UPDATE: see here. Microsoft are in my good books again…

So there I am this morning, typing away, just 50 pages from the end of the final (I hope) major revision of book 1 in the Random Rain Cycle.

And all of a sudden, the keyboard runs amok and takes on a life of its own as a black hole munching through its surroundings. The backspace key becomes rampantly feral, chomping through letters and words; whole paragraphs disappear into its ravening maws. Nothing I do will stop it. It then tires of that and starts zipping thousands of zeds in unending lines onto the screen. When it wearies of the letter z it intersperses x and y, then whips through all the menus, hanging them out for my edification. Alas, I can’t actually use any one them, because the keyboard is totally jammed for any manual intervention. I am in a horror movie – you know, the stereotypical ineffectual screaming woman. Unfortunately, there’s no hero to the rescue.

In the end it was only stopped by pulling out the connection, bringing its destructive rampage to a halt.

I then spent the morning going through those endless “troubleshooting” pages that NEVER EVER work. Ultimately, if I turn on the computer with my lovely Natural Ergonomic 4000 MICROSOFT keyboard that I paid a fortune for and lugged all the way back from USA and have used exactly one week (because it would not fit on my old desk and I had to wait until I had installed the new one!), all I get is a loud bipping scream.

Thanks Microsoft. Nice to see you are now in the business of manufacturing reliable, usable hardware just like your software.

The awful thing is that it is a lovely keyboard to use, when it actually works, and it definitely helps my ergonomic problems.