Guess What: Vermin Like Food In Your Keyboard

Multitaskers, be warned: The Daily News reports on a distressing European study, "Scientists swabbed keyboards in their London offices and found traces of E. coli, coliforms and enterobacteria, which all cause food poisoning." The idea is that little creatures will eat—and poop—on the desk surfaces. One Brooklynite admitted, "I eat at my desk a lot. I've never cleaned my keyboard. Most of the crumbs just fall in between the keys. I've got a whole ecosystem going on at the bottom of my keyboard right now." Another said she doesn't really clean her desk, "I eat at my desk every day and spend about seven hours at my keyboard... I found ants on my desk once."

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By Jen Chung in News on May 14, 2010 3:13 PM

Comments [rss]

manytimes

This story brought to you by an irrational fear of microbes.

anotherview

Our old IT joke was to pick-up a keyboard and shake and tap it on a desktop and yell out "LUNCH."

Usually after that they would put a napkin over their keyboard when they ate . . .not!

grandzu

And I keep telling you, you IT boys crack me up!

anotherview

Our old IT joke was to pick up a keyboard and shake it and tap it on the offender’s desk and yell out “LUNCH.”

Usually after that they would cover their keyboard with a napkin.

snickerdoodle

Every time I've taken apart my keyboard to clean it's never worked again. So the nasty crumbs are going to stay there until I can figure out how to clean it without killing it.

hotstepper

excuse me, are you gonna eat that keyboard?

Manitoba

If you have a keyboard with space below the keys, you really should take it apart every few months and wash it. Whenever I do that, I find lots of little crumbs, hair, dead skin, fingernail bits, etc. It's all mine, and I still find it nasty.

You can also buy USB keyboards for $10-20 these days, so I often replace mine every 12-18 months.

jaycjay

Once years ago I was visiting a client's office in Berkeley. They were in a building on the outskirts of the city, with an open field behind it and a great mountain view from the loft, which was where I got to work while I was there.

They were having trouble with one of their PCs downstairs; it kept just shutting down. The way they described it I thought it sounded like it was overheating for some reason, so maybe the fan wasn't working correctly or the CPU fan had failed, something like that. I popped it open, and found a mouse nest made of grass and string and various other trash sitting right on the motherboard.