Be a HERO by planning for and fixing those “arrrrgh!” moments
My husband just unwrapped his brand-new IBM ThinkPad. As he was turning it over, marveling at how light it is, he noticed one small feature: a hole.
The underside of the keyboard has a hole in it, so that if you spill liquid on the keyboard — and lots of us have done it, we know it happens — it will drain out easily.
Adding a hole was not a feat of technical engineering. It didn’t require special materials or sophisticated machinery. It was just a case of someone thinking about what it’s like to knock over your glass of water and curse and turn your laptop upside down banging on the bottom and hoping that the water will leak back out and wondering if a hairdryer will make things worse – and saying, “We know this will happen. How can we minimize the damage when it does?”
This isn’t the kind of feature that’s going to win you points up front. But someone is going to be saved by it, and that person is going to be a ThinkPad evangelist for life (or at least the next couple of years, which is pretty equivalent to “life” in the high-tech world).
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