Here’s one that will really get you guys… At a previous job, my boss wouldn’t just point to stuff with his pen on his laptop (or anyone else’s for that matter). He would actually, fold open the computer like a book, and then DRAW ON THE LCD WITH HIS PEN!. Not only did I get ink on my screen, but in a few cases, I actually had the indentions left in my screen.
On one occasion, he actually caused the LCD matrix to break he pressed so hard…
But that was during the dotcom boom and our company was raking in the money… Those were the days! New computers every year, golf Fridays, and something called a “bonus” that I haven’t seen since!
Sometimes, when I water my plants, I use this big glass that I usually drink beer in. I fill it with tap water and then take a sip, then proceed to give it to my plants, taking a sip from time to time.
Just as drinking the same water as my plants reminds me that I’m alive, touching my screen reminds me that I am not simply a brain floating in a fish tank.
Rob Janssen is right that we should point instead of touching if the person asks politely. The problem is that most people I know who hate their screen being touched and who are verbose about it will immediatly become aggravated if your finger gets less than 6 inches away from the screen and proceed to instantly kill you if it’s less than 3 inches (or at least have thougts of doing so).
What should a poor human with hands do then, talk in screen coordinates? Sorry, I must be a real bad developer because I can’t.
Even with my own screen I always use the back of my finger and just touch the display with lightly with my fingernail. It has nothing to do with germs (3 kids and houseful of pets will cure you of the whole “germ” thing) and everything to do with smudges. They drive me bug$h1t - doesn’t matter if they’re on my glasses or screen or window. However, if somebody touches my screen with their grubby, greasy little digits I’m certainly not going to go balllistic. It’s a smudge - it wipes off.
As for the keyboard - as long as the keys are clean, who GAS? I mean really. Grungy stuff underneath the keys isn’t the prettiest thing, but it’s not like it’s going to ooze up out of the keyboard and grab you (well…not most of the time anyway - there are always exceptions).
If you’re that concerend about germs and ick it’s time to encase yourself in a plastic bubble, immersed in a giant vat of hand sanitizer, in a clean room with sub-micron filtration, far beneath the surface of the planet, surrounded by disinfecting UV lamps…
Reminds me of a sign I saw years ago in a public john, “Please don’t throw toothpicks in the toilet. The crabs have learned how to pole vault.”
I have said the same thing many times about there being two types of people, those that touch displays and those that don’t.
I came to this conclusion after noticing the same group of people touching my monitor when talking about things and then noticing that group of people had a layer of finger grime all over their own monitors.
Which lead to the corollary: There are two types of people, those with spotless monitors, and those with so many fingerprints on their monitors that they wouldn’t even notice one more.
For me it’s not that it’s disgusting or germy but that when my monitor is completely spotless except for a few fingerprints, they keep drawing my eye to them. After years of failing in every attempt to just ignore them, I now just sigh, go grab a damp paper towel, and clean the stupid fingerprints off before I attempt to get back to work.
I also cut people off before they touch the monitor. As soon as they start pointing, I interrupt them and say, “Please don’t touch the monitor.” They usually get annoyed and say they weren’t going to touch the monitor. They’re usually lying. Regardless, once I say that then they’re make a point not to touch it, saving me a cleaning trip.
By the way, I’ve found if you just use warm water, a paper towel, and gentle pressure, it cleans just fine without scratching.
I’m not alone, aha! I go positively ballistic if I catch anyone touching my screen(s). I came in to work this morning to discover that my boss had polished the desks, and had used the waxy/dusty rag to wipe my screen. ARGH! Did I want it smearing with crap? No! Did it even need “cleaning”? NO!
deep breath
Over in the UK we have an IT qualification called the A+ (also known as IT Essentials) and one of the questions is about the best way to clean your keyboard. The correct answer is to put it in the dishwasher, so it doesn’t surprise me to read that people are actually doing it…
I do that with my mouse too (the disassemble and dishwasher thing). Works fine. I’m still using my first MS IntelliEye Explorer (not wireless).
As for keyboards, I just recently threw away my old IBM 102 key DIN plug keyboard for a curious reason.
You see, those old keyboards didn’t have rubber pieces to push the keyboards back up, like they do now, they had rubber foam. You know, that stuff chair and sofa seats are often made from.
The fascinating thing ? After almost 20 years of compressing and depressing the foam, the little bubbles it’s made of burst one by one, so often used keys would eventually become so weak that their decompression force wasn’t enough to push up the keys anymore.
For a few years, I moved the badly used foam pieces to lesser used keys (like the upper F* row, or the print key), but eventually, too many were so broken down that the keyboard just didn’t work anymore.
I almost cried when I had to throw that old buddy away. It had codes to Zak McKracken written on the side with permanent markers, and it had kinks in the top row I carved in there when I played my first online games of Doom via KALI and thought I was really bad ass for marking frags on my keyboard (I was not). The cord had three almost broken places where one cat and two different gold hamsters gnawed on it. The plug was patched up with Smurf covered band aids because I opened it to solder in a new pin after one broke off.
As for cleaning keyboards, Jerry Pournelle at Byte used to always say that he’d take his keyboards into the shower with him and give them a good scrubbing.
As long as you allow several days for thorough drying, that would probably work fine for most keyboards. Obviously it’s only practical if you have an extra.
For those of us that have really trashed out our laptop keypads, I’ve found them very easy to replace and not very expensive either. The last one I did cost about $30.00 and took less than 5 minutes.
My husband sent me this post as we’ve come to blows over me touching
his monitor and he just looks at me in disgust when I show him something on my monitor and point it out with my fingers all over it.
OK. Show of hands. How many people are picturing BlackMax as looking just like the kid in the picture at the top of the article?
I remember a guy who would freak if someone pointed their finger at his monitor within a foot of the surface. It was just plain annoying. When he was gone from his cube, people would go in and smudge up his monitor with fingerprints, just out of spite.
Oh yes I know all about the filthy keyboards. A previous developer who I took over for left an ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING keyboard covered in yellow stains from his excessive sweating. I tried everything to clean it up to no avail but I eventually just ended up buying a new keyboard. I’m real particular about folks touching my keyboard nowadays.
We once had a contractor leave, and I found the keyboard he left behind too disgusting to stay in the same cubicle with. He wasn’t exactly the cleanest guy in the world. One of those overweight guys who has trouble keeping his shirt tucked in. He used to eat at his keyboard too.
Some coworkers and I took apart the keyboard and hand cleaned it. There was an amazing amount of crumbs and crud in there. Probably an entire sandwich worth. But of course some of the keys refused to work after we dried it and put it back together. We eventually had to report it broken and get a new one for that machine.
Unless it is designed to be cleaned that way, I really wouldn’t count on a “cleaned” keyboard being usable again. Sure, go ahead and try if you want. Just make sure to buy the replacement first, so that if (when) it doesn’t work, you are just out a backup, not your primary keyboard.
The worst is LOLing so hard and so suddenly that you don’t have time to prepare and end up spraying spittle all over your own monitor. Then you have no one to blame but yourself.
You need to print yourself a nice “if you touch my monitor, I will poke you in the eye” sign ( http://www.morevisual.com/poke/ ). I have one on my monitor. It gets the point across. I had a visiting developer from India, pull his hand back like it touched a hot poker when he read it, apparently he took it quite literally ( not a bad thing )…
Ah yes, the dishwasher. DEC’s VT100 keyboard could famously be cleaned in a dishwasher - no disassembly required, or so I’m told. Of course, each key press on that thing required more force than on a manual typewriter and made a louder click than a card punch.
