All I want for Christmas is new O key...

You may recall that the O key popped off my laptop keyboard and HP was going to charge me $300 to replace the whole keyboard - and worse yet since I am self-employed, make me ship it to Tennessee for ten days. Right around that time, we had a variety of unusual and unexpected expenses, all of which turned out to be $300. Our life was like one of those Mastercard commercials. Two flat tires with nails in them? $300. Trip to the emergency vet with two dogs suspected of ingesting rat poison? $300. Refurbished clarinet? $300. New O key? $300. Driving my healthy dogs to the park after practicing Mozart's clarinet concerto and sending a few emails filled with the letter O? Priceless.

BUT the rub is, I never sent the computer in. I was annoyed, and the key still works most of the time, and I had a big job I was finishing up. Every time I'd think about doing it, I'd come up with a reason to procrastinate. So finally on Friday I decided to suck it up, but figured I should call HP and make sure my service ticket was still open after three months - the last thing I wanted to do was send the computer into some kind of bureaucratic black hole because they couldn't figure out why they had it.

The phone was answered by a nice man, clearly Indian (as in the subcontinent), who informed me that his name was "Scott" because of course Americans are generally too provincial to deal on the phone with someone named Lakshmi or Vikram even if they are speaking perfectly good English. Before arranging to send my computer in, I asked him to please check one more time that there wasn't some easier and cheaper way for me to just get an O key, since I truly believed it was only the plastic tile that was damaged, not the underlying keyboard. Couldn't I at least try the simpler solution first?

He checked. "Oh, Ma'am," he said when he came back, in the most lovely of accents, "I do not know why the other people on the phone told you to send your computer in and pay $300. We can send you a new keyboard for $50 and it is very easy to install. We will send you instructions and there is even a phone number that you can call to walk you through it if you have trouble. You should not have to spend all that money!"

Oh, "Scott," you have made my day! Sometimes it pays to procrastinate, I guess.