Five Days, Four Nights, No Potato Chips

Dear Readers,
Yay! I'm back. Whenever I typed, I had to wait for each word to come up. I thought I would punch holes in the keyboard trying to make it type--word, excel, e-mail, you name it. I was gritting my teeth and giving myself carpal tunnel syndrome. Time to change that scenario--

Naturally I took my computer in on the Friday before a National Holiday. And it took this long to get it back.
I felt like an idiot when I picked it up.

I thought about mentioning potato chip crumbs and decided against it. I don't really like to tell people I eat potato chips. It seems wrong. So I just blame the pets instead.

"Did you vacuum the cat hair out of the keyboard?" I asked.
"No, I lost the attachment to the vacuum."
I thought about mentioning that he'd had my computer for Five Days and Four Nights, but didn't. Still, he must have seen it in my eyes. With a huge sigh, he dug his vacuum out of the box. Sure enough, he had a tiny wand-like attachment, but no hose to hook it to the motor. He used a regular corner attachment. I do that at home all the time. It's not enough. Sometimes I use a Q-tip and rubbing alcohol, with mixed results.

"What about cleaner?" I asked. "What do you use to clean the monitor screen?"
"I'm out of it right now."
"Does it have rubbing alcohol in it?"
He gives me a strange look. "No."
"I've heard you can use Windex."
"Not very much," he said. So now what am I supposed to do?

Did you fix the "e" key?" I asked. "It wobbles."
"No, and don't touch it!!" he said. "I'm afraid it's going to break off."

"Did you fix my memory? I should have 4 gigs of memory, but it's only reading two."
"You're okay on memory," he said. It still only reads 2 gigs.

"Do me a favor when you get it home," he says. "Run the Disk Defragmenter."
"I do run it," I said. "It's on a schedule." Wasn't he going to run it?

"Well, I dumped 9 gigs of temporary files from your hard drive, and you need to run it."
How can I have 9 gigs of temp files on a 4 gig memory? I didn't ask.
"My computer is supposed to run a temp-file dump automatically, too."
He checks. Yes, it is on a schedule. He says, "Huh." He looks at me.
"Just run it."
"Okay."  It took hours for the hard drive to defragment, so I guess it was necessary.

And I had to order a new battery. It's not in yet. They don't know when it will come in. They have no idea. Either two days or nine, or something like that. They did know when I had to pay, though: in advance.

But, I will say, this poor laptop is running MUCH better. He used the upholstery brush to clean the keyboard. Cat hair went everywhere. No potato chip crumbs were found.