> It is completely irrational spending all this time on it, but it am really attached to that particular keyboard.
Nostalgia and/or emotional attachment aside, I think you can actually rationalize repairing it:
① Knowledge and skills. Repairing stuff increases your understanding of the things you use on a daily basis.
② Emotional reward. Successfully repairing something is simply satisfying.
③ Environmentalism. You manage to keep one more product functioning instead of consigning it to a landfill.
I am willing to bet that the time you sink into this project is mostly your down-time. If you weren't doing this, you might be watching Netflix, or playing a game, or reading a book — it is not lost time.
Just make sure to blog about it and you can file this time under "marketing". A touch of geekiness looks good on a résumé as long as it does not smell of elitism.
You are right. It was fun with a good sense of accomplishment at the end. On point 1, I was thinking quite a bit about how they used to make and how quality and assembly was different back then. Saw how some materials aged better than others. There was a thin rubber sheet between the keys and the membrane, I would expect after 30 years it would have been falling apart, but it was in great shape.
Nostalgia and/or emotional attachment aside, I think you can actually rationalize repairing it:
① Knowledge and skills. Repairing stuff increases your understanding of the things you use on a daily basis.
② Emotional reward. Successfully repairing something is simply satisfying.
③ Environmentalism. You manage to keep one more product functioning instead of consigning it to a landfill.
I am willing to bet that the time you sink into this project is mostly your down-time. If you weren't doing this, you might be watching Netflix, or playing a game, or reading a book — it is not lost time.