Many of you have read me talk about my laptop before. It’s definitely got that “Road Warrior” look to it – dented, bent, scratched, paint peeling off the titanium. It’s in a sweet spot where the processor is fast enough for me but it doesn’t eat up batteries. It is slender and lightweight.

I added a character count feature to Jer’s Novel Writer recently (my faithful Swedish users were pinin’ for it), and one of the documents I have done a character count on was a slimmed down (and still fat) version of The Test. Almost a million characters. Combine that with all the other stuff I have typed, and it’s no stretch to imagine that there are individual keys on this keyboard I have pressed well over a million times. Space bar, slam dunk. Backspace, probably approaching a billion by now.

Sure, sure, there are plenty of people who have pressed their keys far more than that, but still it’s mind-boggling to consider. How can anything (fingers included) continue to work so well after that much use? What happened to all those e’s? Where are they now?