Have a confession to make......

I am sitting in bed with the laptop on my knees! Have got very fond of being in bed recently...I am frequently a little late for work due to a reluctance to get up, and on Saturday morning stayed tucked up til 10am, having cups of tea, reading, doing sudokus which are so wonderfully relaxing and satisfying...as long as they are not too difficult of course.....

Anyway, you may have noticed that all my keys appear to be working, plenty of mmmmmm's abound, and I no longer have a problem. It started when the semi colon/colon key stopped working and I rang Acer and they said I had to send the laptop to them to mend, but it would be gone 10 days...for the past three weeks I have been trying to manage withnout using ; or : as I didn't want to be without for 10 days, but then it started working again on its own, so I thought..wonderful! Then immediately the m key started playing up. I thought maybe Acers just had crap keyboards which died one key at a time....

But when Laura and Mec were round on Sunday, Mec having been called in to help restore our home pc, bless him, everyone ahould have a computer genius in the family, I was giving them lunch as a reward when I remembered that as a Mac Genius in the Apple shop, he must have seen macs with dodgy keyboards, so I told him about mine and wondered what the cure might be...'Mother, he has just spent two hours fixing dad's computer, leave him alone' says Laura (quite right too, the boy is trying to eat his lunch) but fortunately Mec's curiousity gets the better of him and he asks to look at the laptop. He presses the m key and agrees there is a problem. 'Don't worry, please leave it,' I say, 'I'll send it off to Acer.'

Mec asks for a small screwdriver, so I find a little glasses repair kit which contains the tiniest screwdriver in the world. He poked carefully under the key and slowly removed the screwdriver and held it up.... it looked suspiciously like a small piece of chocolate..Laura and Mec looked at me accusingly and Laura said sternly, 'Mother, stop eating chocolate while you are working on your laptop, what are you like!' and I turned into sulky, embarrassed child trying to justify messy eating habits.......

After they had gone, I thought, surely a tiny piece of chocolate would melt when the laptop gets warm, and wouldn't resist a key being depressed..so I looked closely at the tiny offending item...it was like a small brown flake. I pressed it with my fingernail. It broke in two. Then I realised what it was...really.....a tiny piece of the shell of an M & M........