This past weekend, I got to experience something I’m sure many a gamer does at some point in their lives.
I ruined a keyboard.
It all happened so fast.
There I was, happily crocheting while I waited with Sekan for the countdown timer to send us into a match of ARAM Mayhem in League of Legends.
For those unfamiliar, it’s a particularly chaotic game mode where you don’t get to choose your champion in the traditional way. Rather than picking exactly who you want and locking in, you initially choose from two or three completely random champions.
Then, after your initial selection, you can play musical champions with any of the rejected options in the pool if you want.
It’s actually been a decent way to get a handle on new champions—it so rarely hands me anything I know well that I have to try and play something I don’t know!
In that particular game, I’d opted out of musical champions, settling for one I’d played a few times and knew I at least didn’t suck with.
But then, chaos struck.
Someone gave up a champion I knew I was good at—with only five seconds to go until game time.
Before I knew what was happening, my hand had dropped my crochet hook and flown across the desk toward my mouse to try and make the switch. On its way, disaster struck.
I accidentally whacked the drink can I’d completely forgotten was sitting right in front of me and unceremoniously flung the contents all over my keyboard and desk mat.
And unfortunately, despite my frantic attempts to clean up as best I could, neither of them survived. As much as Sekan tried to assure me that it’s more or less a rite of passage for a PC gamer to destroy a keyboard by drowning it, I did feel pretty guilty about the whole thing. Especially since he’d gotten me that keyboard for my birthday a few years back.
So now, as I wait for a shiny new (cherry blossom-themed!) keyboard to arrive, I’ve been learning to game on a spare office keyboard I had kicking around. It’s been a neat throwback to my earliest gaming days, when I played things like the original Harry Potter PC games on the shared family tower my dad had set up in the kitchen.
And the desk mat? Well, it’s working for now, though it does have a certain eau-de-hops these days. But once the sample for a new desk mat design I made (!) gets here, it’ll be time for a fresh new setup!
YOUR TURN
