oops

I broke the laptop!

I dropped it by accident and it made a loud clunk. I thought "omg!!" and opened it, to find that the screen looked normal and all my applications were continuing to run as normal. No pieces of plastic or ominous parts were littering the floor either, so I thought it had escaped unharmed. But no such luck. Sometime later on Monday evening, I noticed the battery looked kinda low considering it was plugged in, so checked the connection to the charger... and found that the little connector where it plugs in had got pushed inside the case, so the charger wouldn't actually connect to the battery. Oops.

Fortunately, I live with a wuzzie who is a Professional Computer Geek (people pay him for it and everything), and it "only" took him 4 hours to fix it:
2.5 hours to take it apart (all 37 fiddly little screws plus a couple more strange lumpy connectors, and snap fittings that wouldn't unsnap until he found exactly the right angle to get at them)
42 minutes to find the Araldite (superglue)
8 minutes to figure out how to glue the plastic parts without also gluing the circuity parts
1 minute to mix the Araldite (#1)
2 minutes to glue it before the glue went too lumpy to use anymore
1 minute to mix more Araldite (#2)
2 minutes to glue a bit more
1 minute to mix even more Araldite (#3)
2 minutes to glue the rest
wait 24 hours for the thing to dry
3 minutes to solder the glued thingy back into the laptop
20 minutes to put the laptop back together
10 minutes fiddling to make sure it worked.

Eeek.

As the wuzzie did not charge me his standard consultancy fee, I believe I now owe him something less tangible in return. But I'm not sure what. So I have been doing laundry and washing up and making him cups of tea, & stuff.

I think he is not going to let me use the new laptop, when we ever get round to buying one :(