I spilled a full mug of tea over my work laptop – make me feel better by sharing your own broken PC stories

Pour one out for my laptop. Or, on second thoughts...

On Friday, while on the phone to friend of this parish Jeremy Peel, I knocked an entire mug of tea over my laptop. I won't immortalise in text what I said in that moment; it's for the best that those curses are lost to the aether.

I immediately shut down the PC, mopped it clean with a kitchen towel, and flipped it over, leaving it splayed open to air dry. I even went so far as to plonk it down in front of a dehumidifier to really sap the tea out of the machine.*

There it sat for two days, a modern day Schrodinger's laptop. Possibly fine. Possibly broken.

Except, for all of the difficulty of disposing of a dead cat and explaining the pet's disappearance to his children, Erwin Schrodinger never had to go to an IT department during his probation and tell them that he had been such an idiot as to knock a full mug of tea over his company-supplied laptop. I don't know about you, but I find it much easier to disappoint children than face someone in the IT department slowly explaining that it's best practice not to keep any food or drink within one metre of electronic devices. Especially when I have to bite my tongue and not say "Like I would ever do that" as I hold the evidence in my hands of doing exactly. Imagine the shame.

As something of a PSA, if you ever need to know what to do when you spill liquid over your laptop, all the advice I could find online suggested you should leave the laptop for at least 24 hours before turning it back on. Powering it up while there's still liquid in the machine is when the real damage can happen – as the electricity passes across the damp components it can short them irreparably. Being a weekend, I left it even longer, not turning the machine on until this morning.

So, you may be asking yourself: 'Is Julian 'The Idiot' Benson writing this article on his newly dried laptop or on his desktop?'

Well, reader, the laptop booted up just fine. When it reached the password entry screen, I punched the air. My laptop was lazarus risen from the dead. Good things do happen to big dumb dumbs. With smug fingerstrokes, I typed in my password. Or tried. The keys no longer enter one letter at a time, but five or six. A hiccup, though not insurmountable: my cursor keys and the backspace still work, so I could delete all the extraneous letters and log in. I took that win happily. Even better, the laptop detected my USB keyboard and mouse. I could work around this. It would be okay.

Then my WiFi cut out.

Windows is currently struggling to detect the WiFi adaptor. I say 'currently', but, in truth, the laptop is once again switched off, flipped over and splayed out in front of the dehumidifier. I am, of course, on my desktop, like a big idiot, hoping that I can point to this article when I tell IT, saying 'Can you at least write off the tax on the repair because I turned my mess up into content?' That is what I have been driven to, hoping my nincompoopery is tax deductible.

I would say 'Pour one out for the laptop' but, in this instance, it would be disrespectful to the Dell family.

So, in an effort to make myself feel better, I asked around the Treehouse what everyone else's most idiotic time they broke their PCs.

James
Obviously I’m too dextrous and intelligent to have ever ruined an entire PC, though RPS supporters will recall the time I exploded a power supply by switching it on while it wasn’t connected to anything.

Well, only James came forward. Edwin and Mark both looked at their feet, not able to meet the gaze of their editor, the fool. So, I'll go again. You think the only time I've messed up was that time I poured a mug of tea over my work laptop? You're kind.

No, I also remember the time I caught the power cable for an external hard drive in the wheels of my office chair and yanked it off the desk to the floor. It held everything 16-year-old me held dear. Hundreds of photos from the same parties, all waiting to be diligently uploaded to Facebook, my truly rubbish attempts at modding Far Cry and learning 3DS Max, and so, so, so many game saves. This was in the days where SSDs were still ridiculously expensive, so it was a mechanical drive and something inside was knocked out of place. Every time I tried to use it afterwards it made a despondent clicking noise and I never could access any of my treasured data.

Reader, please tell me you've done something as stupid yourself.

*The image above was for illustration purposes only. Know that I haven't got the dehumidifier precariously looming over the laptop on my unstable sofa.