think before you borrow that mobile phone or PDA
A word up front, this is pretty sick. If you are already paranoid about washing your hands or cleanliness in general, you may want to read elsewhere. You will just get more to consider from this article.
How many times have you borrowed someone else’s Blackberry (for all you other admins/techs, this includes rotating call), cell phone, or other pda? Maybe a friend just handed you their phone to show you a picture of a rare car they managed to snap a picture of? Did you just find out someone had a new phone and let you take a look at it? Consider the following:
Where has that thing been? Study after study gets done on how dirty keyboards and mice are, how much bacteria is on a doorknob, and so forth, but I haven’t heard of any studying the keyboard of a text-enabled phone.
Twice in the past month now, I’ve visited the men’s restroom at various places and heard keys on a blackberry getting tapped in the nearby stalls. Once, someone even had a game going on something and didn’t even bother to mute the audio. Last week, someone was actually carrying on a conversation ON the phone while taking care of business.
Washing hands before leaving the restroom doesn’t help with this either, so please consider letting your phone ring and try going without the game fix while in the restroom.
