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What's That In Your Keyboard?
An anonymous reader noted that The Beeb has an
article on the crap you find in your keyboard. I usually wear my keyboards out fast enough that they need replacing before cleaning (which is good since nate took his keyboard vacuum with him when he moved). Besides that, I spill a mocha on my keyboard at least every 2-3 weeks. Thank god you can get keyboards for ten bucks!
Now noways research come from AOL and not have biased or skewed results. I think that they are keeping out a very important part of the results...
34% crushed up AOL CDs
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
never ceased to amuse me how a user could, with total poker face, tell me they hadn't been drinking any coffee near the keyboard, they had been sitting there all day and it just stopped. Then I'd hold up the keyboard and watch something like heavily creamed coffee drip out.
LOL, don't you love users?
I build data-driven websites, and I've learned that I need to build at least some sort of audit-trail capability into the sites because users are *always* fucking up and entering the wrong data and then blaming us. Nothing better than *nailing* a user during a meeting in front of their superior...
Client: There's a bug with the content system. Several of the items I entered have disappeared. Why does this happen? I thought you tested this stuff!?!?!?
Me: Hmmm. Actually, nothing gets deleted, it only gets marked as "inactive" and is no longer displayed... let me see... [I tap out a few SQL queries]... hmmm, looks like they're still here, and it looks like you deleted them all yourself at 5:43PM yesterday from IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.... we could have your IT people tell us what computer corresponds to that IP address, maybe someone else was using your account?
Client:Oh. Uh, um. OK.... I don't know what happened... err....[shifts nervously in seat]
Client's Boss:Ah. I see... good job John! [glares at incompetant underling while making angry-looking note in red ink in his elegant leather executive DayTimer]
Doesn't happen that often, but boy, is it worth it. It's just that there's so many bugs that occur in the development process, clients know they stand a good chance of succeeding if they blame their mistakes on your "buggy code". :-)
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Unfortunately, gods help me, I used to work in a "character" building dating back to 1912. The place was split office/residential - really LOW INCOME residential.
One of the charming residents, while not being a crack dealer (they'd all been chased out by that point) had absolutely zero grasp of cleanliness. The guys apartment was completely and utterly infested with cockroaches... crawling on the walls, filling the fridge, you name it.
And this lovely heritage building? Nothing but wood, which is just a migration highway for the roaches. We'd have to deal with the buggers on a daily basis, crushing any we saw, and spraying wherever we could. That was bad enough.
But I cannot POSSIBLY relate the disgust when I found out that one had laid an egg sac in my keyboard. I found out because suddenly, little baby roaches started boiling out between the keys.
I am -so- glad I'm not there anymore, and in a nice, antiseptic, concrete-and-steel office tower.
I have fairly straight hair, but when I open my keyboard for cleaning, most of it in there is somewhat curly...
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reminds me of the movie gattica when they're trying to solve the murder mystery and since they have genetic information on all of the employees and all of the people in the world (I guess) they're able to figure out who should be there and who shouldn't be there due to stuff like hair, dead skin, finger nails clippings, etc. in the keyboard.
makes you think how much you shed while being huddled above your keyboard staring too intently on the monitor on your desk...
A science broadcaster on the Australian radio station Triple J is running a study where he asks listeners to donate their belly-button lint.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2
-- veni vidi nuclei deceri --- I came, I saw, I dumped core.
My house has about (give or take) 6 cats.
Once when I was about 17 I popped off all the
keys to my keyboard because my enter key had ceased functioning -- and there was enough cat hair underneath to build a whole cat.
If only lego mindstorms were around, perhaps I would have succeeded.
I cleaned my own just now, and here's what I found:
- Dog hair
- Crumbs from various snacks
- Sticky syrup from when I spilled Jones into it.
- Human hair
- Dust
- Lint
- A pea (i have *no* idea)
- A piece of nacho
Now, if I just had the guts to look under my sofa cushions....Got Rhinos?
I've been collecting all the gunk that I shake out of my keyboard and constructing it into a lifesize model of Jon Katz. With swivel-arm grip. I'll submit the story, complete with pictures, when it's done.
We must respect evil, and we must make evil respect us.
I dropped fruittttttttttttttttopia on ttttttttttthe lettttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttter 'ttttttttttttttttttttttttt'
::
-Swift
-Swift
I can only imagine what the results would have been if it were taken at an American college campus.
1. Dried Beer Residue (23%)
2. Dried Coffee Residue (15%)
3. Unidentified caffeinated particles (11%)
4. Doritos (6%)
...
Various particles resembling cereal grains, biscuit crumbs, bread crumbs, pastry flakes and chocolate crumbs (56%)
We don't want all of that to go to waste! Lets market it as a new cereal, Keyboard Krunch(tm)!
Part of this balanced breakfast.
eeeeewwwwwww.....
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I wear pants.
I have to clean them out of my cereal box every morning. I don't know how the darn things get in there. . .
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
There's a guy at the office that has the nastiest keyboard I've ever seen. Not only does it smell bad, but there is a thick layer of slimy silly-putty-like stuff covering all the keys... food residue? I had the luxury of editing some code on his machine today and it's a great way to boost productivity, ala "I need to finish to get away from this keyboard!!".
Enjoy
--ChrisB
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Worst I had to clean up was a coffee spill in a keyboard from a cow orker with a serious dandruff problem. While doing the cleanup, I discovered something else amusing.
In the case I experienced, I pretended not to notice, because, what the hell, HR's not my job, and the cow orker in question was getting the work done. But it may come in handy should you ever have to break out the Bag Of Dirty Tricks.
I even hesitate to publicize this, but what the hell. No such thing as security through obscurity, right?
"How to determine the amount of time your SO (or a problem cow orker( is spending surfing for pr0n:"
- Take a small jeweller's screwdriver.
- Run the screwdriver the length of the keyboard between two rows of keys.
- Lift the screwdriver and examine the hair.
- Depending on hairstyle, the ratio of pubes to straight hairs is directly proportional to the amount of time spent surfing for pr0n.
In a corporate environment, that's probably probable cause for an investigation. Best to do this discreetly on your HR manager's 'puter first to see if it's gonna work.Of course, I must now add the following corollary:
The strangest thing I ever found in a keyboard was a dead mouse (the biological kind, not the peripheral kind). It was an old Apple IIe, one of those machines with the keyboard and motherboard all in the same box. It was used for stock control in a factory in the South East of England. The nearest we could guess was that the mouse had crawled in through one of the unused connector holes at the back of the machine.
The worst aspect of this incident was the fact that I only found the mouse due to the smell. It appeared that it had become lodged between the keyboard PCB and the casing. This had obviously caused it some distress, as it had apparently urinated before expiring. Beats the hell out of the usual Coke stains for both odour AND durability, I can tell you!
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The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Spllied ketchup on mlne once. Took the keys off and cieaned lt. Lt wasn't untli a month later, when someone trled to use my keyboard, that L realized L swltched a couple of keys when L put them back. Guess my typlng skllis were better than thlers.
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Yeah, well, I used to actually wash (that's right wash) keyboards people spilled coffee into. I'd tear them appart right down to the little springs which push the keys back up and wash them, then dry with a towel and blowdryer. It never ceased to amuse me how a user could, with total poker face, tell me they hadn't been drinking any coffee near the keyboard, they had been sitting there all day and it just stopped. Then I'd hold up the keyboard and watch something like heavily creamed coffee drip out. Clearly the folks who investigated that house in Amityville need to know about this...
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Let loose a bunch of nano-ants to get in there and eat all the organic matter. Maybe some genetically engineered micro-leeches.
Naw, they might secretly send out embarassing email at night when they are supposed to be working. Either that, or they will communicate with other nano-janitors all over the world, and some Monday morning, when everyone comes in for work, we will all be eaten alive by swarms of these things.
At work, I use an 84-key IBM AT keyboard. This thing was made somewhere around 1984 to 1985, and it is the King of Keyboards, but I won't go into all the things I love about it. What's important is that I am the only person who ever uses it (other people get lost when try try to work at my workstation with its 84-key keyboard and OS/2), and I have used it for a long time (since about 1988, I think).
I cleaned it once around 1993, and then a few weeks ago (August 2000) the keyboard finally experienced its second cleaning. This involved opening the keyboard to clean it out, and also removing each key individually and lovingly scrubbing it by hand in warm soapy water. I stayed late one night to do this, and the boss popped by. He said something along the lines of "We have people who can do that for you," referring to the gofer girls who are usually bored silly and chatter all day long when I'm trying to work in peace. The thought of one of those passionless dimwits operating on my precious keyboard, made me shudder with revulsion. I said, "Does a true warrior have a peasant sharpen his sword?"
The greasy black grime came off the keys quite nicely. "Ah, so that key is labelled F8, huh? Yeah, now that I think of it, I remember having an F8 key."
What I found inside was:
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