The crud free keyboard
Several years ago, when the “I love you” computer virus had just wreaked havoc across the globe and we didn’t know if we were ashamed or proud that Filipinos created it, my friend’s mother admonished her to be careful of computers. “Hoy, be careful, you might catch a virus from that computer. I don’t want you to get sick.”
My friend burst out laughing, but stopped immediately when she saw that her mother was getting that look, the one followed by the speech about how she carried her ungrateful child in the womb for nine months without a word of complaint, ruining her figure forever, aging her irreparably, blah blah blah.
I don’t know how germ-infested my computer keyboard is, but I’m certain that there are clumps of cat hair under the keys. I live with three cats, and as any cat person know, they shed massive amounts of fur. Not only that, but cat hairs have amazing properties. No matter how often you groom and brush your cats, everything you own will still be covered in cat hair. It’s extra-difficult if most of your clothes are black: you need to go over yourself with a lint brush before you can leave the house (unless your cats are black, too). In my case, I take some masking tape, wrap it around my hand with the sticky side out, and pat all over my shirt to pick up cat hairs. Even then you know you’re still clothed in fur, so you can’t be too finicky. As soon as I get a research grant, I’m going to test my theory that cat hair can pass through walls and other solid surfaces.
The atmosphere inside my house is part-oxygen, part-carbon dioxide, and part-cat hair: I probably have white lung from all the fur I’ve inhaled. Apart from the fur floating around, there’s the fur that collects right on the computer, thanks to my cat Saffy’s habit of sitting on the keyboard while I am working (and trying to bite my fingers). My MacBook Marat is my word factory, so I need to keep him in excellent working order. That includes an immaculate screen and a sparkling keyboard. So I asked Stephanie Jobs, my guru in all things Apple, for the correct way to clean my Mac.
“Take an old T-shirt,” he said, “Dampen it with clean water, and gently pass it over the monitor.”
“What about the keys?” I asked. “Should I get a can of compressed air and blow the debris out from between the keys?”
“No!” he shuddered. “You could get one of those little vacuum cleaners for your keyboard.” That would not only solve my cat hair problem, but also remove the bits of my own hair and skin cells that have fallen onto the keys. Like Ethan Hawke in Gattaca. That way, if evil masterminds are planning to clone me illegally, they won’t get my DNA off my MacBook.
“You could also get a keyboard condom,” Stephanie Jobs suggested. “It’s a flexible plastic cover, like skin, that fits over the keyboard to protect it from spilled food and coffee.”
“They were developed for people who visit porn sites a lot,” Grover helpfully added.
“Uhh, won’t that ruin the sensation of typing, though?”
I consulted several websites on computer cleaning and maintenance. For the traditional PC keyboards with raised keys, they recommend cleaning the sides of the keys with cotton buds and a few drops of cleaning fluid such as isopropyl alcohol. This won’t work for laptops. One site recommends a keyboard cleaner with a spray and a hard sponge that fits between the keys. The sponge drags the crud lodged in the keys to the end of the keyboard, where you can wipe it off. Of course, the old school obsessive-compulsive way is to take all of the keys off and clean the spaces under them. If you’re worried about microbes, wipe down the keys with disinfectant.
Then there are the extreme measures. Some geeks advocate popping the keyboard in the dishwasher, then letting it air-dry for a week. Others recoil in horror at the idea, saying the water would short-circuit the wiring and the keyboards would lose functionality. One computerware company in Florida actually sells keyboards that are dishwasher-safe. They’re expensive and sold mainly to hospitals. Again, not a solution for laptops.
So I’m off to the computer store to find a small vacuum cleaner for Marat. I’ll let you know if it works.
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