Notes from the Lost World - Part 3

I haven't been able to access my e-mail account all day. At first, I figured my e-mail service was having a system problem. I decided to wait until later in the day to see if the problem resolved itself, but it didn't. After the 100th attempt to log in, I noticed that my password was missing a character. It's not obvious when a password is missing a character because they are all asterisks, and there are so many of them that you don't really notice when one is gone. So I very carefully typed in my password again and found out that the "number eight" key was not working. Why would it stop? Shift-Eight didn't work either, so I couldn't type any asterisks either. And not just in my web browser, that key didn't work in Word or anything else. Strange.

I tried rebooting to no avail. I needed to check my e-mail, so I went to a web page and copied a "number eight" from somewhere and pasted it into my password in the appropriate place. Access! The really weird part is - now that I've successfully logged into my e-mail account once - the 8 key is working again! 8888888888. See what I mean? Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got 'till it's gone.