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Your Computer Is 400 Times Dirtier Than Your Toilet Seat
from the how-nice dept
Well, this is probably going to gross out a few people and make them pull back from their desk, but it turns out that your telephone, computer keyboard and mouse probably have 400 times the germs as your toilet seat. The thing is, people wash toilet seats... but they tend not to do much to clean or disinfect the things they keep their hands touching all day, every day. There's a great quote in the article: "Desks are really bacteria cafeterias." Anyway, they recommend that you disinfect your computer and telephone equipment on a fairly regular basis. Seems like a good idea.
Reader Comments
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Douglas Adams was wrong
There's a use for telephone sanitizers after all!
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obvious quip
Well, it brings a new meaning to the word "techdirt" ;-)
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Re: obvious quip
Well, it brings a new meaning to the word "techdirt" ;-)
Ha! So obvious that I completely missed it. Clearly, I need more sleep.
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Re: Douglas Adams was wrong
Actually Douglas Adams was right. Remember the planet died out to a plauge transfered by dirty telephones after they shipped off the useless third of their population to seed earth. So Douglas Adams was actually ahead of his time, and this report just confirms it.
Charles W.
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Re: Douglas Adams was wrong
Actually Douglas Adams was right. Remember the planet died out to a plauge transfered by dirty telephones after they shipped off the useless third of their population to seed earth.
Yes, but the unless third of their population didn't fare too well themselves, after all, they started using leaves as money and immediately destroyed their economy, at which point they decided to defoliate the forests and burn them down in order to control inflation. And they came up with "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" as the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything (which is 42.)
And actually, they didn't want the useless third to seed the earth (or Zed-Zed-9-Plural-Zed-Alpha, or ZZ9PZA), they wanted it to crash into the planet (resulting in their death, though that didn't happen.) The other two thirds convinced them that the planet was about to be destroyed, either by exploding, crashing into the sun, or being eaten by a giant space goat. The captain wouldn't get out of the tub (which he had been in for 3 years, and never seemed to get out of after the crash either.)
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FILTH!
Think about it--there's always going to be something that's more dirty than something else. So keyboards and phones have microbes on them; I've also heard that kitchens are more dirty than bathrooms. And my answer: so what? I don't see coworkers picking up the phone, gasping, and falling down dead, so we're not talking about a meaningful level of lethality here. And if we make everything absolutely sterile, we'll really be in trouble, because then our immune systems will be so weak that they'll be overcome by the most common of diseases.
Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. My keyboard isn't killing me, so I'm getting stronger every day. ;-) Worry about the stuff that might actually do you in. There's plenty of that already.
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Re: FILTH!
I've printed the article out to show my co workers that laugh @ me for cleaning my mouse, keyboard & general workstation once a month.
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