There have been a few phlog posts going around in gopher
space [1][2][3], and maybe some that I've missed, about
the virtues of the Thinkpad. My main laptop is a T410,
which I picked up cheap off-lease about a year or two
ago. That's not very remarkable, but I do have a tribute
and a story about this Thinkpad...

Several months ago, life was a little rougher than usual,
and I was struggling with it. At one point I let my
emotions get the better of me. I was angry at technology,
and not too pleased with my career choices, and I decided
to take it out on the laptop that was sitting in front of
me. I smashed my fists down on the keyboard as hard as I
could several times, shouting something unintelligible. I
must have hit the thing 5 or 6 times, full force.

Now, I'm no body builder, but physics were entirely on my
side with this one. Long arms, with balled fists at the
ends, swinging in heavy half-circles, landing squarely on
target. And of course, the laptop didn't even blink.

I throw this sort of tantrum on inanimate objects once
every several years. The last time I can recall was
probably 6 years ago or so. I'm not proud of it, but I'm
only human. When I got over myself, I thought "Well, now
you've done it." But surprisingly, everything seemed to
be fine.

A week or two later, a key started to stick. I popped it
up, expecting to see some damage and feel the weight of
my rash actions, but to my surprise it was just a piece
of something stuck in there. I removed it and that key
worked fine again. This happened 3 times with different
keys over the next several weeks, but no damage; every
time I've removed the junk and the key has worked
perfectly.

So it appears that even though I beat up the keyboard
pretty heavily, the only result was jarring junk free
and lodging it under keys. I'm glad I have an SSD in
there though...

Of course, I don't recommend you treat your Thinkpad in
this way, but it's a tribute to the raw tank-like build
quality of these things.


[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/pet84rik/BLOG/JAN18/Jan08-01-Gophermap
[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jynx/dat/20180106.post
[3] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/on-devils-and-bentos.txt