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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.'"
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 guess we shouldn't be surprised. Most of us sneeze on our hands, not our asses.
Every windows user is a sadomasochist.
We are surrounded and inhabited by living beings. It is good for you ...
Does this mean I have to stop using the top of my computer as a food tray? It was so convinient to be able to place a plate and glass on top of the case while I'm working.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
Of course they're filthier! Toilets just have people sitting on them. There's no end to the fetishes explored on personal workstations across the globe!
I guarantee you, if you cleaned your toilet as often as you clean your computer, it would (a) be utterly filthy, and (b) reek like nothing you've ever experienced before.
the "lick test"
lick a public toilet seat you'll probably get real sick
lick your desk and your work mates will just think you're a freak.
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
...telephone sanitisers.
Un-news
Not only is this old news (I remember hearing about how keyboards are more germy than toilets years and years ago), but its also not even that surprising if you stop to think about it, as the average toilet is disinfected quite regularly while the average workstation/keyboard is almost never even subjected to a basic dusting or wash, let alone a disinfectant.
Yeah, it's gross, but not at all surprising... I work in a cube farm where it's pretty much common knowledge that touching any of the equipment is going to be worse bacteria-wise than doing pushups on the mensroom floor (one of the stranger things I've seen in my cube farm days). And when you consider that equipment is shared between people on different shifts, and how strongly people are discouraged from calling in sick when they're sick, you start to get a very good picture of the kind of biological warfare taking place in the cracks between the keys. You can pick up more germs in this office by typing "WMD" than you would pick up from being attacked with one.
And don't even get me started on the transmission of scabies in shared upholstered swiveling office chairs...
[Z?]
Yeah, but the germs on my desk come from my hands and nose, not other people's asses.
Seriously. All manner of filth just accumulates just below the keys.
I'd like to know why no one has come up with a decent, washable keyboard. Most of the ones on the market are way too expensive are just too impratical. Are there some engineering problems with the design? Outside of the whole water-and-electricity-don't-mix thing I mean.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
Everything is dirtier than a toilet! It's really that simple. Everyone should start making things out of toilets.
1) Find everything to be dirtier than toilets
2) Make things out of toilets
3) Profit!
There's no missing step! Well, except that these things will not actually be toilets, and thus will be found dirtier than toilets. But why? Because people know that toilets are "dirty", and thus clean them! So many things are assumed to be clean because they are not specifically used in a way that would seem to make them dirty, and so they don't get cleaned. No story here, move along.
One thought that occurred to me was to get an air purifier... one that circulates air with a HEPA filter. Does anyone use one of these in their computer rooms and does it actually make a difference as far as dust goes? They also have ones with UV lightbulbs, maybe this would cut down on the microbe populations? I'm more concerned with the constant accumulation of dust than anything else.
Pinkeye (3 times)
Ringworm (once)
two sinus infections (suspected)
and
the herp...
Well, not from the keyboard, from the skank I was emailing, but I'd like to think it counts....
I sometimes use my wireless laptop while I'm IN the lavatory. I think this means I'll probably die earlier than most of you.
What the article doesn't report is that according to the same study, the average toilet seat contains 47% more urine per square inch than the average workstation.
Really, when you think of your computer area, you don't think of bacteria as you would when you think about a bathroom, so you're less inclined to clean it to the extent you would a bathroom. But either way, pretty much everything else is as equally as bacteria ridden. It's like the test they did on Myth Busters where they tested to see if a tooth brush left by the toilet would really pick up fecal matter, and they found out that tooth brushes all over the building had the same amount of fecal matter on them after a month of use.
Buckethead
I never have understood this obsession of counting the number of small living creatures around us. Now, count what behaviors/locations are more likely to make us actually sick, and you've got my interest, but it's pretty rare I see a study that actually says something along the lines of "cleaning with anti-bacterials will reduce the likelyhood of you getting sick" (in fact, I've only seen ones that show no difference).
The human body has evolved to be pretty capable of protecting against the things around us people now call "gross", and the rarer diseases that we come in contact with generally aren't stopped by staying "clean" anyhow.
My solution is to do nothing.
Modern society's obsession with disinfecting everything is weakening our immune systems. Your body is meant to be exposed to these kind organisms and such exposure strengthens your resistance.
User: My keyboard doesn't work.
Me: Ok I'll go check it out.
Me (later): Ok, keyboard keys are sticky... and there is no software problem... and there are a lot of porn sites in the browser cache........
Me resigns.
Back when the P266 were just hitting the market I sprung and bought a dual MB all the stuff to build a system a whopping 256 meg of ram an adaptec 3940uw, all the hot harware of the day I just finished putting it all together and loaded it when I knocked my BIGGIE Coke from wendys onto the floor, well the case was off, and it all shot inside the system, I reached for the plug pulled it and went and sat down on the couch thinking about the 2k I had just blown. Well I decided to see what was salvagable so I took it all apart and rinsed it in the bathtub (seriously) and let it dry for about 5 days just to make sure. I put it all together and VOILA It worked fine. About 6 months later it started acting real odd, I assumed it was contacts had corrodd after the coke then water bath, I took the case of , it was unreal, EVERY cat and dog hair in the house had stuck to everything , and it smelled, I cant even imagine how many germs were in there, who the hell needs an Ionic Breeze I got a coke covered P266
This is true. I lived in Asia for a few years, ate some of the most discusting things on the planet out of street stalls (usually I was really drunk), now, nothing bothers my iron gut, as I have quite the worldly bacteria living in there, takes care of just about everything.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The dirtiest part of the computer is really windows. That's where millions of virus exist.
My father-in-law recently told me a great story about this. His current customer wanted the onsite tech to swap out some 100 keyboards because they were in disgusting shape. Instead of putting the company through all the harassment of replacing the keyboards for free, he decided to try having the cafeteria steam clean the keyboards.
He tasked a couple of box monkeys with splitting the keyboards open and pulling the keyboard assemblies out, separating them from the electronics. The cafeteria ran them through the high pressure steam cleaning dishwasher system, and they came out looking and working like new! Strange but true.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Go here for some fun tips.
If there's electricity in the water when you clean it, then you forgot to unplug it, and your computer is too close to water anyway.
Not only that, but we're not dead yet, despite the Clorox/Lysol warnings. Maybe there's germs, but so what? In most people it's helpful for building a strong immune system.
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..
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
Water won't damage most keyboards. My wife spilled sweetened tea into my desktop keyboard. I disconnected it and rinsed it off in the shower. I towel dried it, then left a fan blowing on it overnight. In the morning (and ever since, about two years), it has worked perfectly. The "trick" is not to operate the keyboard with water in it (plug it out as quickly as possible), and let it dry completely before plugging it back in.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Toilet seats are flat and non-porous. They're easy to clean and there's nowhere for bits of food to go. The reputation for toilet seats being "dirty" is rather unfounded unless someone shits or pisses all over them. And while urine is disgusting and I don't want to sit in it, it's actually almost always sterile.
Bacteria usually need food to multiply on. People don't tend to eat in bathrooms, but they do eat at a desk. Keyboards are filled with places for dust, food, moisture, etc to collect. Great places for bacteria to multiply. Keyboards are also very hard to clean, and almost impossible to clean well because of all the spaces inside them.
What upsets me most though is the comparison to toilet seats that winds up in every "thing X has this many germs/inch article". In understanding anything context and perspective is king. The implications is that if something is dirtier than a toilet seat, it just MUST be dirty as hell. It's a rare article that points out that maybe the premise (toilet seats are really dirty) is at fault. I'd be more interested in comparisons to things that ARE dirty, like a cutting board after having cut raw meat on it. Unfortunately articles like these always end up as the "interesting little tidbit" articles in newspapers where they have to grab your attention and don't have time for things like giving out real information.
AccountKiller
As long as you power it down AFAP (yank from wall if necessary) water is not that damamging to electronics. If not cleaned up it can delaminate PCBs and destroy caps, but if left off and dried well it'll work fine. Other things, esp sticky thinks (soda, get your minds outa the gutter...) can be cleaned up by rinsing with water and then drying. Not a fix 100% of the time, but usually works out pretty well.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
My thoughts exactly! I mean, look what happened to those poor people on Golgafrincham!
/.ers can probably related, just think of how many bacteria, mold and fungi you pick up during sex!
This is not to say that it's good to wallow in filth all day, but chances are the bugs on your desk and keyboard are 99.9% completely harmless, with the other 0.1% being a very mild hazard that you're probably more likely to get from something else (another posted mentioned warts as an example). Your best defense is to wash your hands before eating. Hopefully that's common sense.
Every time you breathe in you swallow about 60,000 bacteria. According to the linked article that's like licking your spacebar clean. Can you imagine how many germs you pick up drinking out of a bottle or cup that's been sitting out for even a few minutes? What about eating the rest of that sandwich you got yesterday? And only a few
=Smidge=
Provided you have a room where other entrances are reasonably blocked or dealt with and you keep the air flowing. Heck, at work the clean room is a room with lots of HEPA filters. Basically you have an outer room, with all the doors qith at least one other door before the outside, and good seals. All the air is filtered comming in here, not sure how well. There are also stick pads to get dirt off your shoes.
The inner room, the actual clean room, then just maintains itself through positive air flow. There are a couple layers of filters that take out basically all particles. The bottom of the walls are open so that the air can continually flow out.
Well this works REALLY well (well enough to work on micro processors in there). There's basically no dust in the outer room, never mind the clean room.
So if you want to use it in your home, you'll need to make sure that your doors/windows are reasonably well sealed and stay closed. It'll do you no good if a big entrance for dust is open all the time. You also need to keep the air flowing, since some dust WILL get in and it's only getting out via the airflow. Just having it run with your AC probably won't do a ton. You'll probably need continous airflow.
But ya, they work great if you give them an environment to work in. You won't get cleanroom conditions in your house, of course, but you can pretty effectivly eliminate dust, at least in a single room.
a) scream and run out of the restaurant.
b) pick the bug off and continue eating.
c) calmly point out the problem to the waitperson and ask for another salad.
d) get all in a huff and sue the restaurant, the waiter, and the food vender.
This situation has happened to me twice. The first time, my answer was "b". The second time (years later) my answer was "c" (I think the bug was uglier than the little inch-worm thingy).
I suppose you could offer "e) ignore the worm and eat the salad. The worm can look out for itself." But that's just a little bit too far for me.
There is stuff everywhere. Get over it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Best not to stick the keyboard in your colon either.
Damn microsoft natural keyboard
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Here's what I use to keep my computers clean:
1) Shop Vac -- $20 from WalMart for a 1x1 (1HP x 1Gallon) container.
2) Isopropyl alcohol -- 50c or so for a pint
3) Baby Wipes -- about $4.00 for a box - unscented
4) Glass cleaner -- $1 at the Dollar Store
5) Scouring Powder -- 50c at WalMart
The ShopVac is perfect for the dust bunnies and stuff inside the system unit. Be careful around fans as the suction can spin them much faster than the typical case fans are rated for. Some of these vacs are reversible to blow air.
Isopropyl alcohol is great for cleaning mice. I tend to just throw away the keyboards since they're so cheap and so tedious to clean. If you do need to clean them I recommend actually removing the keys and dumping them into some soapy water. Rinse. Then set them to dry on a towel. A hair dryer can help dry up residual moisture. Alcohol is also good for some types of sticky residue from stickers and tape.
Baby wipes are convenient in a lot of places. I use them for the system unit and general wipedown. They work just as well as the Computer Wipes but are about 1/10 the cost. They are damp so don't use them inside the case.
Glass cleaner is good for body grime. Make sure it has ammonia (most do). Be careful when using it near Scouring Powder that contains chlorine bleach.
Scouring powder is a last resort for marker stains on plastic housings. It will scratch a little, but can help get out tougher permanent marker.
Other useful things include a toothbrush, eraser pencil, air can, Qtips, and cotton buds.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
Modern society's obsession with disinfecting everything is weakening our immune systems.
At the same time, places like computer work stations develop a remarkable amount of organic trash and all sorts of nasty germs. While there is a problem living in a steral enviroment, there is a greater problem living in a sespool. Your workstation should be cleaned and vacumed.
Problem is, in this throw away soceity of ours, the typical business enviroment isn't hip on paying someone to clean keyboards / mice / PC cases. I clean my keyboard from time to time. that is pull all 104+ keys, and throw all the plastic in the dishwaser. This would be impractical for a business to do, far more practical to just buy another damn keyboard.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Simple as that, as long as your don't pick your asshole and THEN use the keyboard, you should be fine. ...and people wonder why I carry a bottle of Purell while on-site to fix Joe Sixpacks computer.
Life is not for the lazy.
So, your cells still constitute the majority of your body's biomass.
1) I have never had a worm or virus crash my toilet
2) The do not make any of that blue junk that I can install in my computer
3) microsoft doesn't make bathroom fixtures
4) I let people go in my bathroom. Noone is allowed to drive my PC
5) Visitors understand how to use everything in my lavatory.
6) Thankfully, there is no 'undelete' function in the can
7) Seat at workstation is more comfortable. I try to perform as many biofunctions there as I can.
I recall brainstorming a way to actually prevent someone from leaving the restroom without washing their hands. I was at Applebee's of all places, and at least 5 different guys walked out of the bathroom without even a glance at the sink. I went through a million different technical ways and all were easily circumvented. I noticed when I washed my hands in the bathroom, others were more likely to as well.
I finally figured that the best way was to have either a hot chick sit by the door and say, "Did you wash your hands?", or a withered old one-eyed crone point a translucent finger at those who didn't and scream, "UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!".
Maybe follow them into the resturant if they refuse. "UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN! Shun him who walks among you - UNCLEAN!"
My solution is to do nothing. Modern society's obsession with disinfecting everything is weakening our immune systems. Your body is meant to be exposed to these kind organisms and such exposure strengthens your resistance.
In that case, may I defecate on your keyboard? It's for your own good you know.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I used to service PC's in a hospital, and they were a mess. Systems in the sterile areas, the compromised immunity area especially, you had to bag and remove before you could open them up. Dust carries some dangerous stuff, and in the compromised immunity wing you couldn't even move a ceiling tile or change a light fixture without removing the patent. The first time a nurse saw the inside of a PC from that ward, she remarked "That pretty much could have killed the patient who shared the room with the computer".
At a different hospital I was at for a short time, no such policies for removing systems exist. Scary.
-G "We love to buy books, because we are buying the belief we have time to read them" - Warren Zevon
I've read about the same thing regarding overprotective/sanitary parents.
The kids who go to day care (and are exposed to every germ and virus within a 30 mile radius, every day) DO get mild illnesses more often while they're little... but as they grow up their immune systems are super-fortified against just about everything, and they are much healthier overall then the kids whose parents disinfected everything and kept them away from any other kid with a sniffle.
Obviously this does NOT mean you should encourage your kid to eat dirt and so on, because a really concentrated source of bacteria (e.g. dog turd) could make them seriously ill, and it's a good habit to wash their hands before meals. It's just an interesting case of more of a good thing (cleanliness) NOT being better.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
...when the mods consider "don't pick your asshole and THEN use the keyboard" to be informative. Is slashdot hygiene really this awful?
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
The first sentence:
"The vast majority of bactera on Earth are harmless."
Vonal Declosion
Wonderful.
I've stopped really caring to hear, every 1.5-2 years, about the shocking and revolutionary study that -gasp!- places that get daily use sans daily cleaning are actually dirtier than places that are - given their function - cleaned nightly.
However, there is a quote and its bretheren that never cease to amaze me:
The study found that where office workers who were told to clean their desks with disinfecting wipes, bacterial levels were reduced by 99%.
Hmm ... let's take a look at this ...
1. Disinfecting wipes can take out bacteria. Woohoo. We know this.
2. People are being encouraged to live in a germ-free world - and we'll suffer because of it.
I believe we're headed straight for another Black Plague, given our disposition towards feeling the need to scrub and kill every last germ off our surfaces. This is silly, and is in fact making us weaker as a whole, as we now have zero exposure to elements that, 50 years ago, we came into daily or near-daily contact with.
A few-point plan to save us from ourselves:
a. If you go to the bathroom, wash your damn hands after you're finished. And this does not just mean rinsing them under cool water - this means the full soap and warm-hot water treatement.
b. We're not Howard Hughes. Let a few germs go; they'll likely do us all a lot more good than bad. Yeah, they're all over your skin, clothes, and so on ... but to want to rid yourself of 'em is tantamount to saying that we ought to rip out our eyelashes - because there're symbiotic crawlies living in there, and that gives me the willies.
c. The only people that antibacterial soap ought to be dispensed to are nurses and the like. Antibacterial products are the result of an over-indulgent Western imagination rising up with our xenophobia with a desire to remain King or Queen of our Domain.
Anyway ... that's what I think. ;) Please wash your hands after going to the bathroom ... other people have to touch that door too, you know!
It goes futher than symbiotic bacterial cells with their own genetic futures. Mitochondria may have originated as separate organisms that evolved to exist symbiotically inside a larger cell... mitochondrial DNA is separate from nuclear DNA. Mitochondria cannot be produced by cells de novo.
It would be foolish to say that only the parts of a cell which are created by genomic DNA are human. Our animal cells cannot function without mitochondria.
The bacteria are not the stonework or metalwork of our bodies' cities, though. A closer metaphor would be that a country is a body made up of humans as cells, and that the animals which support each person are the bacteria that outnumber the cells. America is a country made up of people, not cows.... but it survives by consuming dozens of cows per person every year. Rats eat our garbage.... that is, intestinal bacteria eat our digestive waste. Etc.
A body without bacteria is no more desirable than a country without non-human animals. It's beyond silly.
... Dr. Charles Gerba and the BBC science news staff eating their lunches off of toilet seats.
Number of germs and bacteria is not nearly as relevant as which ones. Of course you're going to get a bunch of rhinovirus on desks and keyboards. People breathe. But on toilet seats you're going to get E. coli. In the right place, inside your intestines, they're just dandy. Eat some, and you're in for a world of hurt.
Of course the germs were there. They've always been there. A reasonably healthy person carries just as many and spreads them around, and is not suddenly susceptible to something just because someone counted them.
The article was ridiculous, sensationalistic, half-science, and I blame BBC far more for that than Dr. Gerba. They've been leaning this way for years now. They making more factual errors, and not correcting them, but worse, they're writing it more like tabloids.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B