I had a dream the other night that someone here had advised me to go around town calling into local businesses to see if they had old keyboards. I forget what the outcome was, but, strangely enough, after waking up and going back to sleep, I had a sequel dream — I went into some building and there was an office with the door open, and a heavyweight black chap who looked like a security guard. While I was allowed in, they denied having anything, but someone dumped a large plastic box on the table in front of me. It was full of broken keyboards, mostly with jammed keys (probably thinking of that melted thing from Ascaii) but there was a cream (?) slimline Alps CM keyboard with black keycaps with Japanese legends (but pretty busted), an AT-style, Philips spacesaver keyboard of some kind sealed in a giant bubble pack (couldn't tell what it was, I was hoping for NMB), and an all-black model M (not M13) with a load of missing keycaps and bent springs. That was it, I think. Makes a change from dreaming about my old hobby of telephone card collecting.
In reality I'd end up with a load of rubberdomes with the letters worn off (a while back I seriously found someone who'd replaced all the worn-off pad-printed legends with hideous Tipp-Ex scrawlings — seriously, replacement keyboards don't cost enough to justify the shame of such a heap of scum on your desk for everyone to see, and fortunately it got replaced, but not with doubleshots sadly)¹.
Last night, though, I had another dream — no idea where I was, but there were two women present (one of whom I know online but have never met), and I was holding two keyboards on my lap, one being my Realforce …
As for dumps:
¹
As Dictator of the World, when not completely preoccupied with wreaking viciously sadistic cruelty upon people who write errors like "haha ur not having ur USB drive back and I wont tell u why u suk" (WTF Windows, you know exactly what process has handles open on that volume, just ask Mr Russinovich), I'd create a mandate that all medium and full travel keyboards would be required to have sliders with Cherry MX-compatible mounts so that we can least fit black Taiwan Tai-Hao doubleshots even if people can't stretch to decent switches … but then back to torturing people as I've got a staggering backlog to work through and the elixir of life continues to elude me :(
