WoW. My Return Key Broke...

From November 2007 to July 2008 I played a lot of WoW.

Like... A lot.

I was probably putting in more hours into the World of Warcraft than most people put into their full-time jobs. Over that period, I raced to Level 70 with two characters and created two more on my roster. Tons of PvP. Epic Season 2 gear. Tons of PvE, too. Awesome Badge of Honor gear. Was it the best gear in the game? Not really. But for someone who had played less than a year, it was real damn good.

Truth in advertising: My frenetic, addicted rate of play was like a “burning crusade” to get my characters up as far and as fast as possible.

Over time, I joined the raiding guild Demise on the Aggramar server. A great guild: strong leadership, good friends, and a lot of fun. If anyone plays WoW on that server, is a mature player who is serious about raiding, and has a Level 70 on their roster, I recommend to look into Demise.

We cleared Karazhan. Gruul’s Lair. We were making our practice runs and forays into Serpentshrine Cavern. Lots and lots of Daily Heroics.

For those in the world who are utterly unfamiliar with the World of Warcraft, that is alright. Stay calm. “Don’t panic!”

Just know these are the Major Leagues of the World of Warcraft. The Big Kahuna battles. Five-man heroic teams. Ten-man raids. Twenty-five man raids. Forty-man raids. It is much like joining the military. A company-at-arms. Squad-level and platoon-level action. Brothers (and sisters) in arms from all around the world. I was near instantly friends with people from the US, Canada, Trinidad and Columbia. I even made a real-world friend here in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was great to talk to all these people from all these different walks of life. Together, in a chaotic symphony of bloodshed and magical explosions, we’d tear apart some big bad monster and save the world.

But suddenly, the world was over.

At least for me it was.

Only the World of Warcraft. The real world was still fine.

Alas! My trusty Macintosh broke. The return key was kaput. No matter how often or how hard I hit return, it never did anything. Everything entered stayed on a single line of text. That sort of made writing documents difficult. I couldn’t enter a URL, because the browser didn’t accept the carriage return. (Though I could select that little green arrow beside the URL field in Firefox.)

It was really awkward to type.

On top of that, the right arrow key was apparently broken too. It was as if some invisible pinky finger kept it constantly depressed even though I never touched it. Because of this, in the World of Warcraft, my characters spun in place to the right constantly. Turning and turning like a whirling dervish.

After a bit of testing, I discovered if I clicked on the left arrow and also kept it depressed, I would straighten out. The left-and-right effects balanced out. Even so, it was like having a car out of alignment. I constantly drifted to the right.

As a warrior-class “tank” in the game, it was hazardous to play with me. My character was unreliable and could go into an uncontrollable spin at any time. How can I protect the other characters if I cannot control my own motion and direction? I was a hazard to their virtual lives.

Quite literally, because of my Mac’s mechanical failures, my WoW characters seemed depressed, spinning dizzily out of control and had no hope of returning!

So I did the only merciful thing I could do: I brought my MacBook Pro in to the Apple Store in Palo Alto for repair.

At the Genius Bar, I asked how long it would take to get my Macintosh repaired. They were a bit vague, since they’d have to get the whole keyboard replaced. Maybe even test the motherboard. It was all fine with me. I knew I had needed to take a break from WoW at last. I had played it out. Not to the extreme end of “End Game Content,” but that I was content with what I had played so far. I could take it or leave it at this point. So, I left my Mac in the hands of the powers-that-be.

As they say in the Grail Legends, I “let the reins drop free,” and surrended to where the fates would lead me. It was liberating. After I checked my Mac into computational rehab, I walked out into the sunshine of a brilliant California summer.

I would not get my Macintosh back for 8 days.

This is the story of how my life changed over that period, one day at a time. When it was over, I had committed my life to a new path.

Just imagine what you might do, if this had happened to you.

Me? I was happy as a clam. I had a smile on my face, and a plan in my head.

I'll tell you more soon.