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The mechanical keyboard I use on iMac has made typing a joy.  While not normally one to require constant feedback, each key press comes with the noise of the letter struck saying “bring it, fatty!”  Work is the other place where I do a lot of typing so the second mechanical keyboard I purchased went there.  When I brought it in, I told my coworkers, “this keyboard is loud.  If you find it annoying, please tell me and I’ll use something else”.  My coworkers would then look at me and go “how loud could it possibly be?” and soon learned.  I couldn’t use the keyboard when people were on conference calls but no one complained, until today:

Boss: Terry, do you have a second?
Me: Sure.
Boss: I’ve been, uh, approached, uh by some other people in your area.
Me: Yes?
Boss: And there’s a problem.  Your keyboard is too loud.
Me: But I told everyone to tell me if they had a problem with it.
Boss: I understand, but everyone knows how much you like your loud clicky keyboard and we didn’t want to hurt your feelings so I was elected to talk to you.
Me: Oh, ok.
Boss:  You can still use it when the office is empty or when it’s just me, I kind of like it.  Makes me feel like I’m a newsroom in the 80s.

So now I’m back to a membrane keyboard with its crappy response time, lack of tactile feedback, and painted-on key labels.  I don’t think my coworkers were annoyed, they were just jelly.

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The delight I experienced with each press of the Matias Tactile Pro keyboard’s keys is audible in the sense that for the first few times I squealed, and the keys are otherwise quite loud.  Loud to the point that Max won’t sit in my room when I’m typing, to the point where I can’t listen to music while typing, and to the point where my housemates ask me to close my door if I need to type after 11 PM.  For a few days, I was in keyboard heaven but the hyphen key wouldn’t work properly, nor would the function keys so I emailed the manufacturer.  The first email outlined the problem, the second email provided description elements, and the reply was a phone call.

Him: Mr. Robinson, can you read me off the numbers on the back?
Me: Sure.  *reads off numbers*
Him: Are there 3 stickers on it?
Me: Yeah.
Him: I was afraid of this.  You’ve been victim of keyboard counterfeiting.  Someone has sold you a Korean knockoff of our Taiwanese made keyboard.
Me: Ok, I bought it through Amazon, I’ll just return it and buy another.
Him: That’s not an option.  I know it’s letting the bad guys win but I just can’t let this keyboard out into the wild.  The next person may not call us, and it will sit there, performing poorly, harming our name.  Mr. Robinson, would you be willing to send it to us in exchange for credit towards a new keyboard?
Me: Sure.  I picture you guys doing forensic analysis on it or something and then plunging it into a demon-mouthed furnace as you stand around in robes sprinkling holy water as demons are freed.
Him: We have a keyboard shredder.
Me: That’s amazing.  I will totally send you the keyboard.
Him: You sound like a just and honorable person.  We will send you a new keyboard for the price difference of what we retain for and what you paid if you promise you will destroy the keyboard.
Me: I will find a suitably neat way of destroying it and post it on youtube.  I think I can make a cannon that can…
Him: Iiiiiiiiiiiii’d prefer you not do that.  Something tells me, not everyone will pick up that it was counterfeit and will just see a video of you destroying one of our keyboards because it didn’t work.
Me: Gotcha.

I’m going to find a good way of destroying the keyboard, I just haven’t figured out how yet.  My fingers await a mechanical keyboard that will not pollute with ill-gotten mechanical switches and keys molded by the hand of Satan.

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My father has taken to his iPad and probably uses it two to three times a week which I consider a lot for him.  Today he presented the device to me and said he could bring up the keyboard and I confirmed that he couldn’t.  I poked at a number of things and when switching windows the OSK would pop up for a moment and I eventually got into a near-physical struggle to keep the keyboard on screen.  After poking around I found the problem:  The iPad was connecting to the Bluetooth wireless keyboard of my iMac a floor and a room away.  The war on cords took another casualty.

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This will be my last post using my 15 keyboard.  Once I was unemployed, I started to clean the unk out of random thins in my office and finally took a critical eye to my keyboard.  I’ve popped the keys off before and cleaned the interstitial areas and ave the keys a ood cleaning in the dishwasher in a mesh ba but that wasn’t enouh to unseat five years of accumulated flotsam.  After unscrewin the back, I ot the keypad separated and removed the rayscale LCD screen.  All three went into the dishwasher on entle and came out quite clean an hour later.  After re-assembly I was saddened to find that the  key did not work.  I tried to work around this and see if it was just residual water but oolin thins or oing to oole’s mail and even izmodo was too touh.  The 15 served valiantly, I wish it well in the keyboard afterlife.

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My G15 keyboard probably isn’t dishwasher-safe because of the LCD screen so I opted to pop off the keys, put them in a mesh bag and send them through the dishwasher.  This worked quite well as all my keys are now shiny and clean again.  I wondered how my keys got so dirty, not just scummy but dirty having a literal coating of dirt on the 1-5 keys and the Q key.  The answer became apparent when I had to put down the barbeque sauce-coated ribs to do the first draft of this post.  Maybe it’s time to get some Wet-naps.