Ask HN: What is the worst you poured over your keyboard?

I poured a whole cup of tea. The whole thing.

It stopped working immediately, so I just shut it off, but left it to dry upside-down (something I read online that would apparently help).

I went and bought a new laptop right away, knowing that I wouldn't be able to work otherwise.

3 days later, I turned the tea-tainted laptop on & it worked fine.

Now I lug two laptops around with me :/

Soylent. Laptop was unrepairable after that. Needless to say, I quit Soylent.

A 300 ml mixture of sugars, proteins, water and salts: COFFEE.

Disassembled the entire notebook into small parts, washed it with destilled water, isopropanol, destilled water, let it dry for a week or so, re-assembled it (don't forget to make pictures).. et voila, it worked!

There is a certain type of front-end work that's really hard on keyboards, I find. CSS nudging where the thing wants to either stick in place or jump at least 10 pixels, but no amount of tweaking, negative margins or padding will do the trick, all to fit a silly design mandated by a bad freelance client for a project you've already checked out on.

I used to get these odd fist-shaped dents around the JKL area when doing stuff like that. I've mentioned them to the Dell on-site guy when replacing them under warranty, but he didn't have a good explanation either.

They happen a lot less often now that I'm working on my own projects.

I have had two pouring incidents in the last ~20 years or so. They both happened within a week and in both times it was tea. Still laughing, especially for the second time ;D

At the time I was a student so probably had really, really bad sleep-deprivation (=really jumpy or something) from too much of anime and hobby coding. Oh those were the times :D

Coca-Cola, except it missed my keyboard and went straight into the desktop computer cabinet. The cabinet door was open at the time. Amazingly it missed all of the components and the coke gathered at the bottom.

On another occasion I spilled a whole cup of coffee over my keyboard though. Some buttons stopped working. I _would_ open it and wash the circuit board, but it presented a good excuse to get a new keyboard instead :)

Was eating milk and cookies and put the bowl on top of the monitor (big old crt monitors) for a moment. The bowl leaked and fried the monitor.

I "strained" a big red solo cup filled to the brim with iced tea and crushed ice all over the keyboard (seeping out through the other side onto my desk) with the ice remaining on top of the keys like I was sifting gold. Somehow nothing broke and the keys were a bit sticky for a day, but that's it.

Gin. Like people, laptops also behave stupidly after drinking gin.

A flight attendant dumped an entire screwdriver on my 2 day old macbook pro at the start of an 8 hour flight. Entirely accidental, but a pretty rare mistake for BA cabin crew to make. We got towels on it immediately and aside from a few sticky keys around the top left it worked pretty well for the flight and continues to be fine 4 years later. I took it as a sign that I shouldn't be drinking vodka at 7am and ordered a cup of tea to replace it.

Deliberately: Thinner

Ranch dressing all over my Kindle. I've been able to remove the most of it from the keyboard with plastic collar stays.

Was the egg raw, or cooked? That makes a great deal of difference in how I think about how awful your experience was.

Not a keyboard, but: Many years ago, I worked for a company that was using microwaves on living tissue. They used salt water (saline solution) to simulate blood - it has a similar thermal reaction to microwaves. We had this VMEbus rack with various circuit boards in it. The top card in the rack was the graphics cards. And we had this VMEbus rack without the top on in the lab, so we could get oscilloscope probes onto the circuit boards...

I happened to be looking at the monitor when the tub of salt water got dumped onto the graphics card. I suspect it looked something like an acid trip (don't have any actual experience to go by).

They turned off the power, rinsed the graphics card with distilled water, then dried it in an oven at about 150 F to dry it out thoroughly. It worked after that.

http://www.qdb.us/29152 <-- I don't know why, I remember spreading my coke all around the desktop reading this... I totally spit my coke laughing/choking when I got to the point where the guy spit his lemonade.

It was somewhere between 2001-2003. I still find it funny, can't tell why.

Vanilla ice cream, real strawberries and strawberry syrup on a keyboard. Wasn't the same afterwards even though turned it inside out and I cleaned it.

I am sure if you post this on reddit, you will get some different answers (sometimes, more creative).

When I was a kid, I spilled an entire glass of milk into my Acorn Electron. I guess the electronics were protected somehow from they keyboard above, as I don't recall any ill effects. It didn't even turn off.

Instant Glue and my keyboard was no more since then