Last week I bought some new stickers for my laptop.

Thirty seconds after I finished applying them I spilled a large glass of lemonade down into my keyboard. I dried the keyboard off with a towel and things seemed fine for a while,but when I turned on my laptop later that evening, 1/4 of the keys were stuck in capital mode and 1/4 were completely stuck.

But, hey — I’m a tech guy! How hard can it be to pop off the keyboard and clean it? Turns out, pretty hard. The instructions started with removing a dozen screws, then the battery, then a trap panel, then the hard drive, then the DVD player, and another two dozen screws. The next step involved running a knife all the way around the top of the laptop to break a seal, and then physically pry the keyboard off. Once removed, I found the bottom of the keys covered in a sheet of electrical tape. I used rubbing alcohol where it would reach, and I fixed the shift key, but by the time I got everything back together my delete key was stuck at a weird angle and my “k” key stopped working altogether.

ASUS doesn’t carry replacement parts for this laptop, but I found a seller on eBay who (for whatever reason) had a few keyboards for this model for sale. $30 later — and really, that’s cheap for dumping 20oz of lemonade into a laptop — I had to disassemble the entire thing (again). Funny thing, each time I put this laptop back together a few more screws get left out.

I’m going to go on the record and say that having to remove a laptop’s hard drive to replace a keyboard is ridiculous.

Roughly thirty minutes later, the new keyboard was installed and I was — am — back in business. It feels like new!