Unexpected expenses

Perhaps the biggest truth about freelancing is that you can't always anticipate your income.  Well, neither can you always anticipate your expenses... especially when your livelihood depends on a fickle thing called a computer.

Thursday night (okay, early Friday morning) when I went to bed, my computer was working just fine.  Friday morning (err, afternoon) when I tried booting up again, the keyboard suddenly didn't work.

Yes, I killed another keyboard.  This seems to be a theme for me.  Apparently being typed on all day is hard on them.

Anyway, this is the second time I've killed a keyboard on my beloved Sony Vaio, which I have had for four years now.  The first time I wore out the hinges on a few of my most-used keys, like A and S and T.  This time, anytime I pressed a key, it thought I was holding it down, which locked everything else up.


Thank heavens I have a touch screen and an on-screen keyboard on that laptop, because otherwise I would have been in big trouble.  But I managed to log in and plugged in a borrowed USB keyboard while I did some troubleshooting.  When I was fairly sure the problem was hardware and not software, I went to Microcenter to get my own USB keyboard to get me through until I could fix it (I have several deadlines looming).

I came home with a new computer.

It happened because I decided I had better see what they had, just in case my computer couldn't be fixed.  And they happened to have the "old" Surface on sale since they need to make room for the new one.

I was skeptical at first, but I played around with it a little and realized I really liked it.  It's as light as my Vaio (which I didn't think I'd find), and I like the feel of the keyboard.  Plus, since the keyboard is separate, I can easily replace it if I kill it... since I am apparently so hard on keyboards!  (I've now killed three laptop keyboards throughout my time as a freelancer.)

I'm not sorry, but it was definitely an unexpected expense right now.  My computer had shown little sign of trouble (okay, a couple of the keys' hinges were starting to wear out again, but it was manageable so far).  I wasn't expecting or prepared for an expense like this.

But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.  I just hope I can keep this one running as long as I kept the others going, as I like keeping and maintaining my laptops for as long as possible.