hiding somewhere waiting for me to step on it?

Hard reboot a Sun? Once every 100 years is about right.