Whoops!

 Photo from www.notebookreview.com

I have a laptop with a touchpad.  I use it a lot. 

Sometimes my touchpad gets a little sticky, or gets crumbs on it or whatever, so I wipe it off, or scratch off whatever goo is stuck on.

The other day there was something stuck on the touchpad and when that happens it's SO annoying because every time my finger swipes across the pad I can feel it.  So, as I've done a million times before, I scratched it off. 

Except this time when I scratched I made a tiny hole!

Uh oh!  That can't be good.  :-O

I think what I originally felt was a tiny spot where I had worn through the protective coating of the touchpad.  Now I had a tiny hole.  Which felt exponentially more annoying when trying to use the touchpad. 

So it seemed to me the only logical thing to do was to scratch the ENTIRE coating off, so it would be smooth again.  Right?  I mean, wasn't that the sensible thing to do?

So I did.  It took quite awhile.  By golly, that little project was not on my agenda for the day but that's just one of the little twists and turns that makes life interesting.

So once I had the whole thing scratched off and I tested it out, to my dismay, my finger did not glide over it very smoothly at all.  Hmm.    
So I hunted down our roll of clear contact paper to make a NEW protective coating.  I cut it to perfect size but SMART ME tested a part of it on the touchpad first before laying it down.

And to my continued dismay, the contact paper was not really suitable either - again, my finger did not glide nicely over the touchpad.  Hmm.

Not sure what made me try this, but I tuned the contact paper OVER that I had cut to size and just for kicks, tried out the back side, which is a sort of wax-like paper.  Wow, that worked great!  Only, now how do I get the un-sticky side of the contact paper to stick to the touchpad?

Have you ever heard of "Fun Tak"?  It comes in blue or gray, looks like gum? (I used to use this stuff when I was a teen to hang up all my Tiger Beat posters of Rob Lowe, George Micheal and C. Thomas Howell (what ever happened to him anyway?))  I ended up using a tiny ball of fun tack in the four corners of the touchpad to stick the upside down piece of contact paper on.  Not exactly a modification that's going to increase the value of this POS, oops, I mean wonderful Dell Inspiron 6000 that came with the added bonus feature of heating to the temperature of the surface of the sun - saves on heating oil, you know!

Anyway, I certainly did not expect to scratch off the protective coating on the touchpad today.  I didn't even know there was a protective coating.

THAT WAS WEIRD!

The end.