It was last night when I discovered F13 on my keyboard.
The boys had just come over we were gonna crush some beers and talk over a movie, typical stuff. I’d just let them in and set them up in the living room, telling them to sit tight while I finished up sending in some work upstairs.
Because of the pandemic I work from home now.
Anyways I go upstairs into my bedroom, where I work, and boot up my computer. That’s when I look down and notice I left my reddit browser open and there was a link to an article, I forget what it was. So I click open the article and it goes to some news site, like one of the regular ones, but it did that thing where I could read the first few lines then a big blocker thing came up and asked me to subscribe.
Obviously I’m not going to pay for the news, so I go to click out when I remember this thing I read recently also on reddit. It had some thing about bringing up that code bar on the side of the internet and deleting something and then you’re in. As I remember it it said press F13 then delete the code in tan or something, so I look down and press F13.
As I’m pressing it, I am realizing that the shouldn’t be an F13, and if there is one I certainly shouldn’t be pressing it. But I did and now this new browser for code is on the side of my browser, but it’s like slowly sliding out. I didn’t really think about it I just quickly closed the browser, and I swear for like a teenth of a second I saw something start to type in some weird letters, like maybe arabic or some shit.
So then I’m like “Yo boys! Come here I gotta show you something!” and they’re like “Yo!” but only my buddy Jimmy comes up. Jimmys a good dude and always has my back, but I don’t blame the others for not coming back cuz they probably thought it was me trying to show them a funny video or something.
So then Jimmy comes up to my room and knocks and I say come in, even though I left the door open, but Jimmy’s just polite like that. Oh and also this whole time I’m staring at the F13 key, because I’m like scared that if I look away for a second it might disappear on me. I was even trying to do this thing where I close one eye, then close the other, like alternating like that so I always got one eye on the key, although looking back I don’t think that was necessary. Because I definitely fucked it up a couple times.
So I’m staring at the keyboard and Jimmy walks up like “what’s up man?” and I point at the F13 key and I say look, and Jimmy looks, and he says “what the fuck?”
I don’t know that much about computers, so I’m like “It normally goes up to F12 right?” and Jimmy says yeah, and Jimmy is definitely the kind of guy that would know. So he goes “what the fuck??” in that high pitched voice people do when they’re really confused, and I’m like “I’ve had this keyboard for at least 4 years now I swear that hasn’t been there” and then I tell him about that weird code browser.
So obviously Jimmy asks to see the code thing, so I say OK but only if you press it this time, because I kinda want him to press it. He says sure so I open up the internet and say go ahead bud. So he’s reaching out for it but then stops, which kind of pissed me off because I think I yelled at him.
The rest of the night was kind of a blur but I think my friends were being dicks, because I had to kick them all out and my dog wouldn’t stop barking. As soon as they was gone I ran back up to my room to see if the button was still there, but it had disappeared on me.
So that brings me to today, I’ve got my keyboard pressed against the monitor so I can keep both in my vision. I felt like it would help the button come back if I posted here asking for help, and halfway through typing this all up I’ve seen it pop up in my periphery. I think it’ll probably go away unless I finish this, so here’s the question I guess.
Should I press it again? I think I will.