Look at This Rabbit I Pulled Out Cleaning My Keyboard

Cleaning my keyboard took almost two solid hours.

When I first started removing keys while cleaning my keyboard yesterday, I was under the impression it had been maybe 3 to 4 years since I had last cleaned my keyboard. Lately my keys have been sticking. I type words that look like I’ve been talking to my phone. Because my phone does not understand half the things I say unless I speak very slowly, pronouncing words like a robot, and I’m tired of people staring at me funny while I talk to my phone. But I did not expect my keyboard to betray me.

I stared at the keys. They were a mess. Brown, icky gooey stuff, like caramel drizzled all over, stuck hard. Pieces of animal flesh. Unrecognizable things. And I don’t really eat at my desk. Aliens must do this crap. Well, what the hey. I popped off a key and whoa, I found a rabbit foot. Popped off a few more keys and then forgot which order they were in or where they went. Before I knew it, I was going down that rabbit hole and pulling out more rabbits.

All the hair and icky crap I pulled out of my keyboard.

I gathered my weapons of destruction: tweezers, Q-tips and rubbing alcohol. This must be years of stuff that has accumulated and crawled into my keyboard. When I depressed a key, there was no sound. It was muffled and quiet. That should have been first clue. A clue that that I should be cleaning my keyboard.

Probably due to the cats sitting on my desk. Even though they never touch the keys, some of their cat fur gets in there somehow. Imagine my shock when I looked up a blog I had written recently about how many keyboards do you buy. That blog was August of 2016. Which means I’ve had my new keyboard for 14 months. During that time, this is how much stuff had crept into my keyboard.

Believe it, I type 140 WPM. Why? Because I took typing twice in high school to avoid having to take a science class by saying I did not know how to type. My school records were such a mess, nobody knew which end was up because I attended so many schools and we didn’t use computers in the 1960s to track anything. You take typing in 9th grade on an old Remington and you do 30 WPM. Take it again in 12th grade and whoa, you’re up to 140. Doing basics again pays off.

I’m thinking I’ve never noticed this before because I usually replace my keyboard every 6 to 12 months. I’ve never had to clean it. Because I’ve ruined every keyboard. Water and electricity does not marry well, which is where that science class would have paid off. This is progress, actually. I’ve gone 14 months without destroying my keyboard. Except yesterday I had to spend several hours removing all of the keys, cleaning my keyboard, and putting them all back in some horrible random order. Well, it’s not like I look at the keys while I type. It doesn’t matter if they’ve moved around into a different position.