We love our tiny, shiny Apple Keyboards (aside from the ridiculous USB placement/depth). We also love eating lunch at our desks. Today happened to be one of those days where lunch somehow ended up on my glorious keyboard. It could have been worse (soup). It could have been better (soft dinner rolls). But it was a bagel with cream cheese. Face down.

It wasn’t pretty, and rather than taking photos of the incident (depressing and poorly lit) I’ll walk you through how to remove a slightly messy substance from a slightly ridiculous keyboard.

Oh snap, you got cream cheese on your keyboard. The first method (wiping with papertowel, wedging paper towel in gaps) proved useless as the keys are so sensitive that touching them depressed them, thus spreading cream cheese further down the already-tiny crack.

I had never encountered this problem with Apple’s absurdly thin keys. So I looked around my desk for something better. A harder/stiffer material. Something thin enough to get underneath the key (because removing the Apple keys puts you at a 77%* chance of breaking the key, or never getting it back on). My successful find: a former employee’s business card.

The above card has been changed (to our latest version) to protect the identity of the not-so-recently departed. But I’m sure any business card would do.

I wish I could say it was trickier than that, but really you just have to dig down in there with your business card, alternating corners to get the most use out of your card (which will also prevent further spreading of material).

It might take a few minutes, and it would be advised to use some sort of sanitation product after. It is important to note that I unplugged my keyboard during this process. I wasn’t looking to accidentally send an email to a client that looked like “jm,j,kj,k,mkjm,m,jk“.

Repeat until clean.  Look at it shine! Back to normal, almost.

These illustrations were done in Illustrator while finishing the slippery bagel (cheddar) from Collegetown/Downtown Bagels which was: delicious

* Totally made up