Last month, I was struggling with a strange problem with my computer keyboard! It’s a wireless Windows keyboard connected to my laptop. All of a sudden Ctrl+C shortcut stopped working. Interestingly, Ctrl+V worked fine. The C key also independently worked fine. It was frustrating as instead of copying text, it was replacing the source text with the letter C when I pressed Ctril+C. I tried pressing the keys hard but that did not help. I replaced the batteries also in vain.
I tried several ideas from Google search but none helped my situation. The frustration was mounting and I was hating my keyboard and was getting a little hard on it. I knew that I would need to buy a new one. As a last-ditch effort, I dived again into google search and stumbled upon a solution which anyway was not useful, but there was an interesting postscript to it:
P.S: Please don’t bang your PC. Treat it like a fragile lil baby 🙂
I found it pretty thoughtful! We miss this point, sometimes, don’t we? When we can’t punish the culprit we tend to punish someone innocent who is within our reach or in other words, we end up killing the proverbial messenger. I did this myself a couple of times in my life and learned it the hard way (I will talk about it later).
Interestingly, this week, I was precisely teaching the same lesson to my kids. When we are undergoing a health issue, it’s prudent to be patient and give the required time for the medicines to work. This is the worst time for self-loathing (why me?) and disturbing mental peace to end up acquiring more long-lasting side effects. These times are actually to be gentle with yourself or to treat yourself like a fragile lil baby! The present problem will go away soon, but we will then be battling with the “invited” long-lasting problems.
Coming back to my keyboard issue, after reading this postscript I was back gentle on my keyboard. I noticed that Ctrl+C started working occasionally. This reminded me of an old solution, that I had read in the context of a laptop keyboard – flipping the keyboard upside down and shaking it vigorously! Although it did not appear so, the keyboard had gathered fennel grains. Once the keyboard was cleaned up it started working like a new one!
A netizen helped me in a profound way and reminded me of this life lesson which I probably relearnt one last time!
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