you work for a company that is willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on what any sane company would deem "just a keyboard" ?
where can I apply to work there?!?!
It's a big technology giant and I work developing software that is in mobile phones, televisions, and more. There are loads of prototypes and unreleased products in the office. A lot of "corporate espionage" information running around in the internal private network. The type of thing where millions of revenue are in risk based on beating your competitor to the market and controlling the PR of the new products. Remember the disaster that followed when a Nokia phone prototype got leaked, it got ****ty reviews that didn't consider it being beta and killed the product when it came out.
Security and admins are very paranoid and OCD, which is their job so it is cool. One of their rules blocks us from bringing external hardware into the office. The two things they are most strict about are keyboards and headphones, because they are small, common for people to have their own, and easy to hack to turn them into recording devices. Headphones are easily turned into a microphone and keyboards turned into a keylogger. Obviously cameras are blocked.
It's funny though, all engineers most use a secure Windows, but I am in a special division were we run our own Linux environments (because we build/hack on it). So in theory if I wanted I could have the keylogger in my machine. What I develop is Open Source so I am a bit shielded from this competitive corporate environment. They trust us, and know we will only share public development and information.
The company understands hackers/engineers are very picky about the hardware they use. So I can just ask my manager for anything I need to use for work, and unless completely insane he will make a request and it will be at my desk in a week or two. It is worth spending a few hundred dollars on the comfort of a person that will be more productive and bring the money back quickly.
I also requested a standing desk, a beefy code building server, a second machine to test code in OS X, two big resolution screens... all are expensive. But totally worth it.
A happy employee is a productive employee.
pd: don't want to hihack this thread. If you have any more questions, send me a PM