Lifting The Lid On Computer Filth

IainMH writes "There's a story over at BBC News about how work stations contain nearly 400 times as many microbes than lavatories. Gross. 'A desk is capable of supporting 10 million bacteria and the average office contains 20,961 germs per square inch, according to research. ... By contrast, the average toilet seat contains 49 germs per square inch, the survey showed.'"

Comments

Hmmm....

[luxis]

Old news? Workstations 'Dirtier Than Toilets' /. article Mon May 13, '02 02:43 PM.

Same story at CNN

At least... if you're working at your workstation its 'your' bacterias and not some others ass/shit/piss? ;-)

I work on LOTS of computers and they are usually

[pair-a-noyd]

so filthy I that I don't want to touch them without a radiation suit and tongs..

Really though, the FIRST thing that any computer I service gets is CLEANED.

The keyboard is the most disgusting thing of all, people eating, drinking, picking their noses, scratching their privates, you name it. The keyboard is a petri dish.

I mix 50/50 antiseptic mouthwash and 91% rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle and mist the keyboard, then scrub it with a nylon scrub brush. I have an air compressor with an aardvark nozzle that I blow the keyboard out with. The keyboard looks 100% new (unless it turned yellow from a SMOKER) and it 100 times cleaner that it came in as.

I open the PC and blow all the crap out, including the drives and fans. If the owner is a SMOKER, then the job is extra nasty and takes more aggressive cleaning. Cleanest computers come from elderly, upper class people, filthiest computers come from poor people who usually have lower hygiene standards and more likely to SMOKE than the upper class folks.

Also, computers on the floor in a carpeted room get clogged up with carpet dust no matter how clean the habits are of the owner, carpet disintegrates as it wears out and the fibers that break off (as dust) get sucked into the running PC fans..

Re:Brought to you by...

[kfg]

Who found, among other things:

The area where you rest your hand on your desk has - on average - 10 million bacteria.

So guess where the source is, boys and girls. Wipe your desk then, cut off your hands?

It has been estimated that only 1/10 of the cells within and upon the human body really "belong" to us. We are host. Enviroment. The "World as we know it," to a good many teeny-tiny little critters.

If you really want to get paranoid about something, get paranoid about money, which passes from hand, to hand, to hand. Your own desk doesn't really rank that high on the risk list, seeing as how its population is largely an extension of your own.

Unless you're selling disinfectant products.

Of which honey is one of the best, although it's a bit tough on keyboards and the general office enviroment.

On a boo-boo a little honey, dusted with corn starch to deal with the sticky issue, works wonders, but neither Johnson & Johnson nor Clorox would make much money promoting that.

For disinfecting your desk (or hands) in a safe manner nothing really beats vodka or other high proof, food grade alcohol, but the moralists and politicians have made that an over pricey proposition.

KFG

Re:Surprising?

[l810c]

I don't want to come across as Mr. Clean here, my keyboard is as nasty as the next guy.

We were talking about this just a couple of days ago, because they have been teaching it to the kids in school. You should always Sneeze into your elbow, doctors have been doing this for years.

Biomass?

[gotr00t]

As prokaryotes, bacteria are much smaller than your eukaryotic cells(think proton to electron... orders of magnitude smaller). They add about 3 pounds to your weight, which is nothing, considering the average person weighs... what, like 130 pounds?

So, your cells still constitute the majority of your body's biomass.

Taken from a popular microbiology textbook

[CptChipJew]

The first sentence:

"The vast majority of bactera on Earth are harmless."