I do a lot of typing so when my space bar started missing about half the time it became incredibly annoying. I have a wireless keyboard so I checked the batteries and they were in good shape.
I was typing an email this morning and I was missing almost every space in a sentence and out of utter annoyance I got a small screw driver and popped the space bar off. My jaw dropped.
There was so much dog hair and so many crumbs under it I had no idea how it had been able to function at all. Yes, I do eat at my desk. But the dogs live on the floor — how did so much hair get in there?
I have to confess I was so mortified by the filth I immediately blew it out with a compressed air can and wiped it out with a cotton swab so I have no pictures to memorialize it. It was gross.
I am not kidding — if mice were small enough they could have started a colony under there. Between the dog hair for nest building and the crumbs for sustenance they could have had a wonderful life.
I figured I better check under more keys and this is what it looked like after I popped the control key — this key was about half as bad as the space bar had been and look how bad it is. Man – was it ever time to figure out how to clean a keyboard.
I probably popped a dozen keys off. I blew out the hair and crumbs and used a swab dipped in alcohol to wipe out the gunk. And believe me, there was gunk as you can see on the bottom of the control key.
Reassembly
A lot of the keys were simple to pop back on. A few like the space bar, control key, enter key and delete key had little metal bars that had to be put under a bracket on the keyboard and then the key turned to snap down. I have no idea why these keys need the little bar, but it’s kind of a fragile set up on the back of the keys so I was careful with them.
This, like the washing machine rust, was a little cleaning project I should have addressed a long time ago. I had idea how much crap could accumulate under those close fitting keys.
