It has to be a sort of a Rite of Passage for most people who spend a lot of time daily in front of a computer. You have a cup of Coffee, Coke, Tea or other drinkable liquid, which you have placed within range, so you can drink while you work or play games. While the results isn’t as fatal if you tilt the glass over your desktop computer’s keyboard, what I experienced was the wrong kind unfortunately.

As you know, a laptop’s keyboard is rather integrated into the computer itself, and spilling liquid on this will, without doubt, prove rather fatal very quickly. I had a cup of warm tea besides my good old trusty laptop, and – as fate has it – accidentally struck it with one of my arms, causing the almost boiling-hot tea (with honey, mind you) to spill all over the laptops keyboard. 2 seconds later, the computer shut itself off.

This should, without doubt, cause panic of epic proportions to most people, and I admit that I was very close to yelling a lot of very bad words out loud. Luckily enough, I realized that there wasn’t any immediate smoke and sparks flying, and got my hopes up a bit. Disconnected the power supply, wiped as much as I could off the keyboard, got my girlfriends hairdryer, and started going berserk with the getting sure that there wasn’t a single drop of tea to be found anywhere in, or on, the laptop. After that, I left it to cool down for a few hours … and tried what would eventually be needed to check if everything was ok.

It booted fine, but made my heart skip a beat, when an error-message almost instantly popped up:

The computer was shut down for safery-measures, because of over-heating. Check the (…)

Insanely enough, the heat from the hot tea had caused the computer to shut itself down before the liquid had any chance to damage it. Lucky? Quite.

So, did my computer survive without a scratch? Not really. The keys on the left side of the keyboard (where the primary “splash” had hit) are crunching quite a bit when pushing them, most likely a result of the honey in the tea drying. I might have to clean it completely eventually, when it starts to annoy me enough. For now, I’m just happy that the laptop still lives.