Ander, I totally hear you in the sense that trying to be too clean — sterile, even — can cause health issues in the long run... My issue with the keyboard is that if I pay good money to have this nice tool, and perhaps even adorn it with some special caps, I don’t ever want it to look like my colleague’s keyboard, which looks like it might have been used in some bizarre food prep situation in an industrial kitchen…
Absolutely! But I don't think there's much chance of anything like that happening to you. From your comments, it's obvious you have much more awareness of normal hygiene.
And don't get the wrong idea—I'm totally into
reasonable, realistic cleanliness. I'm probably somewhat picker than most people. I usually wash my hands before going from one type of activity to another. Besides wanting to keep my things clean, and to avoid the possibility of spreading disease, it just
feels better and more civilized to me. When I see those signs in restaurant bathrooms that say:
ALL EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK
...I always want to take a pen and add:
THE REST OF YOU CAN BE SLOBS
If a sensationalistic article like this one inspires people to wash their hands before they start typing, that's great. That's just common decency. But you can take anything too far. Germ paranoia is something that drives many people into lives of misery, and these types of attention-seeking articles make people like that even more anxious and desperate.
Guitarist Tom Morello once said that he washes his hands every time before he picks up his guitar. It is a sort of ritual, shows respect for the instrument, and probably helps him enter the right “mode” before he begins practicing or playing.
Sure. And looking at it in a more basic way, IMHO, only a
pig would pick up a musical instrument with unwashed hands.
My Steinway piano has ivory keys with a natural grain. If I played it with unwashed hands, it'd get grimy very quickly. It wouldn't be as obvious on my banjo, guitar or accordion—but when you play music, presumably you're doing something very personal and individual, something you've spent a lot of time and trouble learning to do. I'd no sooner play music with unwashed hands than I'd make love to my wife that way. (I'm not trying to tittillate anyone, BTW; musicians often make that comparison.)
When you sit down at a keyboard to write, you're expressing yourself as though you were playing music. (Just
look at all the interesting, complex conversations that go on here—and all we're talking about is flippin'
keyboards. It's like buying a parrot and teaching it to say, "I'm a parrot! I'm a parrot!") So why on earth would anyone sit down to
type, and express themselves to the world, with unwashed hands? I never did get that.
We're here because we consider keyboards not just tools, but things of beauty. Even a KB with blank keys is a work of art in our eyes. It's almost a shame we
have to put our mitts on them to use them.
Think of the mixed emotions you have when you sit down at a new, fresh-out-of-the-box keyboard. You know it'll never look or feel quite as nice as it does in that moment. If that's how we feel about keyboards, the
least we can do is wash the grime of the world off of our hands before we start fondling them.
But worry that our keyboards will turn into festering farms of deadly disease if we don't maintain operating-room standards of cleanliness? No thanks, doctor.
