keyboard filth

Everyone lives in squalor to some degree - whether you don't dust for months, leave stuff piled on the floor, never make your bed or...never clean your computer's keyboard. Since I bought this glorious desktop Dell back in...2002(?) I have never once cleaned it. Sure, once or twice I blew at it with a can of air, but that's about it. Five years. Five years of eating over it, drinking too near to it, painting my nails while I typed and swiping dust from the desk onto it.

And by eating over it...I mean constantly. There were a couple years there where I practically lived on the computer and I crumbled all manner of pop-tarts, pizza, sandwiches and cookies. I spilled sodas and water and juice.

My keyboard is disgusting.

So today I finally got around to cleaning it. Carefully I photographed it before dismantling the keys (thanks for that tip, Mama...):

a little dirty.

Then, bowl of sudsy soapy goodness at my right elbow and pile of Q-tips at my left I took a butter knife to my keys, popping them out one by one. In case you think about doing this yourself, I'd recommend staying away from the kitchen sink area since keys can sometimes unpredictably fly off in the most inconvenient directions.

I tossed the keys in the suds to soak and gagged at what I found lying in the bottom of my 'board:

some nice gross crap.

This stuff was nasty. First I tried blowing it out, but it wasn't just dust and yuck. It was stuck. It was bonded to the base with the bonds of all that is gross and ucky. I was able to distinguish at various times such things as jam and sticky soda residue. Most of it was just a mass of unidentifiable crumbs.

nausea-inducing grossness.

So I took a Q-tip to it. I took about twenty Q-tips to it. First there was the once-over...loosening layers of gross and then blowing it out. Repeat. Then the wet Q-tip scrubbing, scrubbing off the guck and sticky gunk. Then the dry Q-tip to wipe away the stuff. Then the wet Q-tip again. Repeat until keyboard somewhat resembles what it looked like right after it was born.

Then there was the wiping and scrubbing of keys. After a good soak the water was brown and full of dust and hair. It never occurred to me that hair would get stuck in your keys, but I found a great population had migrated from my head and into my keyboard, wrapping around everything and getting tangled.

scrub-a-dub.

After the soap-water scrubbing there was the rinsing with hot water and laying out to dry. I can't tell you how shiny and new everything looked!

Soon I was checking my pictures and snapping all the keys back in place. When I showed J the finished product he nearly fainted...that's how impressed he was.

Alright, he was impressed, but it didn't rock his world or anything. It rocked mine, though.

squeaky clean!

It only took me two hours to complete my cleaning project. It's a good thing we're snowed in...