On being a moron AND a lucky bastard

SO, it was last Saturday night, and I was leaving a friend’s house. I’d brought a rather expensive computer keyboard along with me, plus my laptop, because sometimes when at this friend’s house, I use the time to work on stuff. So I walked out to my car, temporarily put the keyboard on top of the car so I could open the door, opened the door, put the laptop inside, got inside, closed the door, started the car, turned on the radio, fiddled with my phone for a bit (because it sends audio to my car radio over Bluetooth), got comfortable, put the car into drive, and pulled out, confident that I wasn’t forgetting anything.

I drove for a bit, enjoying the fact that I was driving in the rain (because I’m strange like that), and as I rounded a corner, I heard an unexpected ”bang!” noise behind my car. I’m used to hearing unexpected noises and not being able to explain them, so I said “what the fuck was that” aloud, thought about it for a few seconds, concluded that my brain made up the noise, and I kept driving.

After driving for 15 minutes or so, I stopped into Wal-Mart to do my super late-night shopping, which is nice because there’s almost nobody there and there are no lines at check-out. I wandered around in there for about an hour, as per usual, drove home, brought in the groceries, put them away… and froze when I saw the vacant spot on my desk where the keyboard should have been.

“I just did something monumentally stupid, didn’t I?” I said aloud.

It didn’t take much to connect the dots. The loud “bang!” noise I’d heard while I was driving was the sound of the keyboard sliding off the roof of my car and hitting the pavement.

So I spent several minutes yelling and cursing and waving my fists and generally calling myself a moron. It’s a $50 keyboard; I have a bit of an attachment to it. Plus, I’m pretty sure that when I put the keyboard on the roof of my car, I chuckled to myself about all of the people I’ve seen that have driven away with stuff on top of their cars… so that didn’t make it sting any less.

When I settled down, the ol’ logical brain started to kick in and reassure me. ”OK, I know exactly where it is, so that’s the biggest problem solved. Only four more potential problems: 1) Someone found it and picked it up, 2) It’s been sitting in the rain for over an hour now, so it might be corroded and useless, 3) Someone could have ran over it, 4) It’s very likely broken just from hitting the ground. As far as #1 goes, it’s really late at night, so odds are nobody has even seen it yet. #2? It probably hasn’t been long enough to corrode, and plus, water’s only a major issue if there’s electricity going throgh it when it gets wet, and it’s obviously not plugged into anything. #3 is possible, but again, it’s really late at night, and the road it fell off on is very under-traveled. #4 is highly possible, but there’s the remote chance that it might not be broken.” So, adding all those up, I realized that the keyboard might still be there, it might still be ok, and that a half-hour round-trip is certainly worth $50. So I hopped in the car and drove all the way back to where I heard the “bang!”.

And there it sat, completely undisturbed, in the middle of the street.

I picked it up and brought it into my car for inspection. It had some nasty road rash on one side where it hit, but overall, looking at it right side up, it was still in excellent condition – not even any keys had popped out. It had landed key-side down, meaning mostly just the back of it was wet – the keys were protected. As I was inspecting it, another car drove by. Hoping that it was still ok, I drove home, telling myself over and over “you’re a lucky bastard”.

By the time I got back to it, it had been sitting in the rain for nearly two hours, and nothing had happened to it. If it had happened during the day, someone surely would’ve heard the “bang!”, and they surely would’ve come to investigate, saw a really nice keyboard, and said “mine!” And if I’d gotten there just 15 seconds later, that car that drove by might’ve ran over it. It is, after all, a black keyboard, and was sitting on a black street, in the middle of the night. I only saw it because I was looking for it.

So when I got home, I turned it upside down, and put a fan on it overnight to dry it out. Does it still work? Well, I typed this post on it. Somehow, a vertical drop from five feet at thirty miles an hour didn’t kill it, and neither did two hours in the rain. It seems that they DO make them like they used to.

So, now you know why I’m a moron, and why I’m a lucky bastard. I fully expect the universe to compensate for this good fortune proportionately, which, by my figures, means I should get hit on the head by a meteorite any day now.