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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.
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.
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.
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
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
Up here in the Great White North we had a bit of a pinkeye outbreak a few years ago. There was a particularly virulent strain that made its way onto campus, and spread like crazy via all the public computer keyboards. Word on the street was that between half and two-thirds of the campus might have had pinkeye that winter. The CDC even sent some people up to study it. Just goes to show what a few dirty keyboards can do.
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."
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.
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So, your cells still constitute the majority of your body's biomass.
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!"
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
...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