The Pixelthinker.com blog

Sometimes I will help my friends by fixing, upgrading and maintaining their computers. Sometimes they pay me money, other times it’s in barter exchange for something useful.

The other day, I went to visit a wonderful lady who I admire for both her smarts and her fantastic ability to keep a clean house. I tend towards having a bit of clutter where I live.

Her laptop had symptoms that had me suspecting either a hardware issue or a heat issue. I figured if it were a heat issue, I could at least see if I could blow out some dust from inside the machine with a can of compressed air.

Shooting the compressed air into the fan intake didn’t bring out a hoped-for cloud of dust. So much for a nice, simple, heat issue fix.

Well, I figured, the LEAST I could do is to clean her keyboard as a courtesy. There was a little grunge between the keys. Might as well use the compressed air to blow out the dust and make the keyboard nice and neat.

I stuck the compressed-air straw underneath the J key and gave it a shot. Up popped some dust and a little wad of hair.

A little wad of WHAT?

Paper clip… where’s a paper clip… ah, there’s one. Let’s just unbend this wire and use it to get what’s underneath that J key some more; see what we come up with.

Remember the big blue furry guy from Monsters Inc? Kinda like that. Only it wasn’t blue. it was a mixture of different hairs from possibly a fuzzy blanket as well as from a human scalp. There was food bits in it too.

Ewwww.

So I started gently escavating between each key (making sure that I didn’t break anything) and scraping hairy sludge out from underneath. More ewww. I kept digging out hair chunks and depositing them in a growing hairball pile.

By the time I was done, the resulting large hairball was ready for it’s own hamster wheel and a bed of wood shavings. Only not nearly as cute. I’m surprised the darn thing didn’t grow it’s own eyeballs in the process.

My lovely friend was rather shocked by what was hiding within her laptop keyboard. How could all that accumulate in just 3 years in a spotless house like hers?

I didn’t tell her some of the worst stories I’ve heard on the net about what sometimes can be found hiding within the keys on a computer keyboard.

I’ll just say that if she were some rather skeevy guy instead of a classy lady, I would have not gotten anywhere NEAR that thing.