Technology work.

For some weeks now, my laptop's E key wasn't working. First the plastic cover got dislodged, then it came off, and then the constant realigning it got the rubber nub to come off, too. Today I finally biked down to a computer repair place in the East Village, pretty much all the way over on the other side of Manhattan - I almost never make it that far east without leaving the borough, which made it feel like an adventure instead of something to worry about.

My computer got inspected, and the E and also T keys examined, and it took two techs maybe 20 minutes and a total of $20 to fix both keys. The little metal hooks attaching the keys to the rest of the laptop were what got broken, causing the initial misalignment and my refusal to seek help exacerbated the problem. It's a little hard to admit that it really was that cheap and easy to fix - not easy for me, since I don't have their equipment, but for them, and at $10 a key, it's far cheaper than replacing the laptop. And now that I know it's so easy to see to hardware problems, I don't think it'll be so difficult to address them in the future.

In those 20 minutes of repair work, I went to a nearby coffee shop, had a flat white, and walked around a bit. The East Village is nice enough to visit, though I don't think I'd want to live there.