I’m such a dork. Look what I did yesterday –

This is truly only something I could do. I’m such a spaz!

Yeah … well … I was eating breakfast while working on my laptop. Consider this a lesson learned.

I leaned over to write something down on a piece of paper and PLOP went one half of a bagel covered in cream cheese onto my keyboard. Wrong side up of course!
Ugh!

What a mess!

I took the photo that you see above after I’d swiped at the cream cheese covered keys with a paper towel. It looked much worse before I wiped it.

I quickly realized that if I continued to try to wipe the cream cheese off the keyboard that I’d probably end up pushing it into the cracks between the keys and likely under the keys as well. So I went upstairs and I got several q-tips so I could try to clean the keys without pushing the cream cheese all over the place.

My husband was home since it was his day off. He was just shaking his head at me as if I do this every day! Then he remembered that we happened to have toothpicks in the kitchen, so he brought me the box and I started using them to pick the cream cheese from between the keys.

The toothpicks worked great!

As I cleaned the keys I also discovered that there was quite a bit of dust under the keys … well more than dust – more like dust balls and surprisingly quite a bit of my very fine auburn hair! Bleh! Who knew I was losing so much hair! I sure didn’t.

Considering the fact that I ended up cleaning dust balls from the whole keyboard I’d say that it took me well over an hour – perhaps even two hours to clean the keys. I even finished up by vacuuming the laptop and keyboard to get all the fine dust that I’d loosened with the toothpicks. Then I gave the keys a swipe with a rubbing alcohol soaked cotton ball to give it a final cleaning.

After all that, the laptop looks almost brand new again! I didn’t realize how dirty it really was. Thankfully I didn’t spill liquid on the keyboard … at least the cream cheese dried out a bit and started to flake off after a while.

Oh yeah, the puppy got in on the action too once I pulled out the vacuum. She loves that thing! So she got a vacuum too. Hey … she’s shedding – I’m pretty sure I vacuumed some of the loose hairs right off her.

What’s the worst thing you’ve spilled or dropped on your keyboard? And did you manage to clean it off?